The New New Deal (5 page)

I’d love to reveal some previously hidden Obama pathology, but my sources mostly describe the same cerebral, low-blood-pressure, somewhat aloof alpha male. They marvel at his uncanny ability to boil down a meeting to its essence. They chuckle at the authoritative way he starts sentences with, “Look,” as if you’d surely agree if you just saw what he was saying. They emphasize his show-me-the-data empiricism and half-a-loaf pragmatism, but also his desire to help others.

“I worked for Ted Kennedy, the gold standard for caring about people, and Barack didn’t emote the same way,” says economist Daniel Tarullo, an Obama campaign adviser who is now a Federal Reserve governor. “But he was always thinking about the guy who lost his job in the Maytag factory in Newton, Iowa.”

Obama has a more analytical, businesslike—some say bloodless—approach than feel-your-pain politicians like Kennedy, Biden, or Bill Clinton. He doesn’t pound his fists or draw many lines in the sand. It’s not his way, and he doesn’t think it helps the guy from the Maytag factory. As an organizer, he helped poor people seek better government services with an unusually nonconfrontational style. At Harvard, he was elected to lead the Law Review because conservatives felt he’d treat them fairly. In the Illinois legislature, he had a liberal voting record, but was known for brokering bipartisan deals. He followed a similar path in the U.S. Senate, voting the Democratic line while working with Republicans like Richard Lugar of Indiana on nuclear nonproliferation and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma on government transparency. His MO hasn’t changed much.

Obama’s aides do acknowledge that there’s something vaguely enigmatic about their boss. He’s so modulated, so left-brain, so unruffled. They admire him, but they’re not sure they truly know him. How did such an alienated young man become so anchored in middle age? Did he find peace by marrying Michelle? Did he repress his emotions to avoid angry-black-man stereotypes?

Honestly, I have no idea. For this book, the fact that he ended up anchored seems more relevant than his mysterious journey to anchored. And the most relevant aspects of his biography are his beliefs, which are not so mysterious.

O
bama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was the warmhearted wellspring of his social conscience, teaching him needlepoint values like empathy and compassion.
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She was also a self-proclaimed “unreconstructed liberal,” a Ted Kennedy liberal, an imagine-the-Pentagon-had-to-hold-a-bake-sale liberal. Obama portrayed her as a naive romantic who gave money to every beggar in Indonesia, “a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” She later became a respected anthropologist, but Obama distanced himself from the bleeding-heart ethic he associates with her. In
The Audacity of Hope
, he chided Democrats “who still champion the old-time religion, defending every New Deal and Great Society program from Republican encroachment.” He championed a less purist liberalism, reflecting more practical influences—like his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, a blunt-spoken Midwesterner who worked her way from clerk to vice president of a bank, and his step-father, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian oilman who warned him that the world is cruel and lofty ideals are luxury goods.

Obama was still a man of the left. As he explained to the uninitiated, his “views on most topics correspond more closely to the editorial pages of the
New York Times
than those of the
Wall Street Journal
.”
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He embraced the New Deal ideas that Americans have a stake in each other’s success, markets sometimes fail, and government can help promote prosperity. He endorsed the New Deal concept of a safety net to make sure Americans don’t go bankrupt when they get sick or hungry
when they get old—and to promote economic risk taking the way an actual safety net promotes acrobatic risk taking. He credited FDR with laying the groundwork for the postwar growth that lifted workers into the middle class, creating consumer demand that kept the economy humming for decades. Modern Democrats, he wrote, should aim to “recast FDR’s social compact to meet the needs of a new century.”

In Obama’s telling, New Deal liberalism simply failed to keep up with the times. In the 1960s, it came to be defined less by pocketbook issues than permissive attitudes toward the counterculture, alienating Americans who respected faith and flag. By the 1970s, liberals spoke the language of victimhood rather than community, ignoring middle-class concerns about crime, taxes, and government bloat. Ronald Reagan, with his appeal to patriotic families who played by the rules, tapped into a sense of common purpose that liberals no longer could. Their whiny attacks on kindly Ronnie as a racist meanie only made them look like “out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically-correct elites.” And they didn’t appreciate the dynamism of capitalism. When factories fled overseas in pursuit of cheap labor, like the shuttered steel mills near the projects where Obama worked in Chicago, they had little to offer laid-off workers and hollowed-out communities but unemployment benefits and welfare checks. When schools failed to educate poor kids, another crisis he witnessed firsthand as an organizer, their only answer was to hike taxes and pour more money into the ratholes. As a professor at the University of Chicago, the global hub of laissez-faire economics, Obama didn’t drink the neoclassical Kool-Aid, but he did grow concerned that Democrats were “more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie.” They had become a pity party, with no vision for creating prosperity, only for redistributing it—until Bill Clinton came along.

Obama was disgusted by Clinton’s shameless political posturing, especially the “frighteningly coldhearted” execution of a mentally retarded inmate before a primary. He thought the Clinton White House neglected families left behind in the global economy, trimming its policy sails to push poll-tested trivialities like school uniforms. But he
credited the Man from Hope with dragging Democrats back to reality, reforming welfare, balancing the budget, and focusing on economic growth. Shortly after arriving in Washington in 2006, Obama signaled his sympathy with Clinton’s “Third Way” by speaking at the launch of the Hamilton Project, a Brookings Institution policy shop founded by Wall Street bigwig Robert Rubin, the former Clinton treasury secretary and godfather of Democratic centrists.
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“Both sides of the political spectrum have tended to cling to outdated politics and tired ideologies instead of coalescing around what actually works,” Obama said that day.

Unfortunately, Obama wrote, Clinton’s biography—“the draft letter saga, the marijuana puffing, the Ivy League intellectualism, the professional wife who didn’t bake cookies, and most of all the sex”—catered perfectly to Republican stereotypes of sixties liberalism.
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Even as the economy boomed and the rising tide lifted almost every boat, a new generation of Republican hard-liners led by House speaker Newt Gingrich raised slash-and-burn partisanship to an art form. Politics eroded into good-versus-evil, jackboots-versus-hippies warfare, “the psychodrama of the baby boom generation … played out on a national stage.” And George W. Bush stole that stage after campaigning as “a uniter, not a divider,” with a platform of “compassionate conservatism” that sounded a lot like the Third Way.

After a historically close election decided by the Supreme Court, pundits predicted that Bush would be forced to govern from the center. But soon he was slashing taxes for the rich; appointing timber, mining, and finance lobbyists to oversee their old industries; launching an un-provoked war; and generally governing as if “divider” were his job title. Republicans ditched the fiscal rectitude of the Clinton years, putting two wars, $2 trillion in tax cuts, a drug benefit for seniors, and a record earmarking binge on the charge card. Rather than ask Americans to make wartime sacrifices, Bush urged them to go shopping. His bank regulators posed with a chain saw in front of a stack of regulations. And a corruption scandal starring a sleazy Republican lobbyist named Jack Abramoff revealed the dominance of corporate interests in Bush’s Washington.

Obama dropped his measured tone halfway through
The Audacity
of Hope
to shred the modern GOP as a party of zealotry and magical thinking, controlled by K Street and its right-wing base, unswervingly opposed to taxes, regulation, and basic arithmetic. It was just as dedicated to redistribution as the old Democratic Party, except it redistributed wealth upward. Bush’s “Ownership Society” was a euphemism for leaving families on their own, a step toward replacing the New Deal with a winner-take-all society.

Obama had an alternative vision of reconstructed liberalism. He imagined a country that embraced freewheeling capitalism, while still making sure every American could go to college, afford decent health care, and retire with dignity. It would finance forward-leaning public ventures, as Abraham Lincoln did with the transcontinental railroad and National Academy of Sciences, as FDR did with the Triborough Bridge and rural electrification, as postwar administrations of both parties did with the interstates and the Internet. Instead of squandering surpluses on pork for the connected and tax breaks for the rich, America would invest in modern schools, research, and infrastructure. Instead of ducking tough problems, it would tackle our addiction to fossil fuels and our dysfunctional health care system.

That was Obama’s general case for change.

I
t wasn’t really a case for Obama.

It was a case for a Democratic president, but the black guy with the weird name had no reason to think he’d be that president. Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming Democratic front-runner, a star-power senator backed by her husband’s political machine. When
The Audacity of Hope
was published in 2006, Obama was two years out of the Illinois statehouse, known only for his electrifying “We Are One People” speech at the 2004 Democratic convention.
³¹
He had never even shown he could take a punch, gliding into the Senate after a marital abuse scandal torpedoed his main Democratic rival and a swingers club scandal torpedoed his main Republican rival.

But as Obama toured the country to flack his book and stump for Democrats, attracting mobs at every stop, he sensed he was tapping into the zeitgeist. Democrats of all stripes—liberal, conservative, urban, rural—wanted him by their side. New Hampshire’s governor quipped that he was a bigger draw than the Rolling Stones. He was hot, and he doubted he would get hotter sitting around Washington for another decade, risking early-onset senatoritis while acquiring enough gravitas to satisfy the arbiters of such things. He was bored in the Senate, a change-averse, geriatric debating club with stifling procedural rules. He expected 2008 to be a change election, and he looked like change.

The case for Obama was not a substantive case for changing policies; Hillary was making a similar case with a better résumé. The case for Obama was a political case for why those policies never seemed to change. It implied that Hillary was part of the problem, that America couldn’t afford another decade of Clinton wars, that the political pettiness and nastiness that exploded during the Clinton era was the fundamental obstacle to fundamental change.

Hillary’s one-word explanation for the persistence of the status quo was “Republicans.” Obama’s was “Washington,” the endless spin cycles, insult industries, and poll-driven platitudes that made tough choices and commonsense compromise impossible. As a symbol and a participant, Hillary was inextricably linked to that Washington gridlock machine, the bickering and parsing, the eternal boomer-driven relitigation of the sixties. She could never make a credible “We Are One People” speech, or bring people together to solve big problems; she had tried and failed in 1994 with her husband’s health care plan. The case for Hillary was that she knew how to fight Republicans, that she was comfortable in the muck. The case for Obama was that he could move politics beyond the muck.

Obama was not a cockeyed optimist about getting the Crips and Bloods of the Beltway to call a truce. He knew a less myopic, more cordial politics might not be possible anymore:

Maybe there’s no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement
are futile.
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Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or a cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters.

Still, Obama felt like he matched the moment. He would run as an outsider against Washington, an insurgent against a quasi-incumbent, a start-up against a behemoth, change against business as usual. He figured his chances were slim, but hey, sure things don’t require the audacity of hope.

I
n February 2007, Obama announced his candidacy outside the old state capitol in Springfield, the site of Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech.
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His theme was America’s divided house. “In the face of a politics that’s shut you out, that’s told you to settle, that’s divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people,” he told fifteen thousand shivering fans. Obama was aligning himself not only with Lincoln, but with civility; Springfield was also the place where he played poker with Republicans at night and legislated with Republicans during the day, the place where “we learned to disagree without being disagreeable.” Basically, he pledged to be a uniter, this time for real.

But Obama’s ideas about changing politics were always a means to the end of changing policies. In Springfield, he listed the four main problems he was running to solve: “a dependence on oil that threatens our future,” “a health care crisis,” “schools where too many children aren’t learning,” and “families struggling paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can.” He argued that real solutions would be impossible until Washington moved beyond the noise and the rage: