Obama and the prospects for American progressives.
| Author | Jackson, Ben |
| Position | Barack Obama - Interview |
As the US presidential election enters the home straight and the British political class over-indulges in the minutiae of Obama's re-election battle, Robert Kuttner provides a more radical appraisal of the American political scene than is usually purveyed to a British audience. Kuttner has a distinguished track record as a progressive journalist, commentator, and editor: he has been the Washington editor of The Village Voice; a national staff writer on The Washington Post during the Watergate era; and economics editor of The New Republic. He was a long-standing columnist for Business Week, and continues to write columns for The Boston Globe. Along with Paul Starr and Robert Reich, Kuttner founded The American Prospect in 1990, and has since played a key role in building the new magazine into an important venue for American liberal debate. Alongside these journalistic commitments, Kuttner has written numerous books on economic policy and politics, including Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets (1997); The Squandering of America (2007); Obama's Challenge (2008); and A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama's Promise, Wall Street's Power and the Struggle to Control our Future (2010). Across this impressive body of work, Kuttner has offered sustained advocacy of a liberal politics that seeks to marry American economic dynamism with the pursuit of social justice and a deeper democracy. A trenchant critic of the right-ward trajectory of the Democrats over the last twenty years, Kuttner reflects in this interview on Obama's first term in office; the ideological contours of the Democratic Party; the opportunities for a new political settlement presented by the financial crisis; and, of course, on the presidential campaign now hurtling towards its conclusion.
The Obama question
I will start with the inevitable Obama question. You wrote at the start of your 2010 book A Presidency in Peril that Obama was 'at risk of being a failed President' (Kuttner, 2010, xi). Two years on, how great do you think that risk is now?
When I wrote that book I did not anticipate the second phase of the European crisis, where a deep recession is being made worse by austerity policies. So I think he is in even more peril now than he was then, because the economy in the United States is at risk of a stalled recovery which would be very, very bad for him as an incumbent President. People who, a short while ago, were saying that Romney couldn't possibly get elected--because of the divisions in the Republican Party, the fact that Romney is not a very effective candidate, the fact that women don't particularly like him--are now saying that it is going to be a very, very close election because unemployment is starting to creep back up.
I think, to some extent, Obama bears some of the responsibility, not for the European mess, but for the fact that, as I wrote in that book, he did not use his influence to really remake the financial system. He appointed people who were either left-over Bush appointees or Clinton people, and so a moment that should have been a radical break from the policies that caused the crisis was presided over by the same people who were responsible for the financial deregulation that led to the crisis. He was much more effective as a candidate than he was as a President. It's really odd that someone who was so effective as a candidate was not all that effective at using his office as a politician. It's certainly not over, and, if anything, as the incumbent, he is still a slight favourite to win, but I think it is going to be a very, very close election.
Romney's sheer ineptitude also helps Obama. And the choice of Paul Ryan as Republican vice-presidential candidate has brought out Obama's partisanship in a good way. Ryan appeals to the Republican base. But the more that the Democrats smoke out the implications of Ryan's proposals on key issues such as Social Security, Medicare, and taxation, these proposals turn out to be unpopular with most voters and that helps Obama.
In A Presidency in Peril you often compare Obama and FDR. On the basis of what you have just said, is part of the difference between them that FDR was much more effective as a president than Obama has turned out to be and, if that is the case, why do you think that is? Is it a result of Obama's caution or are there political constraints on Obama that are more profound than those faced by FDR?
Well, let's look at it charitably and uncharitably. If you want to tell the story charitably, Roosevelt had a working majority in Congress for at least the first six years of his presidency--not on every issue; he got beaten on some issues, but he had much more effective a Democratic majority in both houses than Obama did. You could make the case that Obama had close to a majority in his first few years, but there were conservative Democrats like Max Baucus who were very difficult to win over. So he didn't have a strong majority in Congress. Secondly, the crisis had just started when Obama took office, whereas the crisis had been going on for three and a half years when Roosevelt took office, and so people were more ready for drastic remedies in March 1933 when Roosevelt became President than in January 2009 when Obama became President. So, if you wanted to defend Obama, those are two pretty good rationales.
On the other hand, Roosevelt was terrific at really motivating public opinion and moving public opinion in a way that Obama has not been. And secondly, he was much more aggressive in making Wall Street the enemy. In his 1936 acceptance speech, when he was renominated in Madison Square Gardens in New York, he said of Wall Street: 'They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.' Obama has been much more equivocal about whether Wall Street was the cause of this crash. Even Paul Volcker, hardly a radical, was marginalised because Volcker was in favour of more regulation than Tim Geithner or Larry Summers or the President himself wanted. Although whenever they need him, they do haul Volcker out as a totem or a symbol of someone who is willing to be tough on Wall Street. So, that's the political story.
I think temperamentally--and I wrote about this in both of my Obama books--Obama is someone whose entire life has been defined by his wish to bridge differences, and his whole sensibility going in was that he was going to change the tone of Washington; he was going to bridge the differences between Republicans and Democrats. The problem with that was that it became clear very early that the Republicans were not willing to play, and it took him far, far longer to realise that they were out to destroy him. There were no bridges to be built except on Republican terms. If you look at his view on the deficit, he's moved closer and closer to a Republican position on the need to cut the deficit in a deep recession. If you look at the Health Bill, he split all kinds of differences--the details of which are just coming out--with the Republicans and with the insurance industry. So it was a moment that called for a drastic break...
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