The President Navel-Gazes; Waves White Flag of Surrender

The most unfocused cluster-%#&* in my memory....This is my view of the first 24 months of the Obama administration.  I had previously read the NY Times article and went into even deeper depression.  We are doomed!  I expected a precision operation in Washington (similar to the pre-election Obama campaign that outmaneuvered the Clinton machine.)  Initially, although none of the various machinations were clear to me, the Obama team seemed to be moving in the direction I had longed for.  Then, rumors of massive compromise in the healthcare clean-up.  I didn't give-up hope until January 19, when a literally ignored Martha Coakley was defeated by an incompetent unheard of named Scott Brown.   I call Coaklley's defeat an act of hubris or incompetence by Obama's handlers.  On that day, we gave up control of the Senate.  One could go on and on about all of the lack of clarity and communications with the public, but that would be preaching to the choir.  I make no claims to expertise in the art of politics but I've never had any hesitation:  When an entity was attempting to destroy me, I would come out -- taking no prisoners!  Conservatives are going to take Obama down if it means accepting the destruction of the middle class.  I would make life so miserable for the GOP and those that vote for them, that they would rue, for decades, the decision to destroy me and my presidency, at all costs.  Time to play by their rules. 

So if I understand you correctly, since you didn't get everything you want already (plus a few bonuses) it's a better idea to give control back to those who oppose anything and everything we're even trying to do and have made rolling back the beginnings of the gains we've begun their central campaign point.

Better, I think, someone who is imperfect yet making efforts than people who are diametrically opposed to whatever I stand for and actively working against not only what I believe in, but also the entire society in which I live.

I simply don't understand the depths of your delusion.  And I'm not sure I'm even willing to try.

This is an important article, stardust, and it's great that you brought attention to it, and provided the link.  Plenty to be disappointed in reading it, or offended by if that's your wont -- though I have to be honest.  The earth-colored carpet with inspirational quotations is, I think, cause to offend everyone.  Even me.

But not too much cause for hope in the pages.  A pretty dismal analysis.

I would like to point out one piece from near the beginning that you didn't as it seems to me that losing control of the narrative, or losing a narrative period, was a fatal error on the administration's part.  It has cost already, and will continue to cost, and even if the president is aware of it, I have no idea what would turn that ship around, and without turning that ship around, I see nothing but ever heavier legislative defeat coming up.  But I do think it's pertinent that he is aware.  I'd like to say I appreciate his humility but unfortunately it's not going to cut the mustard to help the situation.  It might rather hurt. 

Anyhow:

"Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told [Baker], “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”

I like the two-part electoral strategy we're getting here. One part emotional motivation: i.e. 'I'm too good for you snivelling morons' contempt, and one part rational incentive, i.e. 'if you don't give us the majority, I'll go and gut SocSec and Medicare with Paul Ryan... just out of spite'.

Utter genius!

... or retarded.

one of those two.

Your title, by the way, is perfect, stardust.  On the money.  It (painfully) says it all. 

Thinking back at reading the original Times interview, I do recall another statement that intrigued me.  During the past two years, I held Rahm Emanuel in disdain as a manipulative snake, willing to sell-out his mother if the price was right.  Somehow, the interview made me sense that Rahm was the only "man-guy" in Obama's inner circle.  I almost get the sense that he was always pleading for Obama to "kick ass and take names."  He, finally, used the governor-thing as an escape mechanism.

Stunningly obtuse.

The Republican Party, thoroughly routed in 2008, the party that authored a expensive and repudiated war and a historic economic collapse, followed up their humiliating electoral defeat by moving as far to the right as can be imagined, promoting strident and extremist rhetoric among their ranks and on the airways.  And now they are about to be rewarded with a tremendous electoral victory.

You would think that just maybe these Ivy League policy wonks like Obama would get the message that the public actually responds to bold and confident positions from people with a strong and morally clear philosophical core.  But no.  The way was, and is, clear for Obama to become the public champion of energetic Rooseveltian government, high octane job creation programs, middle class debt relief and and unapologetic wealth redistribution and egalitarian re-cutting of the national pie.  But he refuses to take that path, and instead stays on his centrist course with more of that Summers-Greenspan-Rubin status quo economics.

Several of the things Obama says make me think that he is just a self-hating Democrat.  He wishes he were a Republican, finds the criticism from the left impertinent and bothersome, and longs at some level to be in the other camp.  Maybe he should just switch.  Just like the departed Emanuel, he clearly thinks we are all retards.

Reading your post and learning that he was today urging Democrats not to get discouraged I am beginning for the first time to dislike the guy.  Until now I've been sympathetic to him personally because he does have a truly impossible job, even while perceiving one "substantively right, politically hard" decision after another to be just the reverse (Clinton said the same things at times; I'm not sure if was deceiving himself or his listeners more.)  I mean, how much political courage does it take to capitulate to the fatcat interest groups instead of confronting them where he thinks they are wrong?  

Democrats are discouraged because they have been expecting him to advocate and defend his party's values.  Instead he half apologizes for them and makes a show of trying to reject them for the vanity points a Democratic President can get in the media for appearing to be a "new Democrat".  It turns out that, far from asserting the historic progressive values that our party (and Teddy Roosevelt earlier last century on some domestic issues) has advanced, to the lasting benefit of our country, he at times does not even appear to respect them. 

He is turning out to be as ineffective an advocate in a governing role as he was a compelling advocate in his 2008 campaigning role. (He has realized of late that he is in another campaign.  But he is fighting an uphill battle to try to win the attention, let alone the support, of some of the people who helped him get elected and are disgusted with what they've seen so far.)  He is an admirer of Lincoln.  In the white hot fires he had to walk through, Lincoln recognized and seized opportunities that presented themselves to make desperately needed choices unavailable through the conduct of normal politics.  On fateful issues, he didn't try to split every difference or imagine there was some way he could please everyone.  And just because he included rivals and even enemies among his own Cabinet does not mean he entertained illusions about the extent they would meet him part way or provide him with cover.  

He says Democrats are congenital pessimists.  He might find that if he scratched the surface of a seeming congenital pessimist he might find a wounded citizen activist idealist whose commitment, effectiveness and passion, so much in evidence during the campaign, might surprise him. 

I admit to my doubts on this last point.  Democratic activists feel so beaten down, dissed and sold out by party professionals and some candidates and officials they've helped elect over decades now that there may be a certain numbness that has set in, whereby the words have become increasingly hard to believe.  The cynicism that has set in is very much evident in the progressive blogosphere and may at this point be increasingly hard to overcome.  It's not a healthy situation where there is the degree of mistrust of the true commitments of candidates who express strong support for progressive values and policies as there appears to be to me at this time.

Well, there is a lot here.  But let me just focus on the beginning of the title.  Navel gazing is derogatory term used to describe someome who is utterly focused on them inner spiritual universe without any regard to world outside themselves.  Reading this interview as well as the rolling stone interview (which I agree with one of the commenters was a real soft ball pitch of an interview), shows me a president who is, if anything, overly sensitive to the world around him.  Now in one your last comments your problem is really not he is navel gazing but that he doing this "odd faux-self-examination."  I would say, however, that having a president who is willing to reflect and admit, not only to himself, but to the public where he made mistakes is a good thing, and definitely refreshing. As this quote from the interview indicates, Obama may be doing a lot of things but he isn't navel gazing:

Now in retrospect, I could have told Barack Obama in December of 2009 that if you already have a third of the package as tax cuts, then the Republicans, who traditionally are more comfortable with tax cuts, may just pocket that and attack the other components of the program. And it might have been better for us not to include tax cuts in the original package, let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts, and then say, O.K., you know, we’ll compromise and give you your tax cuts, even though we had already proposed them. 

And if you recall, when we initially unveiled what the Recovery Act would look like — in fact, that a third of it was tax cuts — Mitch McConnell actually was, as he phrased it, pleasantly surprised that sort of traditional Republican idea had been included. But very quickly that pleasant surprise turned into attacks on the infrastructure or the aid to the states or what have you.

I would have told Barack Obama back in 2009 that just be warned, structuring the tax cut the way we did, where people basically got a small bump in their paycheck every two weeks, was the right thing to do economically, but politically it meant that nobody knew that they were getting a tax cut. And in fact what ended up happening was six months into it or nine months into it, people had thought we had raised their taxes instead of cutting their taxes.

My point here of focusing on this "navel gazing" facet is two-fold.  One is that we all have, including myself, have some narrative we want to validate.  We will take things such as this interview and use to build that narrative, even though someone else can come in basically prove the opposite if so motivated. In reading this and the Stone interview, I don't see a president who has waved the white flag, but one that is trying to achieve the possible steps forward, rather than get nowhere while taking principled stands.

There is a quote in the Stone interview which brings up the point that is the second reason for the "navel-gaze"

I could have had a knock-down, drag-out fight on the public option that might have energized you and The Huffington Post, and we would not have health care legislation now. I could have taken certain positions on aspects of the financial regulatory bill, where we got 90 percent of what we set out to get, and I could have held out for that last 10 percent, and we wouldn't have a bill. You've got to make a set of decisions in terms of "What are we trying to do here? Are we trying to just keep everybody ginned up for the next election, or at some point do you try to win elections because you're actually trying to govern?" I made a decision early on in my presidency that if I had an opportunity to do things that would make a difference for years to come, I'm going to go ahead and take it.

Now this is definitely a legitimate ground for debate to say he could have gone for those fights and won, that he is just making an excuse for giving into the wealthy special interests.  But what I see in both of these of these interviews is a president who is attempting to articulate both what he trying to do and how he is approaching it in given political environment. 

So Obama and his administration tried to govern with political and economic they were handed, we able to achieve some things, admitedly not perfect, and laid the groundwork for other things.  Or so goes one narrative.  And with this narrative it isn't surprising that Obama isn't out there trying to convinve people on the left that he isn't navel gazing nor waving the white flag, then or now.

It's my opinion that: (since it seems unclear to one or two readers, lol!)

Since Obama agreed to do this interview, one might have concluded that his impetus would have been to help Dems in the midterms.  If it was, in fact (and it may be so) that it was to help his re-election, that is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.  I won't even begin to try to analyze that possibility and the contents of the interview.

What he did, IMO, was to say that Democrats are never satisfied, not just attack the Lefty blogosphere as he often does; this was bad.  He then goes on to (what I call) faux-analysis, in that he tosses out some critiques and charges concerning his giving away the bank to business, Republicans, etc., and muses it may have been wrong, while in the same interview saying that he's prepared, since the Dems will lose power in one or both Chanbers, to give new creedence to the 'conservative and centrist reforms' the R's want.  Well, shiver me timbers; he's just announce his agenda for the next two years.

So all the Dems who want to take action on a plethora of issues just got told they can go Peddle Fish:  the President wants to make nice with the soon-to-be recalcitrant Congress.  He doesn't draw some nice, neat lines in the sand, or tell people why it's crucial they elect Dems; he sort of mumbles that he hopes he can fulfill some of that remaing 30% of his campaign promises (okay; I'll leave that one alone), and make some of the enacted policies even better. 

He sounds weak, he sounds like he just gave in to big Dem losses, and worst of all he just gave into some idea that the Republicans might be right on some Reform ideas.  He even named Paul Ryan, who might just agree with the Catfood Commission, and want to lower the deficit by cutting socail programs!  I'm picturing the Dems who still do believe in turning things around, holding their heads in their hands.

And this morning David Ignatious told us that the buzz is that after the Dec. report on Afghanistan comes out, and we all get to Huzzah or scream about it, he'll be choosing General David Petraeus to be Chairmanof the Joint Chiefs.  Now, if that's not an indicator that he means us to be on a permanent war footing, I can't think what is.

I personally can't wait for the next batch of wikileaks.

I thought Democrats were supposed to stop whining. I guess Obama didn't get the memo.