United States: Barack Obama will go to Washington in search of the best liberal talent that will be able to articulate and put in place a plan of action.
BY the time this column appears in print, the United States elections will be over. By all indications at this present time (in late October), Senator Barack Obama will win. Polls across the country indicate that he has opened up an unbridgeable lead in the popular vote and that the swing States (such as Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, Ohio and Florida) have moved towards the Democratic Party. Even comfortable red States, such as Colorado and Missouri, might defect to the Democrats. Early voting in the various States shows that the enthusiasm for Obama has not relented, and it has begun to translate into ballots.
Senator John McCain, meanwhile, has unleashed the dogs of hogwash, trying to tie Obama to Bill Ayers, a 1960s era radical who is now a college professor. The Republican Party has tried to appeal to the worst instincts of sections of the electorate, making barely veiled suggestions about Obamas middle name (which is Hussein) and the colour of his skin. None of this seems to stick.
Nevertheless, there is concern that what voters tell the pollsters might not get reflected in the polling booth: they might feel illiberal being racist on the phone but have no such compunction in the privacy of voting (this is called the Bradley Effect, named after California politician Tom Bradley, who lost the gubernatorial election despite a lead in the polls; but that was in 1982, a generation ago). Warnings have already been sounded from the swing States about inaccurate voting machines and voter suppression. The Republicans know they can win best when fewer people vote. But none of this seems to dampen the rising wave that looks to carry Obama to the White House.
Speculation has already begun about what will follow on November 5, the day after the elections. What kind of team will Obama assemble for his Cabinet, for the important jobs that will begin to reconstruct a very damaged U.S.? Foreign policy is in the doldrums, as the Bush Doctrine has failed and in its failure has trapped a tattered U.S. military in two ongoing war zones (Iraq and Afghanistan) and on the almost 800 U.S. bases and facilities across the planet. Domestic policy was wrecked by decades of active abatement of social welfare.
The implosion of the banking sector, of the housing market and of Wall Street is evidence of the final curtain on what George Bush Sr. once called voodoo economics (in 1980). The cheerleader for the imprudent, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, told Congress in late October that he was in a state of shocked disbelief over the meltdown and that there was a flaw in the model of laissez faire economic theory. The Obama administration will inherit this broken house, which carries an enormous national debt (now $10 trillion). Obamas inheritance is, therefore, unenviable.
Nonetheless, the next President will have to spend the months between November 5 and January 20 preparing to govern despite these major structural problems. He will need to assemble a team that will have to create new intellectual horizons to rebuild domestic infrastructure, global monetary policy and U.S. foreign policy.
The liberal establishment, to whom Obama will turn, is not bereft of talent, but it is also not brimming with the kind of bold thinking that would allow Obama to construct a liberal consensus for a generation a vision so bright that it could shrug off the pettiness of Republican challenges and forge a new direction for the U.S. in the world. Obama has mobilised large numbers of people to taste the feeling of hope, but there is no organised movement to hold his feet to the fire, to ensure that he is not sucked into the morass of the liberal establishment. It will take an act of finesse for him to be able to hold those hopes up, keep the liberal establishment at bay and advance an agenda worthy of his rhetoric.
As Obama advances, the Clinton veterans stand ready. They have an intellectual vision to proffer, one honed from the 1980s by their think tank, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Frustrated with what they considered the old way of both liberalism and social democrats, the DLC walked down the same third way path as Tony Blairs New Labour and Gerhard Schroeders refashioned Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). It borrowed liberally from the Right, taking from them their disdain for social welfare and their enthusiasm for more policing, their general zeal for free trade and their delight in terms such as opportunity, responsibility and community.
Clinton, who had been a President of the DLC, drew from its ranks to fill the most important seats in his first Cabinet (1993-1996). The two people chosen to take care of the dollar came from the DLC (Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and Budget Director Leon Panetta), while the third (Robert Rubin, National Economic Council) was the head of Goldman Sachs.
Clintons foreign policy team reeked of militarism (Les Aspin, head of the Defence Department, came to Congress as a peace candidate in 1970 but spent his years before the Clinton administration fighting the Democrats to get behind the first Gulf War). Confidence that Clinton might turn over a peace dividend (a transfer of budgetary priorities from the Cold War military to social spending) evaporated as Aspin worked to expand the military.
In 1988, Jesse Jackson ran a spirited campaign against the DLC, or what he called the Democrats for a Leisure Class. His challenge failed to carry the day then, and it did not have an adequate standard-bearer in 1992 to take on Clinton (Paul Tsongas, who inherited some of Jacksons team, was unwilling to joust with the class lance).
Nonetheless, Clinton could not totally dismiss the liberal wing, and he turned to some of its members to take their seats in his Cabinet. Two of them, Carol Browner (Environmental Protection Agency) and Robert Reich (Labour), were personal friends of Vice-President Al Gore and Clinton respectively. They came with the emotional ties that would allow their own commitments to be smothered.
Others, who came with fewer strings, faced the wrath of the Republicans at their confirmation and were hastily dropped. In short order Clinton turned his back on Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood and Lani Guinier, and later on Joycelyn Elders, as the Right went after these capable women. Clinton did not fight for them. He had made his point, it seemed, that he could nominate liberal women. When they were attacked, he did not expend any of his political capital to stand by them, preferring to see them off and to bring in Janet Reno, considered soft on police brutality in Florida. Progressives came within sight of the Oval Office, but as the Right demanded they be removed, Clinton willingly swept them away.
There is no organised movement to give shape to Obamas presidency. He will go to Washington in search of the best liberal talent that will be able to articulate and put in place a plan of action. Some of the people who will join him will be from the Clinton-DLC camp, people such as Warren Christopher, Wesley Clark and Hillary Clinton. Others will move from his advising groups into important administration posts (such as Michael Froman, who worked for Rubin in the Treasury Department and now at Goldman Sachs).
These are the warhorses of Washington, people who have been in administrations and on committees, in law offices and in lobbying firms, knowledgeable to the point of cynical and tin-eared to new ideas. But Obama will not be able to staff his administration without a sprinkling of these grey-heads, people who will give confidence to the establishment that things are pretty much business-as-usual in the chambers of government.
Around Washington, there are whispers of new faces, people who would shake things up because they come there with interesting new ideas, even as these are along the axis of liberalism. Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the liberal weekly The Nation, believes that James K. Galbraith would make an excellent Treasury Secretary. According to her, Galbraith has the wisdom to guide us through the remaking of our global financial architecture. Galbraith, whose father was the eminent economist and Ambassador to India, recently published a prescient book entitled The Predator Class, in which he makes the case that the U.S. system is one in which the rich have come to feast on decaying systems built for the middle class.
Toby Chaudhuri of the Centre for American Progress wonders if Obama will go to the liberal Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman for his pick. The consensus among those on the liberal-Left is that Obama must go elsewhere than Wall Street to staff his Treasury team, particularly if he is serious about a federal jobs programme. No one who has worked in the world of Wall Street would allow for anything as radical as extensive regulation and investment in infrastructure.
Many of the liberal intellectuals I spoke with felt that in the interest of continuity Obama should retain Robert Gates as the Defence Secretary. As you move further left on the spectrum of opinion, however, this view is shunned. Katrina vanden Heuvel picks Lawrence Korb for the job. Korb was an Assistant Secretary of Defence in the Reagan administration, who has since moved into the liberal Centre for American Progress and has authored an important report against the Bush Doctrine.
Darrell West of the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank, gives his nod toward Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Reed, an army veteran, is one of a handful of elected officials who voted against the war on Iraq. Once the war was on, Reed travelled to the country frequently, unabated in his measured criticism of the effort. In 2007, he accompanied Obama in his only visit to the country. Raised in a working-class family, Reed has a strongly liberal record in his long years in the Senate. Once courted for the vice-presidency, Reed might well be a reasonable tribune in the Cabinet for what is often called the middle class.
Most of those who offered a view on Obamas potential Cabinet concentrated on the arenas of foreign policy and economic policy, omitting the tried and true liberal field of social welfare and immigration. Chaudhuri and Katrina vanden Heuvel are exceptions.
Katrina vanden Heuvel suggested Marian Wright Edelman for Health and Human Services, a department from which her husband, Peter Edelman, resigned in disgust over Clintons destruction of the social welfare system. Chaudhuri suggested Hillary Clinton, but it is doubtful that she would take such a demotion (it is my view that she will either carve out a major role in the Senate, perhaps as Senate Majority leader, or else take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court).
With the massive deficit, it is also unlikely that Obama would be able to craft a bold domestic policy. He will have to deal with the mortgage-foreclosure crisis before he does anything else. Incidentally, Jack Reed is one of the few Senators who have consistently challenged the U.S. Congress to revive its commitment to affordable housing. The sub-prime fiasco is a result of the privatisation of housing policy as the government abruptly divested itself of providing low-interest loans to the working poor towards ownership of homes.
Even if Obama nominates these resurgent liberals (the title of one of Robert Reichs books from the 1980s), and even if they are confirmed by Congress, they would still have to move an agenda without an organised movement to keep them on track. Pressure from the Right, however discredited, will remain.
Obama, unlike Clinton, will not come to Washington as the representative of the third way nor will he come while the Right remains ascendant. At a time when the nostrums of the Right have found a tin ear among the public, Obama is given the opportunity to revive the progressive path so long left barren.
In his best-seller, The Audacity of Hope, Obama observed that the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction, one that does not have a coherent agenda. Instead, Obama promised a project of national renewal that allows Americans to see their self-interest as inextricably linked to the interests of others.
If President Obama is able to put such a project in motion it will certainly be an advance over the kind of radical selfishness promoted by the Republican orthodoxy.
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