Ghettoization & The Difference Between Politics & Policy
By David Sirota
Created 11/24/2008 - 10:30am
“This is the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right,” David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton official who wrote a history of the National Security Council, said on Friday, as news of Mrs. Clinton’s and Mr. Geithner’s appointments leaked.
This quote, from the New York Times story asserting that Barack Obama will govern from the center-right, highlights a very important dynamic in politics: the tendency of politicians to use the argot of progressivism in their public presentations (to "hold power with the left hand") - all while wielding conservative policy ("playing the music with your right").
There's nothing surprising about this - the reason endangered politicians of both parties start airing populist progressive themes around election time is because they know those themes are popular among rank-and-file voters (thus the definition of "populism") - they know, in other words, that this is a decidedly center-left country, and when they have to answer to that country come election day, they go left. But once these politicians get into office and are far away from all of us, the unwashed masses, the pressures of money and media - ie. the Establishment - unleashes incredible pressure for them to actually write the details of policy in a way that preserves a conservative status quo.
Enter the Obama administration.
While there's not enough evidence to declare a full-on "trend" in the incoming Obama White House, it is notable that Obama's policy appointments (ie. Cabinet secretaries and White House policy advisers who actually craft policy) are almost all right-of-center, Establishment choices - and almost none are, as The Nation's Chris Hayes has said, movement progressives. At the same time, many Obama appointments to exclusively political positions – that is, positions that are focused on selling policy, whatever that policy may be - are terrific movement progressives, people like Mike Lux (transition outreach to progressive orgs), Ellen Moran (communications director), Phil Schiliro (congressional liason) and Patrick Gaspard (political director). In other words, the initial structure seems to resemble the principle in American politics of politicians publicly selling their policies in progressive terms, while having those policies be crafted with much more conservative ideology.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Newsvine
Furl
Google
Yahoo
If Sirota is right, it tells us nothing much
I like the use of the completely non-inflammatory word "ghettoization". Would that be the Bronx or Lodz?
When Obama was deciding who to pick for V.P., Sirota was for Jim Webb over Hillary. Webb was Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. Now having Joe Biden as V.P. apparently concerns him. Give me a break.
Obama's a moderate. He said all along he wanted to make deals that would appeal to moderate Republicans as well as Democrats. I expect that's what he's doing. As far as I can tell, people are eager to be on his team. That puts him in a strong negotiating position. If he's smart, he'll get them on board with his priorities from the outset. I think it's fair to say that Obama has shown some smarts in personnel decisions so far.
Sirota doesn't know. A $700 billion stimulus package, expanding government-funded health care, a balanced foreign policy featuring withdrawal from Iraq, closing Gitmo and other secret prisons, ending torture, the Freedom of Choice Act, the Employee Free Choice Act, and forward-thinking environmental policies. Does Sirota read the same news as everyone else?
Sirota has done nothing but
Sirota has done nothing but hyperventilate and go into hysterics about every personnel leak and/or imagined future policy decision since Obama was elected. Am not sure why (except that it's gotten him on TV to talk about it, and he's nothing if not a fervent self promoter.
Me, I have no clue what sort of administration Obama will have... I have a feeling that it will be as confusing to political bloggers and many politics watchers as his campaign was (if the political bloggers/many pundits were right on anything regarding how he should run his campaign, it was probably an accident). I'll wait and see on the policies and, more importantly, the results.
Me, I have no clue what sort
Neither do I. My best judgement is that Obama knows a LOT of people feel they own his campaign, that giving them that sense of ownership was central to his victory. He's going to have to satisfy them to get that second term. And that office he's about to occupy has immense power...power such that even now, just talking about affairs makes people react. I don't think there's much chance that the folks he's hiring will fight him. So I think if he WANTS to keep his campaign promises, he can.
I think he will, for the
I think he will, for the most part. Well, as much as any politician does, although so much more seems expected of him (beyond just the regular having to do twice as well to be considered as good, so on). A lot of people have a lot invested in him being completely different from anyone who's gone before. I'm not sure how possible that is.
What I do find a little worrying is, from reports I've seen at least, they seem a little uncertain what to do with the army of volunteers and supporters they've amassed, now that the elections are over. I hope it's for something more than just pressuring congress to get his agenda passed, although that is important as well. Will wait and see on that, too, I guess.
I forgot to add - I don't
I forgot to add - I don't believe Obama is super progressive - but when considering the violin model, Sirota and others might do well to remember that Obama is left handed.
What I do find a little
Do those volunteers still want to do things?
I think so. Not all, of
I think so. Not all, of course, but some who were really invested in the um...ethos, I guess, of the campaign definitely were looking forward to being asked to *do* something once Obama was elected (from what I've read and heard).
That's not to say that they won't be asked to do something in the future (or are being asked now, I don't know... I'm not on any Obama email lists) but it seems a shame to not be ready, right away, to give a sense of direction to those who are really hoping to, in essence, continue working in neighborhoods or do this and that.
I wouldn't expect him to (be
I wouldn't expect him to (be able to) flip his organization from electoral politics to...what? Practically speaking, he can't really run a non-profit while he's President.
But I think it would be a good idea for Obama's crew to ask them what they would like to do.
SIROTA/OBAMA, etc
PROMETHEUS: Excellent blog. Great issues and you discussing them fearlessly.
I've been out of America WAY too long, because I couldn't make head or tail out David Sirota's piece. The problem aside from that ridiculous Violin metaphor which made no sense to me whatsoever, was the terminology "Center-left," "Center-right." The whole Left-Right continuum comes from the seating arrangement of the 19th century French parliament. That's more or less where it belongs: in Europe, South America, Canada, and Oceania.
There is no "left" or "center-left" in America. None. There's something that would resemble a mundial "Center-right" which is the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party plus the odd Republican libertarian like Ron Paul or Jeff Flake. There's a "Right" which would be most of the rest of the Democratic Party, including Clinton and Obama. There's a "Far-Right" which would be about half of the Republican Party with the break-point being maybe around where Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is, and then there's a National Front Party which is the rest of the Republicans.
You can start using words like "left" and "center-left" under a few world conditions: single-payer health care, no death penalty, no life sentences, no incarceration of 250,000 children a year with adult felons, no-three-strikes-and-you're-out-laws, no more "war on drugs," non-violent crimes punished non-violently, "victimless" crimes either "legal" or subject to very small civil sanction, no privatized prisons nor prison labor, full privacy rights including a superseding federal wiretap law which covers cellular phones and handheld devices limited in duration and subject to court order and supervision with no conversation or information not germane to the case recorded or transcribed, no wars, a defense budget that is meant to "defend" not to "aggress," FULL respect for the sovereignty of other nations, a rationalization of the national security and control bureaucracy, anti-discrimination laws with real teeth as in discrimination in the form of restraint of trade being a felony, subsidized university education, federal welfare benefit for anyone unemployed as well as food and water coupons at a rate of nutrition consistent with the mean life expetancy of the public at large, same-sex marriage by Notary seal, frreedom of and from religion, for-profit and high-salary religious institutions required to pay corporate income tax, all forms of contraception available over-the-counter to every post-pubescent person, a woman's freedom to choose whether or not to bear a child under the Roe v Wade standard with abortions covered by the national health, banking laws which allow for the same degree of privacy as telecommunications, no tax on foreign source income, return of Glass-Stegall banking act, repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley securities act, GAAP accounting principles, and corporate finance "seniority" principles to govern any bailout of any industry, private sector union penetration of 15% by 2012 if that figure has not obtained, an abolition of Taft-Hartley in favor of Wagner.
This isn't like the discovery of DNA or the map of the human genome. 45 countries, THE REST OF THE SELF-GOVERNING DEVELOPED WORLD LIVES THIS WAY. And I could go on.
When the USA is ready to be a Western nation then perhaps these Western notions of "left" and "center-left" could have some relevance. For now, the USA is not part of the developed, capitalist, self-governing West. It belong to a group of developed Theocratic Authoritarian or Bureaucratic Authoritarian states like: China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Malaysia, the Phillippines, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Syria, Lebanon, Nigeria, Qatar, Kuwait, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, North Korea, and the UAE.
From where I sit, President-elect Obama is a rightist, corporatist, quasi-imperialist, head-of-state with some populist tendencies but an overall orientation toward institutional rather than individual control. That's his preference and he's going to be the president and that's fine for the USA. It merely wouldn't be fine for me. The alternatives to Obama, Clinton and MCain, were a somewhat further right and much, much further right. Barack Obama is ideolgically too right wing for David Sirota. That's ok. Sirota's entitled to his viewpoint although if he expressed himself better I'd appreciate it. Neither Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain nor David Sirota could ever be elected president of Panama because their views are ALL too right wing for the country's sensibilities.
I certainly would not be comfortable without the normal paltette of civil rights and civil liberties afforded to me here. I could never live in the USA comfortably. Once you've had full privacy and national health and no war and a balanced budget, why would you want to live somewhere else? Unless you like the system that has fewer rights and liberties. That's up to the individual. 1/3 of all African-American men under 30 in the USA are somehow in the criminal justice system. If 1/3 of all Afro-Pananmenos under 30 were in the criminal justice system, it would be a national scandal. In America, it's a TV show. In America every American citizen with an Arabic name is on a watch list. If every Muslaman-Panameno were on a watchlist, there would be a general strike by everyone and the government would fall it would be such a scandal. In America, it's a TV show.
I'm going to leave issues of who's Black and who's White to Americans to decide for themselves. I'm going to leave issues of "left and center left" to Americans to embody if that's what they truly believe they are. I take a more straightforward approach. I like the kinds of countries which have the laws I like and I don't like the countries which have the heavy duty social control authoritarianism and warrior culture. But that's me. Americans are free moral agents and can pick any laws or any government they choose.