Gabriel Winant: Obama Needs to Learn from Wilson and Truman to Get Things Done
[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.]
...Woodrow Wilson was a generally pretty detestable guy (this is one thing Glenn Beck gets sort of right), but there’s something Obama could learn from him. At the end of World War I, Wilson expended massive, futile effort trying to convince Americans that the League of Nations was the world’s only hope for peace and stability. The Republicans who opposed Wilson over the League succeeded, in large part, because a weary country wasn't willing to accept an intellectual president's high-flown scheme to prevent the recent disaster from repeating. It's hard to miss the parallel.
When the feeble League failed and the crisis of the 1930s developed into World War II, it offered a kind of perverse validation to Wilson's effort. By forcefully campaigning for the United States to take a central role in global stability, he had elucidated the choices facing the American people. After World War II, the argument of 1919 reoccurred, but it was won by Wilson's successor, Harry Truman. The reoccurrence of global war had validated Wilson's argument, making it much easier for Truman to sell Americans on the Marshall Plan, NATO, the United Nations and, ultimately, the Cold War itself. By being ambitious and clear, Wilson lost, but his side won out in the long term for the same reason.
The goals of Wilson and Truman weren't particularly noble, but that's not the point. This is: the process of attaining difficult political goals sometimes involves a bitter and futile-seeming first act. It's not that political martyrdom somehow earns the public's trust. It's that the sooner we start talking honestly, the better. This was part of Obama's basic promise as a candidate. Now's the time to live up to it.
So when Obama said, last night, that he's open to all ideas and looks forward to working with both parties, he's not only lying -- the GOP has nothing of substance to offer here -- he's not even achieving a valuable strategic gain by appearing bipartisan and lofty. If progressives are going to win on climate change, then what the public needs to hear is this: we know roughly what kind of action is required to prevent climate disaster. We can choose to do it or not. But in the likely event that we choose not to, we'll be having this argument again pretty soon, after things have gotten worse....
Read entire article at Salon.com
...Woodrow Wilson was a generally pretty detestable guy (this is one thing Glenn Beck gets sort of right), but there’s something Obama could learn from him. At the end of World War I, Wilson expended massive, futile effort trying to convince Americans that the League of Nations was the world’s only hope for peace and stability. The Republicans who opposed Wilson over the League succeeded, in large part, because a weary country wasn't willing to accept an intellectual president's high-flown scheme to prevent the recent disaster from repeating. It's hard to miss the parallel.
When the feeble League failed and the crisis of the 1930s developed into World War II, it offered a kind of perverse validation to Wilson's effort. By forcefully campaigning for the United States to take a central role in global stability, he had elucidated the choices facing the American people. After World War II, the argument of 1919 reoccurred, but it was won by Wilson's successor, Harry Truman. The reoccurrence of global war had validated Wilson's argument, making it much easier for Truman to sell Americans on the Marshall Plan, NATO, the United Nations and, ultimately, the Cold War itself. By being ambitious and clear, Wilson lost, but his side won out in the long term for the same reason.
The goals of Wilson and Truman weren't particularly noble, but that's not the point. This is: the process of attaining difficult political goals sometimes involves a bitter and futile-seeming first act. It's not that political martyrdom somehow earns the public's trust. It's that the sooner we start talking honestly, the better. This was part of Obama's basic promise as a candidate. Now's the time to live up to it.
So when Obama said, last night, that he's open to all ideas and looks forward to working with both parties, he's not only lying -- the GOP has nothing of substance to offer here -- he's not even achieving a valuable strategic gain by appearing bipartisan and lofty. If progressives are going to win on climate change, then what the public needs to hear is this: we know roughly what kind of action is required to prevent climate disaster. We can choose to do it or not. But in the likely event that we choose not to, we'll be having this argument again pretty soon, after things have gotten worse....