US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty

by Lance Selfa

  Lance Selfa

  The Trump presidency dawned with the opposition Democratic Party finding itself at its lowest ebb since the 1920s. The Democrats lost the executive branch, remained minorities in both houses of Congress, and stood to see the Republicans lock in another generation of control of the Supreme Court and US judiciary. At the state level, Republicans controlled sixty-eight of the ninety-nine state legislative bodies and held thirty-three of fifty governorships, and the Democrats held more than one thousand fewer state legislative seats than they controlled in 2009.1 Republican dominance at the state level brought a counterrevolution against labor rights, women’s rights, and voting rights.

  Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. In 2006 and 2008, two “wave” elections swept Democrats to power. In 2008, with the US and world economies melting down, with neoliberal dogma discredited (“We’re all socialists, now!” proclaimed Newsweek), and with George W. Bush departing office as the most unpopular president since Jimmy Carter, a new Democratic era seemed to be dawning. The conservative pundit and former Bush speech writer David Frum voiced conservative dread:

  The stage has been set for the boldest and most dramatic redirection of US politics since Reagan’s first year in office. Of course, there are no guarantees in politics. An inept president could bungle his or her chances. Unexpected events could intrude: a nuclear test in Iran, a major terrorist attack on US soil or some attention-grabbing political scandal. But given moderate luck and skill, the next president could join Reagan, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the grand reshapers of politics and government.2

  Barack Obama’s 2008 election certainly marked a historic high point in history—the election of an African American president in a country that was founded and sustained for most of its history on slavery. A sense of hope and optimism pervaded the multiracial crowd of hundreds of thousands who rallied in celebration of Obama’s win in 2008 in Chicago’s Grant Park.

  And yet, eight years later, Obama’s secretary of state and one of the world’s most influential politicians lost the Electoral College to an admitted sexual predator, bigot, and buffoon whom Obama had insisted the American people would never support.

  “Change” Many Believed In

  Obama assumed power at a time when the US economy was in free fall in the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the eve of President Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, Obama’s popularity reached 80 percent, and large numbers of Americans had high expectations of the incoming administration. A USA Today poll showed that seven of ten people believed the country would be better off after Obama’s first term.

  After two straight national elections in which the Republicans took a beating, the largest Democratic majority since the 1970s looked set to shift American mainstream politics away from three decades of conservative domination. The American right looked small, irrelevant to the concerns of most Americans, and appeared ready to spend years in the political “wilderness.” Two years later, the formerly discredited and out-of-touch Republican Party scored a historic landslide in the 2010 midterm election. In the largest congressional midterm shift since 1938, the Republicans captured sixty-three seats, ending the four-year Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

  Much liberal commentary portrayed Obama as a good and decent president who tried to accomplish big goals against unscrupulous opponents who used every dirty trick they could—including promoting the racist myth that Obama wasn’t born in the United States—to undercut him at every turn. Obama himself often compared implementing change in Washington to “turning an ocean liner.” It was as if Obama, the most powerful man in the world for eight years, was a helpless bystander to historical events.

  That’s why any evaluation of “the Obama years” has to focus on the first two years of his term, when Obama held huge Democratic majorities in the Congress and a mandate to enact big changes in an atmosphere of national crisis. The “Great Recession,” which most acknowledged stemmed from the bursting of a Wall Street-engineered credit bubble, dominated every aspect of politics and popular consciousness through most of Obama’s term. The administration would rise or fall on how it dealt with the economic crisis.

  But Obama was dedicated to the pro-business neoliberal agenda that has dominated Democratic Party circles since the Clinton administration of the 1990s. Millions voted for Obama hoping for a decisive shift in Washington politics and policy. But Obama and his elite backers were more interested in restoring the capital to its pre-2008 “business as usual.” The gap between expectation and reality sapped Obama of mass support.

  The economic rescue bill Obama pushed through the Congress early in his term came in at less than $800 billion, which was about half the size that many independent economists estimated it should have been. To win more “bipartisan” support, the administration limited the amount of money allocated to jobs creation and explicitly ruled out direct government jobs programs modeled on the 1930s-era Works Progress Administration. It dedicated far too much of the stimulus, upwards of 40 percent of the total, to a variety of tax cuts and credits to individuals and business that were useless in creating jobs. These concessions won the votes of three Republican senators and no Republicans in the House, but they further limited the bill’s impact.

  When the administration pushed for the stimulus bill, it released studies claiming that the stimulus package would push the unemployment rate down to 7 percent by 2010. In reality, the unemployment rate increased to over 10 percent. The stimulus bill may have helped avert a plunge into depression, but it failed to reduce unemployment in any noticeable way.

  The administration cost itself greater damage when it became associated in the public’s mind with coddling Wall Street. Following a March 2009 meeting at the White House between Obama, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and the CEOs of the largest thirteen banks in the United States, the president reassured the bankers that he had no intention of forcing a change in the way Wall Street did business. Journalist Ron Suskind quoted one of the CEOs who attended: “The sense of everyone after the big meeting was relief…. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything, and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t—he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.”3

  No wonder more and more Americans came to see the Obama administration as a bankers’ administration—in the same way that they viewed the Bush-Cheney regime as an “oil and gas” administration. A September 2009 Economic Policy Institute poll asked a national sample of registered voters to say who they thought had “been helped a lot or some” from the policies that the administration had enacted. The result: 13 percent said the “average working person,” 64 percent identified “large banks,” and 54 percent said “Wall Street investment companies.”4

  The sense of restoring the status quo pervaded much of Obama’s response to the crisis the Bush administration left behind. With the economy teetering on the brink, Obama continued to implement the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailouts and reap-pointed Bush’s Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke. With the United States bogged down in two failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama reappointed Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon.

  Using only executive action, Obama could have unwound the Bush administration bailouts for the Wall Street bankers and pressed bankruptcy judges to reduce or wipe out the mortgage holders’ debt. At the very least, he could have refused to allow executives from the insurance giant AIG to collect their multimillion-dollar bonuses from the taxpayers’ dime. Yet he did none of these things. In fact, billions appropriated to help homeowners avoid foreclosure remained unspent. And after using the excuse of the “sanctity of contracts” to justify allowing the AIG bonuses, the Obama administration enacted a bailout of the auto industry that tore up union contracts and imposed two-tiered wage structures.

  And what of Obama’s signature healthcar
e reform that Republicans have promised to repeal since the day it passed? This was indeed a “heavy lift” and did result in some significant reforms to health insurance that benefited working people. But in its origin, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was modeled on healthcare reforms that the conservative Heritage Foundation promoted and that Republican governor Mitt Romney—Obama’s presidential opponent in 2012—implemented in Massachusetts.

  Supporters of genuine healthcare reform knew that the “compromise” bill was a huge gift to the insurance industry. At the same time, they felt that Democrats got far less than they could or should have, in large part because they didn’t even try.5 In fact, the Obama administration worked with lobbyists from the insurance, hospital, and pharmaceutical industries to craft a bill that would be sufficiently pro-corporate to keep them from opposing it. Healthcare advocates pressed for a public insurance component to Obamacare, but Obama batted them away. As journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out at the time, Obama’s support for the “public option” was always more rhetorical than real: “The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start—the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.”6

  Several years later, the ACA has reshaped the healthcare industry along neoliberal lines, but it has still never managed to win the popular support that Obama thought it would. That’s because it retains the role of the private insurance industry, which has continued to shift costs to individuals, while still leaving millions uninsured. Opinion polls have consistently shown that a substantial number of people who say they oppose Obamacare do so because they think it doesn’t go far enough. Because Obamacare never reached the level of popularity of programs such as Medicare or Social Security, Republicans were confident they could repeal it without much consequence.7

  Austerian-in-Chief

  After the GOP took the House in 2010 and until it took the Senate in 2014, the Obama administration helped drive an austerity agenda that further cut into working-class living standards. In 2010, the administration and the Democratically dominated Congress agreed to extend the Bush administration’s tax cuts for the rich for two more years. And in 2012, when the tax cuts were set to expire, Obama agreed to allow most of them to remain.

  In 2011, the Tea Party-addled Republicans in the House threatened to plunge the United States government into default to force through huge cuts in government spending. Instead of calling their bluff, Obama agreed to cutting $1.5 trillion in federal spending over the next decade. In fact, the GOP had to rely on Democratic votes to pass the deal that lifted the debt ceiling. Noting this, Greenwald commented:

  Therein lies one of the most enduring attributes of Obama’s legacy: in many crucial areas, he has done more to subvert and weaken the left’s political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party’s leader endorses—even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.8

  During the negotiations over the 2011 government shutdown, Obama offered the Republicans unprecedented cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Feeling perhaps that Obama was on his way to becoming a one-term president, the GOP rejected him. But like the spurned yet determined suitor, an Obama reelected in 2012 was back to courting the GOP for a “grand bargain.” Only belatedly did he give up, but he had wasted years legitimizing GOP talking points about the need for working people to accept more austerity.

  Ironically, Obama only won reelection by adopting a pose as “fighter for the middle class” against the plutocrat Romney. Working-class voters of all races were willing to give Obama another chance, especially since—picking up on the sense of class inequality that the 2011 Occupy movement had highlighted—his reelection stump speech foregrounded inequality as “the challenge of our times.” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi was more than a little skeptical:

  Hearing Obama talk about jobs and shared prosperity… reminded me that we are back in campaign mode, and Barack Obama has started doing again what he does best—play the part of a progressive. He’s good at it. It sounds like he has a natural affinity for union workers and ordinary people when he makes these speeches. But his policies are crafted by representatives of corporate/financial America, who happen to entirely make up his inner circle.9

  The “Lame Duck” President

  After the GOP took the Senate in 2014, Obama was mostly a lame duck. His main initiatives came in foreign affairs, such as concluding an opening to Cuba and the Iran nuclear deal. The most progressive recent change in US law and cultural norms—the Supreme Court’s legalization of marriage equality in 2015—resulted from grassroots pressure. Obama officially opposed the demand until 2012.

  Though official indicators show improvements in the economy, Obama left office with a majority of the US population enduring lower living standards than when he moved into the White House. In real terms, median household income did not make it back to 2007 levels and is far away from its all-time high of 1999 levels. And, perhaps more significantly, given how the 2016 election turned out, the maldistribution of economic gains in the recovery has meant that people in rural areas suffered a 2 percent decline in median income in 2015.10

  In assessing the Obama years, much more could be written. For example, about how the president became the “deporter in chief.” Or how his administration transformed the Bush administration’s civil-liberties-shredding “war on terror” policies into accepted parts of the bipartisan consensus. Or how his administration abetted a coup in Honduras, or sold record amounts of arms to Saudi Arabia and Israel. Or how he let the union-supporting Employee Free Choice Act die in Congress, or refused to comment when the right-wing state government in Wisconsin gutted public sector unions in 2011. Or how his administration tried to steer clear of speaking out on race, except when Obama was lecturing Black audiences about the need for “personal responsibility.” Or how, after signing an executive order directing the closure of the Guantânamo Bay prison camp on his first day in office, the camp remained open as he “passed the baton” to Trump.11

  Each of those Obama administration actions (or inactions) eroded support from key Democratic constituency groups. In the end, the Republicans didn’t so much win the 2016 elections as Democrats lost it.12 Years of empty rhetoric about “fighting for working families” finally caught up to the Democratic establishment. For the establishment, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s strong challenge to Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries should have been the proverbial “canary in the coal mine.” Yet, its contempt for Sanders, for the issues he raised, and for his supporters blinded them to the disaster that loomed in November.

  Given how the miserable election ended up, it’s difficult to remember that Trump wasn’t the only candidate who turned out thousands to huge rallies. In fact, when Sanders packed in more than ten thousand people to an arena in Madison, Wisconsin, in June, 2015, it was the biggest rally for any candidate during the primary season. Thousands responded to his indictment of the “billionaire class” and eagerly sought to join up with his “political revolution.” Yet the Democratic Party establishment succeeded in pushing the Sanders campaign out of contention.

  To the Democrat leadership, the Sanders campaign was supposed to perform a service of energizing people that Clinton couldn’t. He’d have his chance on the public stage, and then would move into the wings in favor of Clinton. The revelations from hacked Democratic National Committee emails, released by WikiLeaks, demonstrated that the supposedly “neutral” DNC wired the process in favor of Clinton from the start. In fact, those revelations were so damning that they forced DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign during the Democratic convention in July. By then, the deed was done, and Clinton was assured the nomination.
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  Moreover, the chatter between Clinton advisers revealed in the WikiLeaks email drops showed them planning right-wing smears against Sanders. One of her advisers even likened Democratic-base supporters of Sanders’s signature call for a fifteen-dollars-per-hour minimum wage to the “Red Army.”13 Finally, WikiLeaks demonstrated that all of the criticisms that Sanders leveled against Clinton during the primaries—that she was in the pocket of the Wall Street banks, that her Democratic primary opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline was opportunistic, and that party primaries were rigged against him, among others—were more correct than he even knew.14

  And yet, by the time all these revelations saw light—and long after they were useful as fodder in the Clinton-Sanders election contest—they disappeared from the national political conversation. Of course, the media obsession with “horse-race coverage” of the Trump-Clinton contest partially explained this. But a more pertinent—and important—explanation was found in the fact that Sanders himself refused to make them an issue.

  “The job of the progressive movement now is to look forward, not backward,” Sanders said in a statement to NBC News. “No matter what Secretary Clinton may have said years ago, behind closed doors, what’s important today is that millions of people stand up and demand that the Democratic Party implement the most progressive platform in the history of our country.”

  From “Political Revolution” to Lesser Evilism

  During the Democratic primaries, Sanders gained support with segments of the “rising American electorate” for one main reason: he spoke directly to the realities of class inequality in the United States and raised the expectations of his supporters that something could be done about it.15 His appeals and policy positions fell under his call for a “political revolution.” This slogan was both savvy and telling: Savvy in that it appealed to millions whom the political system had abandoned, and for whom the idea of a radical shakeup (or “revolution”) didn’t sound so bad. Telling because the actual content of Sanders’s “political revolution” amounted to reforming the Democratic Party, encouraging “progressives” to run for office as Democrats, and campaign finance reform to check the influence of “millionaires and billionaires” on the US electoral and government system.