NY Times ____________________________________
June 20, 2010 The Agony of the Liberals By ROSS DOUTHAT They doubted him during the health care debate. They second-guessed his Afghanistan policy. They’ve fretted over his coziness with Wall Street and his comfort with executive power. But now is the summer of their discontent. From _MSNBC_ (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/06/15/msnbc_trashes_obamas_address_compared_to_cart er_i_dont_sense_executive_command.html) to “_The Daily Show_ (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-june-15-2010/respect-my-authoritah) ,” from _The Huffington Post_ (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/16/obamas-speech-not-the-tur_n_614273.html) to the _halls of Congress_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/magazine/13midterms-t.html) , movement liberals have had just about enough of Barack Obama. The catalyst was last week’s lackluster Oval Office_ address_ (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-nation-bp-oil-spill) , but the real complaints run deeper. Many liberals look at this White House and see a presidency adrift — unable to respond effectively to the crisis in the gulf, incapable of rallying the country to great tasks like the quest for clean energy, and unwilling to do what it takes to jump-start the economy. American liberalism has always had a reputation for fractiousness and frantic self-critique. But even by those standards, the current bout of anguish over the Obama presidency seems bizarrely disproportionate. This is the same Barack Obama, after all, who shepherded universal health care, the dream of liberals since the days of Harry Truman (if not Thomas Paine), through several near-death experiences and finally into law. It’s the same Obama who staked the fate of the American economy on a $787 billion exercise in Keynesian pump-priming. It’s the same Obama who has done more to advance liberal priorities than any president since Lyndon Johnson. Yet many on the left are talking as if he’s no better for liberalism than Bill Clinton circa 1996 — another _compromiser_ (http://www.salon.com/news/politics/barack_obama/index.html?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2010/06/13/afte r_obama) , another triangulator and another disappointment. At work in this liberal panic are two intellectual vices, and one legitimate fear. The first vice is the worship of presidential power: the belief that any problem, any crisis, can be swiftly solved by a strong government, and particularly a strong executive. A gushing oil well, a recalcitrant Congress, a public that’s grown weary of grand ambitions — all of these challenges could be mastered, Obama’s leftward critics seem to imagine, if only he were bolder or angrier, or maybe just more determined. This vice isn’t confined to liberals: you can see it at work when foreign policy hawks suggest that mere presidential “toughness” is the key to undoing Iran’s clerical regime, or disarming North Korea. But it runs deepest among progressives. When _Rachel Maddow_ (http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/06/16/4519408-fake-president-maddows-oval-office-in-her-own-head-addr ess) fantasized last week about how Obama should simply dictate energy legislation to a submissive Congress, she was unconsciously echoing midcentury liberal theoreticians of the presidency like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who often wrote as if a Franklin Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy could run the country by fiat. (They couldn’t.) The second vice is an overweening faith in theory. It’s now conventional wisdom among Obama’s liberal critics that the White House has been insufficiently ambitious about deficit spending. The economy is stuck in neutral, they argue, because Obama didn’t push last year’s recovery act up over a trillion dollars, and hasn’t pressed hard enough for a second major stimulus. Technically, they could be right — but only in the same way that it’s possible that the Iraq War would have been a ringing success if only we’d invaded with a million extra soldiers. The theory is unfalsifiable because the policy course is imaginary. Maybe in some parallel universe there’s a Congress that would be willing to borrow and spend trillions in stimulus dollars, despite record deficits, if that’s what liberal economists said the situation required. But not in this one. Yet the liberal drumbeat continues. As _Tyler Cowen wrote_ (http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/06/the-austerity-files.html) last week: “advocates of fiscal stimulus make it sound as simple as solving an undergraduate homework problem and ... sometimes genuinely do not realize how much the rest of the world, including politicians, views them as simply being very convinced by their own theory.” Nor do they acknowledge how much risk those same politicians have already taken on (with the first stimulus, the health care bill, and much else besides) in the name of theoretical propositions, while reaping little for their efforts save an ever-grimmer fiscal picture. But it’s here, with the looming fiscal crisis, that the more legitimate liberal fear comes in. Liberals had hoped that Obama’s election marked the beginning of a long progressive era — a new New Deal, a greater Great Society. Instead, from the West Coast to Western Europe, the welfare state is in crisis everywhere they look. The future suddenly seems to belong to austerity and retrenchment — and even, perhaps, to conservatism. In this environment, the rage against Obama for not doing more, now, faster, becomes at least somewhat understandable. It’s not that he hasn’t done a great deal for liberals during his 18 months in office. It’s that liberalism itself may be running out of time.
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