Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

by Frank, Thomas

  That Obama would be more interested in consensus than in confrontation was something we should have seen coming; after all, the magical healing properties of consensus had been one of the great themes of Obama’s pre-presidential career. It was the motif of his bestselling 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, a long salute to bipartisanship that is distinguished from the hundreds of other titles in that genre by the intellectual pirouettes that then-Senator Obama performed around this deeply boring topic. Americans have “a common set of values that bind us together despite our differences,” he proclaimed in Chapter One of that work, just before telling us “we need a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.” Ideology, which is the opposite of consensus, cannot possibly “meet the challenges we face as a country.” And so tritely on.

  As president, Obama worked hard to signal continuity with Bush administration policy and then, in 2010, to lend his gravitas to the worldwide push for austerity. This was the low point of the Obama years, when the president made his “pivot” to deficit reduction even though the slump continued and unemployment was intolerably high. “Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions,” he said in his State of the Union Address in 2010. “The federal government should do the same.” As a matter of fact, the federal government shouldn’t do the same; as many pointed out at the time, it should do the opposite—that’s the wisdom of countercyclical spending, which the world learned at such great cost during the Great Depression.

  This may have put Obama on the wrong side of history, but it put him squarely in the center of Beltway culture. The editorial page of the Washington Post, for example, kept up its endless war against deficits and entitlements right through the financial crisis and the economic slump that followed; any occasion was a good one for getting tough about the deficit. This was the context in which the capital embarked on its years of deficit-reduction measures, each of them chasing the president’s dream of a “Grand Bargain” in which the war between the political parties would be forever resolved: the Spending Freeze, the Bowles-Simpson Commission, the Congressional “Supercommittee,” the “fiscal cliff” that was reached when the Supercommittee failed, the Sequester of 2013, and so on. They were, each of them, the product of a self-assured culture of D.C. professionalism that Paul Krugman has lampooned with the phrase, “very serious people.”

  “Serious” is exactly the right word. One of the timeless characteristics of rule-by-experts is the belief that informed and “serious” people know the answers to our problems, and that ideology and politics are pointless distractions keeping us from putting solutions in place.13 But never has the connection between professionalism and this post-ideological faith been more obvious than in the career of Barack Obama. For him, all the issues are already settled; all the answers are known; all the serious people are in agreement. Everyone in D.C. knows that entitlements have to be reformed and that the deficit has to be brought under control.

  For Obama and his supporters, there seems to be something elemental, something basic in the many showdowns between his cool, technocratic style and the raging, wailing, senseless defiance of the Republicans in Congress. Surely they believe that it’s mind against sentiment, ego against id, civilization against barbarism.

  For us, however, what needs to be pointed out is that, with their sonorous warnings about deficits, Obama’s “very serious people” turned out to be completely wrong. The expertise of the experts was, in this case, worthless.

  THE HORROR OF THE UNPROFESSIONAL

  I was surprised to learn that when Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter wanted to scold Russia for its campaign of airstrikes in Syria in the fall of 2015, the word he chose to apply was “unprofessional.” Given the magnitude of the provocation, it seemed a little strange—as though he thought there were an International Association of Smartbomb Deployment Executives that might, once alerted by American officials, hold an inquiry into Russia’s behavior and hand down a stern reprimand.

  On reflection, slighting foes for their lack of professionalism was something of a theme of the Obama years. An Iowa Democrat became notorious in 2014, for example, when he tried to insult an Iowa Republican by calling him “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” Similarly, it was “unprofessionalism” (in the description of Thomas Friedman) that embarrassed the insubordinate Afghan-war General Stanley McChrystal, who made ill-considered remarks about the president to Rolling Stone magazine. And in the summer of 2013, when National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposed his employer’s mass surveillance of email and phone calls, the aspect of his past that his detractors chose to emphasize was … his failure to graduate from high school.14 How could such a no-account person challenge this intensely social-science-oriented administration?

  But it was public school teachers who made the most obvious target for professional reprimand by the administration. They are, after all, pointedly different from other highly educated professions: Teachers are represented by trade unions, not proper professional associations, and their values of seniority and solidarity conflict with the cult of merit embraced by other professions. For years, the school reform movement has worked to replace or weaken teachers’ unions with remedies like standardized testing, charter schools, and tactical deployment of the cadres of Teach for America, a corps of enthusiastic graduates from highly ranked colleges who take on teaching duties in classrooms across the country after only minimal training.

  Team Obama joined the fight against teachers unions from day one: the administration supported charter schools and standardized tests; they gave big grants to Teach for America. In Jonathan Alter’s description of how the administration decided to take on the matter, it is clear that professionalism provided the framework for their thinking. Teachers’ credentials are described as somewhat bogus; they “often bore no relationship to [teachers’] skills in the classroom.” What teachers needed was a more empirical form of certification: they had to be tested and then tested again. Even more offensive to the administration was the way teachers’ unions had resisted certain accountability measures over the years, resulting in a situation “almost unimaginable to professionals in any other part of the economy,” as Alter puts it.15

  As it happens, the vast majority of Americans are unprofessional: they are the managed, not the managers. But people whose faith lies in “cream rising to the top” (to repeat Alter’s take on Obama’s credo) tend to disdain those at the bottom. Those who succeed, the doctrine of merit holds, are those who deserve to—who race to the top, who get accepted to “good” colleges and get graduate degrees in the right subjects. Those who don’t sort of deserve their fates.

  “One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is kind of a disequalizer,” Larry Summers told journalist Ron Suskind during the early days of the Obama administration. “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”16

  Remember, as you let that last sentence slide slowly down your throat, that this was a Democrat saying this—a prominent Democrat, a high-ranking cabinet official in the Clinton years and the man standing at the right hand of power in the first Obama administration.*

  The merit mind-set destroyed not only the possibility of real action against inequality; in some ways it killed off the hopes of the Obama presidency altogether. “From the days of the 2008 Obama transition team offices, it was clear that the Administration was going to be populated with Ivy Leaguers who had cut their teeth, and filled their bank accounts, at McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup,” a labor movement official writes me.

  The President, who was so impressed with his classmates’ intelligence at Harvard and Columbia, gave them the real reins of power, and they used those reins to strangle him and his ambition of being a transformative President. The overwhelming aroma of privilege started
at the top and at the beginning.… It reached down deep into the operational levels of government, to the lowest-level political appointees. Our members watched this process unfold in 2009 and 2010, and when it came time to defend the Obama Administration at the polls in 2010, no one showed up.

  THE RACE IS NOT TO THE SWIFT

  All these brilliant people, all these honored professionals and Ivy League PhDs, and yet one of the most striking features of the Obama administration has been its timidity, its leaden lack of originality. The situation of 2009 called for daring and imagination, but what we got were half-measures in all things.

  It didn’t have to be this way. In fact, none of the lamentable episodes I have described in these chapters—not even the technocratic longing for consensus—are built-in defects of expertise-in-government. Nations have found ways to have genius and daring at the same time; indeed, before the “ocean liner” experience of the Obama years taught me otherwise, I used to believe that these qualities went hand-in-hand. For example, the original New Deal, which set the standard for an administration of intellectuals, was creative and experimental above all else. Programs would be conjured out of nothing overnight. And when one of them failed, Roosevelt’s Brain Trust would try something else.

  Obama’s team, by contrast, was “smart.” They were often people of dazzling credentials as scholars but not necessarily as reformers, regulators, and law enforcers. They had successfully internalized mainstream thinking in their respective disciplines, maybe, but that was not enough for the challenges of the moment. Reform often comes from the margins of American life, but marginal is not a term anyone would use to describe the satisfied, conventionally minded people of the Obama administration. This team was limited by its excellence, restrained by its orthodoxy.

  Professional correctness also fetched the Obama administration a beating in the arena of partisan combat. In their guileless search for Grand Bargains and bipartisan comity, it seems never to have dawned on Team D that their Republican opponents might do exactly what Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay taught them to do in the 1990s: dedicate themselves completely to obstruction, drag the conversation always to the right, and refuse to confer even the slightest bit of legitimacy on the Democratic administration. Failing to guess that this extremely likely eventuality might come to pass cost our pack of geniuses many months of wasted time as they fruitlessly pursued Republican votes for their health care bill. Worse: the Affordable Care Act that Obama ultimately signed into law relies in numerous ways on the cooperation of state-level politicians—many of them Republicans who, we now know, are just as enthralled by the obstruction game as are their national leaders.

  Worst of all was the administration’s ideological assumption that Democrats simply owned economic discontent. Those upset because Team Obama didn’t get tough with Wall Street would have nowhere else to go, they thought. It was science, political science: move to the center, and you can take such people’s votes for granted.

  That the liberals’ failures might expose them to deadly flanking fire from the right is something the administration appears not to have seen coming; for all their subtle learning, many members of the liberal class still don’t believe it really happened—what did them in, they think, was just the recrudescence of some boorish reflex in the minds of an unenlightened public. And this brings us to perhaps the most crucial indictment of them all: these Democrats don’t seem really to care about winning elections. Even that, the most fundamental political act, takes a back seat to professional vanity.17

  9

  The Blue State Model

  When you press Democrats on their uninspiring deeds—their lousy free trade deals, for example, or their incomprehensible Wall Street reform legislation—when you press them on any of these things, they reply automatically that this is the best anyone could have done. After all, they had to deal with those awful Republicans, and those awful Republicans wouldn’t let the really good stuff get through. They filibustered in the Senate. They gerrymandered in the congressional districts. And, besides, it’s hard to turn an ocean liner. Surely you don’t think the tepid-to-lukewarm things Clinton and Obama have done in Washington really represent the fiery Democratic soul.

  So let us go to a place that does. Let us choose a locale where Democratic rule is virtually unopposed, a place where Republican obstruction and sabotage cannot taint the experiment.

  THESE ARE DEMOCRATS

  The map offers several possibilities. The deep-blue state of Rhode Island, for example, where the Party of the People controls both houses of the state’s General Assembly and where voters in 2014 chose as their governor the Democrat Gina Raimondo, who was endorsed for the job by President Obama as well as by Hillary Clinton.

  “[I]ncome inequality is the biggest problem we face,” Raimondo once told the admiring New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, and by the standards of the liberal class, she has much to recommend her for tackling that problem. She has degrees from both Harvard and Yale and, like others in our story, was a Rhodes Scholar to boot. She came up through the greatest of the creative industries—by which I mean venture capital—and as Rhode Island’s treasurer, she spent the last several years fighting with state employees over retirement issues, reducing their benefits and entrusting the management of their pensions to hedge funds.

  Perhaps this doesn’t sound to you like much of a way of tackling income inequality, and perhaps it isn’t one. But Raimondo also assures the world that when she talks about inequality she means it. She told Bruni that she has confronted investment bankers with these words: “You’re some of the smartest, richest people in the world, and you need to be a part of fixing America.” Somehow, this rebuke did not frighten them off. Investment bankers were among Raimondo’s greatest campaign contributors.1

  Perhaps they were just showing their enthusiasm for Raimondo’s economic plan, which is to enthrone “innovation” as her state’s guiding purpose. She has proposed to build a “Rhode Island Innovation Institute”; to guide the young with “entrepreneurial training”; to set up what her economic plan calls a “concierge service” for startups; to take all the great ideas bubbling up in the state and “commercialize” them by “partnering our world-class colleges and universities with the private sector and philanthropic ventures.”2

  Another blue zone that might be worth studying is the extremely Democratic city of Chicago under its current mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who was a close adviser to Presidents Obama and Clinton. Emanuel followed a similar trajectory to Raimondo’s: a fancy education, a brief but lucrative spell at an investment bank, conspicuous battles with public employees (in his case, teachers), and various feats of privatization, such as turning over the cleaning of public schools and the collecting of bus fares to contractors.

  Just like other leading Democrats, Emanuel did it all in service of the beleaguered middle class, whose vanished job security and fallen standard of living he loves to mourn. His passion for the little guy was rewarded, just as it was in Raimondo’s case, with lavish campaign donations from hedge fund managers and then donations from still other hedge fund managers. Like Raimondo, Rahm has made a fetish of innovation, building an Innovation Delivery Team and announcing that the equality-minded city of Chicago today seeks “innovation for all.” “When it comes to innovation,” Emanuel writes, “Chicago is open for business.”3

  This is a curious pattern, is it not? Blue-state Democrats, with transparent connections to high finance, who have deliberately antagonized public employees, and whose chief economic proposal has to do with promoting “innovation,” a grand and promising idea that remains suspiciously vague. None of them can claim that their hands were forced by Republicans. They came up with this program all on their own.

  Once we start looking, we see this pattern everywhere. In New York State, for example: Governor Andrew Cuomo’s alliance with hedge funds and investment banks is legendary. Financiers support him in his various campaigns; he shows them the love with tax cuts; and they all work
harmoniously together on a campaign to reform public education in New York State. The main target of this reform effort, by the way, is that mighty foe, the New York public school teacher, a figure Cuomo has assailed and berated in numerous ways over the years.*

  Is there anything toward which the stern-faced, discipline-minded Andrew Cuomo feels tenderly? Why, yes, there is: innovation. Chapter Five of his 2014 campaign book, Moving the New NY Forward (throughout which Cuomo refers to himself in the third person), is entirely dedicated to the subject. It tells how his policies have been “encouraging the key collaborations that help innovation clusters grow and deepen.” Collaborations such as “Startup NY,” a program that uses public universities and tax breaks as entrepreneur bait; it is, Cuomo tells us, “a game-changing initiative” that works by making public universities “into tax-free communities that attract new businesses, venture capital, start-ups, and investments from across the world.”4

  There is also a version that comes from sky-blue Delaware, where Democratic governor Jack Markell—a man much beloved of the East Coast banking and telecom communities—has tried to privatize the Port of Wilmington, has done battle with public workers, and has fashioned a role for himself as an info-age thought-leader. Toward the end of 2014, Markell traveled to Stanford University, the center of the knowledge economy, to speak about “Disruptive Innovation,” meaning, in this case, web-based companies that displace an existing personal service. The question before policymakers like him, Markell said (according to his prepared text) was “how we can facilitate the success of these innovations.” He further wondered how Delawareans might “switch our schools” in order to produce the kind of workforce that innovative companies want and even how they might consult with the “business community to make curricula relevant.”5