Democratic spin-doctors and liberal pundits are right: Barack Obama did get enough milquetoast legislation enacted to confer bragging rights. But unlike LBJ's vastly more substantial reforms, Obama's achievements further entrench the power of those who make reform necessary - from the insurance industry and Big Pharma all the way to Wall Street and back. Obama's motto should be "a half step forward, two or more steps back."
And unlike JFK, who somehow inspired faith in public service notwithstanding the fact that his achievements were even more dubious than Obama's, Obama disillusioned an entire generation yearning for change. Having temporarily alleviated cynicism, he also did more to revive it than any president in American history. By continuing George Bush's counter-productive and long lost wars, rebranding one and escalating the other, and deepening his assault on privacy and the rule of law, Obama made the question of just how, if at all, elections matter timely again.
Unlike Bush, Obama is hard working, intelligent, worldly and equipped with a moral sense; and his views about what government should do are surely no worse than LBJ's or JFK's. Why, then, did his first two years in office go so awry? For Democratic cheerleaders, the answer is obvious: it's the Republicans' fault or perhaps the recession's or both. But the truth is less forgiving of Obama and the Democratic Party.
The problem is not just a lack of ideological clarity and courage; that was characteristic of Democrats in the JFK and LBJ days too. So was the reckless pursuit of murder and mayhem in distant lands inhabited by people of color. The short answer why Obama has done so poorly, compared even to Democrats of the past, and why he will likely continue to fall short even now, with expectations massively reduced, is -- bipartisanship or rather Obama's vain quest to attain it.
To be sure, radical change was never in the offing. The chief executive officer of a capitalist country is constrained by the ever-changing requirements of capitalism itself, and it is not within the ken of any Democratic politician, except perhaps the most marginalized among them, to put those constraints in question. In all cases, capitalist politicians are obliged to block efforts to improve life qualitatively to the extent that they defy the logic of the system they superintend. In the circumstances that prevail today, they are especially bereft of means to combat the afflictions that beset us: involuntary unemployment, environmental degradation, public squalor and a marked diminution of the state's capacity to serve the interests of its people (in contrast to its economic elites), even as productive capacities increase.
This won't change until there is an irresistible call for a qualitatively better way of life, a democratic uprising. It has been a long time since anything like that has been a factor in the politics of any developed capitalist country, much less the United States which, in this respect, has always been "exceptional."
There are also distinctively American problems that make the prospects for change even bleaker. In addition to all the old ways that economic power has spilled over into the political realm, we have lately fallen victim to an ill-conceived jurisprudential tradition that culminated last year in the profoundly anti-democratic Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court. Our politicians are now freer than ever before to sell themselves to the highest bidder. In conjunction with our de facto institutionalization of a party duopoly system, our political class is therefore beholden to corporate interests to an extent that surpasses the corruptions of other liberal democracies.
This is why opportunities for change worth having, for left departures within a capitalist framework, arise infrequently. The glaring incompetence of the Bush administration loosened this constraint, providing President Obama with a rare historical opportunity. He squandered it completely.
There are other factors too constraining Obama's ability to implement the changes many of his supporters expected. Unlike capitalist countries with stronger welfare state institutions, our federal bureaucracy is weak, notwithstanding the vituperations of right-wing politicians intent on weakening it even more. Not so our military and the various components of our national security state, including lately those devoted to "homeland security"; they comprise a formidable permanent government. To the extent that we have anything resembling a deliberative democracy at the federal level, it is within and between these agencies and the White House and, to a lesser extent, Congress. We the people just stand impotently by. Read Bob Woodward's account in Obama's Wars of how an administration elected to end the permanent war regime George Bush and Dick Cheney installed came to resurrect Vietnam in Afghanistan. Read it and weep - not just for the legions of victims, civilian and military, of the wars Obama now "owns," but for democracy as well. And inasmuch as the most sensible voice in the room these days is apparently Joe Biden's, weep too - and fear -- for the horrors to come.
Needless to say, these constraints overlap. We are in Afghanistan still because it won't do for an empire that is the bastion of world capitalism to be defeated by benighted islamists, especially when so many of the pillars of our capitalist economy benefit from permanent war and when the military and "intelligence" communities won't hear of defeat.
Yet, despite these and other constraints, Obama's presidency has been worse, a lot worse, than need be, and worse than it would have been had Obama, not imbibed the conventional wisdom on electoral strategy. That he did so, from even before Day One - by loading up his administration with Wall Streeters and Clintonites and even with George Bush's Secretary of Defense - is especially ironic, inasmuch as his own campaign in 2008 rebuts the conventional wisdom, as does the success of Republican - and Tea Party -- efforts to cause Obama's presidency to fail.
The conventional view is that, while "enthusiasm gaps" matter, so that the concerns of core party constituencies can't be too blatantly dismissed, elections are won by winning over "independents," and that the key to winning them over is to be "moderate" and "pragmatic" or, what comes to the same thing, "bipartisan." Democrats believe this more than Republicans do but, this side of the Tea Party's lunatic fringe, the entire political establishment, along with its media exponents, believes it to some extent.
Philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser once said of pragmatism that it is true in theory, but in practice it just doesn't work. He was talking (joking insightfully) about a philosophical doctrine, not the political style that bears its name and with which it is only tenuously connected. But the point holds true. In principle, the bipartisanship Obama quests after is doable; after all, both parties serve the same masters. But, as the Republican Party has increasingly fallen under the sway of the useful idiots it has actively recruited since the Ronald Reagan days, the parties have polarized - not so much for principled ideological reasons and certainly not over policies that impinge upon the interests of economic elites or the permanent government, but over matters in which the concerns of the GOP's useful idiots conflict with those of reasonable people. Since unreasonable people don't compromise, cooperation has become impossible.
Thus our politics has devolved into a marketing contest in which the competition for those without brand loyalty is ferocious. In such circumstances, boldness, even to the point of obduracy, matters - because it is perceived as authenticity; and consumers (voters) find that appealing. Obama won over independents in 2008, not because he was thought to be a 'moderate' or exceptionally civil, but because he represented "the audacity of hope." As that illusion receded, independents abandoned him. Meanwhile, Republicans won their (apolitical) hearts and (empty) minds -- by standing for nothing, but standing boldly nevertheless.
It was inevitable that Obama would accede to the constraints under which he governs. But he didn't have to take the punditocracy's conventional wisdom on board. He didn't have to make common cause with the most execrable elements of the American political class; especially not when it is clear as day that his efforts have been and will continue to be rebuffed.
Bipartisanship worked for one day in December because a few Republicans, eager to be home for Christmas, felt they could "cooperate" on measures in which the interests of their paymasters are not infringed. They were so eager to get out of town that in one case, repeal of DADT, they were even bold enough to risk annoying elements of their base. With the military brass grudgingly guarding their flank, they felt emboldened to take the risk. But there won't be many more happy days like that one. Instead, expect more devastating capitulations - like the "compromise" on the Bush era tax cuts. Obama finds opportunities to be bipartisan everywhere, and his fellow Democrats are, for the most part, happy or at least willing to go along. At this point, it will take a New Year's miracle to change that; or, almost as unlikely, a revolt from the bottom up.
In these circumstances, the most immediate task is to reveal "bipartisanship" for the foul idea it is. Even liberals for whom the very idea of revolting against or even within the Democratic Party is unthinkable should be able to get behind that. If they don't, we may soon have someone much worse than Obama with whom to contend.