Eugene Goodheart: Obama On and Off Base
[Eugene Goodheart is Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities, Emeritus at Brandeis University. He is the author of many books of literary and cultural criticism as well as a memoir, Confessions of a Secular Jew.]
My object is to defend Barack Obama against attacks on him by what has been his liberal constituency. Again and again he is accused of timidity and excessive caution for not fighting for their agenda. The assumption is that his agenda and theirs coincide, and that he lacks the courage and force to fight for its enactment. Could it be that he simply differs from his critics about policy and strategy and that it may even take a kind of courage to resist the pressure of his liberal base? It is the habit of his critics to invoke liberal heroes of the past—Lincoln, FDR, and even LBJ as models for what a bold presidency can achieve—and contrast their performances with the timorousness of Obama’s. (“Be afraid, be very afraid,” Paul Krugman mocks Obama when he takes a tack that does not conform to what Krugman believes should and can be done.) Anyone who has read the history of the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations has to be struck with the unfairness of the contrast. Their presidencies proceeded through fits and starts, hesitations and uncertainties. Rarely did they avoid making compromises to achieve results. Either unread in that history or willfully ignoring it, Obama’s critics express dismay and disbelief at every failure, every inconsistency, apparent and real, in his performance....
It is not hard to imagine what Paul Krugman’s columns or those of Frank Rich, both of the New York Times, would have been like when Lincoln and Roosevelt grossly violated the Constitution they had sworn to uphold. As contemporaries of Lincoln, Krugman and Rich probably would have joined the abolitionists in their contempt for his cautious, though as it turned out politically necessary, approach to ending slavery and for his incompetence in handling his generals, without acknowledging the decided advantage the South had in the quality of its military leadership. Lincoln, we should keep in mind, has been a model for Obama. He followed Lincoln in recruiting a team of rivals for his cabinet. His moderation, often berated by liberals, is very much in the spirit of Lincoln as represented in biographies and in Gore Vidal’s historically accurate novel Lincoln. When Senator Charles Sumner threatened to endorse an “out-and-out radical Republican like Mr. [Salmon] Chase,” the disloyal secretary of the treasury, to compete with Lincoln, who was seeking a second term, Lincoln responded, “You will split this two-headed party that I have done my best for years to hold together. The moderates—of which I am one—will desert you, while the peace-at-any-price folks will vote you down, and McClellan in.” When Lincoln was pressed to punish the rebels and officials who benefited from wartime corruption, he said (as Obama seems to be saying in response to pressure that he prosecute officials from the Bush administration for their misdeeds), “In politics, the statute of limitations must be short.”
It is FDR who is most frequently invoked as a standard in measuring Obama’s inadequacy in a time of economic crisis. Where FDR was the bold partisan of liberal programs, Obama is seen as the futile seeker of bipartisan compromise. William Leuchtenberg’s authoritative and sympathetic account of the Roosevelt presidency (Franklin D. Roosevelt: FDR and The New Deal 1932-1940) tells a different story. “By 1934, the pattern of the early New Deal was beginning to emerge. Its distinguishing characteristic was the attempt to redress the imbalances of the old order by creating a new equilibrium in which a variety of groups and classes would be represented. The New Dealers sought to effect a truce similar to that of wartime, when class and sectional animosities were sacrificed to the demands of national unity”—so much for holding up FDR as a model for partisanship against Obama’s effort to achieve bipartisanship. Obama, it is charged, has failed to take advantage of a supermajority of Democratic senators in advancing his agenda. Whereas Obama’s supermajority was the bare minimum of sixty (and is now no longer super at fifty-nine), including conservative Democrats, Roosevelt’s in 1934 was sixty-nine. In the House, Roosevelt had 322 Democrats and 10 Progressives and Farmer-Laborites against 103 Republicans. “Roosevelt was riding a tiger, for the new Congress threatened to push him in a direction far more radical than any he had originally contemplated.” FDR had a mass movement pressing him from the left and big majorities in Congress willing to enact big federal programs. Only in 1937 did the liberal wave begin to ebb. Obama has been riding a tiger going in the opposite conservative direction. The relationship between Obama and his Congress is the reverse of that of Roosevelt and his Congress, to Obama’s disadvantage. The Senate, decisive in these matters, has resisted every effort Obama has made in a liberal direction....
Read entire article at Dissent
My object is to defend Barack Obama against attacks on him by what has been his liberal constituency. Again and again he is accused of timidity and excessive caution for not fighting for their agenda. The assumption is that his agenda and theirs coincide, and that he lacks the courage and force to fight for its enactment. Could it be that he simply differs from his critics about policy and strategy and that it may even take a kind of courage to resist the pressure of his liberal base? It is the habit of his critics to invoke liberal heroes of the past—Lincoln, FDR, and even LBJ as models for what a bold presidency can achieve—and contrast their performances with the timorousness of Obama’s. (“Be afraid, be very afraid,” Paul Krugman mocks Obama when he takes a tack that does not conform to what Krugman believes should and can be done.) Anyone who has read the history of the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations has to be struck with the unfairness of the contrast. Their presidencies proceeded through fits and starts, hesitations and uncertainties. Rarely did they avoid making compromises to achieve results. Either unread in that history or willfully ignoring it, Obama’s critics express dismay and disbelief at every failure, every inconsistency, apparent and real, in his performance....
It is not hard to imagine what Paul Krugman’s columns or those of Frank Rich, both of the New York Times, would have been like when Lincoln and Roosevelt grossly violated the Constitution they had sworn to uphold. As contemporaries of Lincoln, Krugman and Rich probably would have joined the abolitionists in their contempt for his cautious, though as it turned out politically necessary, approach to ending slavery and for his incompetence in handling his generals, without acknowledging the decided advantage the South had in the quality of its military leadership. Lincoln, we should keep in mind, has been a model for Obama. He followed Lincoln in recruiting a team of rivals for his cabinet. His moderation, often berated by liberals, is very much in the spirit of Lincoln as represented in biographies and in Gore Vidal’s historically accurate novel Lincoln. When Senator Charles Sumner threatened to endorse an “out-and-out radical Republican like Mr. [Salmon] Chase,” the disloyal secretary of the treasury, to compete with Lincoln, who was seeking a second term, Lincoln responded, “You will split this two-headed party that I have done my best for years to hold together. The moderates—of which I am one—will desert you, while the peace-at-any-price folks will vote you down, and McClellan in.” When Lincoln was pressed to punish the rebels and officials who benefited from wartime corruption, he said (as Obama seems to be saying in response to pressure that he prosecute officials from the Bush administration for their misdeeds), “In politics, the statute of limitations must be short.”
It is FDR who is most frequently invoked as a standard in measuring Obama’s inadequacy in a time of economic crisis. Where FDR was the bold partisan of liberal programs, Obama is seen as the futile seeker of bipartisan compromise. William Leuchtenberg’s authoritative and sympathetic account of the Roosevelt presidency (Franklin D. Roosevelt: FDR and The New Deal 1932-1940) tells a different story. “By 1934, the pattern of the early New Deal was beginning to emerge. Its distinguishing characteristic was the attempt to redress the imbalances of the old order by creating a new equilibrium in which a variety of groups and classes would be represented. The New Dealers sought to effect a truce similar to that of wartime, when class and sectional animosities were sacrificed to the demands of national unity”—so much for holding up FDR as a model for partisanship against Obama’s effort to achieve bipartisanship. Obama, it is charged, has failed to take advantage of a supermajority of Democratic senators in advancing his agenda. Whereas Obama’s supermajority was the bare minimum of sixty (and is now no longer super at fifty-nine), including conservative Democrats, Roosevelt’s in 1934 was sixty-nine. In the House, Roosevelt had 322 Democrats and 10 Progressives and Farmer-Laborites against 103 Republicans. “Roosevelt was riding a tiger, for the new Congress threatened to push him in a direction far more radical than any he had originally contemplated.” FDR had a mass movement pressing him from the left and big majorities in Congress willing to enact big federal programs. Only in 1937 did the liberal wave begin to ebb. Obama has been riding a tiger going in the opposite conservative direction. The relationship between Obama and his Congress is the reverse of that of Roosevelt and his Congress, to Obama’s disadvantage. The Senate, decisive in these matters, has resisted every effort Obama has made in a liberal direction....