Peter Beinart: Obama Just Fired His Air Traffic Controllers
[Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.]
Is it just me, or does Barack Obama seem different since health care passed? He’s sticking it to the Senate by appointing 15 nominees while it is on recess; he’s sticking it to Benjamin Netanyahu by not backing down from demands that Israel halt building in East Jerusalem; he’s sticking it to the banks by aggressively pushing financial reform. It’s hard to believe that only two months ago, Paul Krugman announced that “I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.”...
Let me explain. A president doesn’t define his political era merely by getting elected. Dwight Eisenhower got elected twice, but never challenged the welfare state built by the Franklin Roosevelt. Bill Clinton got elected twice too, but never successfully challenged the dismantling of the welfare state undertaken by Ronald Reagan. A president defines his age by changing the rules of the game, altering the conventional wisdom about what is politically possible....
The Age of Reagan only really began seven months into his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers. By law, the controllers weren’t allowed to strike. But they had legitimate complaints, and most observers assumed that the Reagan administration would negotiate a compromise, which was what most former presidents had done in high-profile labor disputes. A delegation of former Republican secretaries of Labor even offered to mediate. Reagan, however, didn’t want to help labor and management reach a deal. He wanted to send a message that 45 years after FDR’s Wagner Act, which had made labor unions a powerful force in American life, labor was about to be crushed. He gave the striking air traffic controllers 48 hours to return to work; then fired the lot of them. America’s air traffic control system didn’t fully recover until 1988, but Reagan was suddenly feared, not only at home, but abroad. The rules of the political game had changed. When House Speaker Tip O’Neill visited Moscow a year later, the thing that Soviet leaders wanted to talk about most was Reagan’s handling of the air traffic controllers’ strike....
With the passage of health care, Obama has now had his air-traffic controllers’ moment. When Scott Brown won in Massachusetts, it convinced many political observers that the old rules still applied. The country was still basically suspicious of big government, and thus, the only way for a Democratic president to survive was to do what Bill Clinton did after 1994: content himself with incremental change, accept the political parameters that Reagan established, be a Democratic Eisenhower....
Read entire article at The Daily Beast
Is it just me, or does Barack Obama seem different since health care passed? He’s sticking it to the Senate by appointing 15 nominees while it is on recess; he’s sticking it to Benjamin Netanyahu by not backing down from demands that Israel halt building in East Jerusalem; he’s sticking it to the banks by aggressively pushing financial reform. It’s hard to believe that only two months ago, Paul Krugman announced that “I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.”...
Let me explain. A president doesn’t define his political era merely by getting elected. Dwight Eisenhower got elected twice, but never challenged the welfare state built by the Franklin Roosevelt. Bill Clinton got elected twice too, but never successfully challenged the dismantling of the welfare state undertaken by Ronald Reagan. A president defines his age by changing the rules of the game, altering the conventional wisdom about what is politically possible....
The Age of Reagan only really began seven months into his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers. By law, the controllers weren’t allowed to strike. But they had legitimate complaints, and most observers assumed that the Reagan administration would negotiate a compromise, which was what most former presidents had done in high-profile labor disputes. A delegation of former Republican secretaries of Labor even offered to mediate. Reagan, however, didn’t want to help labor and management reach a deal. He wanted to send a message that 45 years after FDR’s Wagner Act, which had made labor unions a powerful force in American life, labor was about to be crushed. He gave the striking air traffic controllers 48 hours to return to work; then fired the lot of them. America’s air traffic control system didn’t fully recover until 1988, but Reagan was suddenly feared, not only at home, but abroad. The rules of the political game had changed. When House Speaker Tip O’Neill visited Moscow a year later, the thing that Soviet leaders wanted to talk about most was Reagan’s handling of the air traffic controllers’ strike....
With the passage of health care, Obama has now had his air-traffic controllers’ moment. When Scott Brown won in Massachusetts, it convinced many political observers that the old rules still applied. The country was still basically suspicious of big government, and thus, the only way for a Democratic president to survive was to do what Bill Clinton did after 1994: content himself with incremental change, accept the political parameters that Reagan established, be a Democratic Eisenhower....