You can pick almost any American liberal blog at random for signs that Barack Obama is already disappointing “the base” – that is, if the netroots actually constitute or represent his base. I’m still a tad surprised by this phenomenon – I guess in the partisan heat of the election campaign, no one took Obama’s “post-partisan” rhetoric seriously. It was pretty obvious, I thought, that he meant what he said. It may also be that large swathes of the American liberal blogosphere are stuck in permanent negativity mode. After all, the thing didn’t exist in any meaningful form last time there was a Democratic President, and it’s always harder to write a political blog when your mob is in power.
But this probably predictable development is not the most interesting aspect of the interactivity Obama’s campaign encouraged. I’ve previously commented that Obama has a potentially powerful political weapon to wield with the ability to mobilise supporters he’s identified online from the primaries onwards. But there’s a flip side to this sort of openness, and Henry Farrell has a cracker of a post at Crooked Timber on it. Farrell riffs off the huge volume of comments left on Change.Gov:
This goes to the heart of the contradictions that the Obama people successfully managed to straddle during the campaign, but are (I think) going to have increasing difficulty in dealing with going forward. The Obama people combined very tight top-down message control and campaign coordination with a fair degree of openness at the bottom to independent initiatives by volunteers. As long as everyone agreed on the same underlying goal (beating the Republicans), this worked. But as that overwhelming imperative recedes, people are going to start pursuing their own objectives – and the ‘open’ architecture that the Obama people have constructed provides them with plenty of opportunities to do this.
There are two other points here I think are salient. First, the absence (at least until the mid terms get closer) of a clear partisan event was always going to lead to a more diffuse focus for political activity – particularly given the candidate rather than issue centred nature of the Democratic Party and the lack of formal party structures and discipline. There’s also the “reach across the aisle” phenomenon that’s always going to be in play for a party that’s occupying the left side of the spectrum in a country like America. As John F. Kennedy said after his election, there are things Democrats have to do that Republicans never have to.
In this context, the best favour the Republicans could do Obama and the netroots is to act like partisan naysayers. Then there’d be the space for a renewal of the partisan unity on the Democratic side some in the liberal ranks seem to be wistful about.
Secondly, it’s worth taking into account the fact that both open government initiatives such as Change.Gov and the Obama net-works encompass a much wider population than simply died in the wool partisans. There are varying levels of commitment, partisanship and a range of different issues which people are invested in. Obama and his team will know this, and knowing this means that ignoring or annoying the “netroots” is a risk worth taking under certain circumstances. The power of the Presidential office and all its symbolism was very cunningly utilised by the Obama campaign, and that power increases exponentially now that he will actually be occupying it.
Obama like every president since the 19th century – will be driven by the imperatives of empire. If he tries to wind these back the “military industrial” complex will attempt to destroy him.
If he wants to make a real difference – to “change” things – he has to go after the torturers, the “defence” contractors and the corrupt elements in the military and the government itself.
No way Jose.
Huggy
I’m still a tad surprised by this phenomenon
.
Really? But it’s in the nature of the parties of the left. Have you seen The Chaser’s Book on Kevvie? There’s a cartoon featuring the ‘true believer’ leading up to election day. Every day she’s anguished and prays: Don’t blow it, don’t blow it. Please don’t blow it!. Then Kevvie’s elected and she’s ecstatic! And from Day #1 of the Rudd govt she’s anxious again: Don’t blow it, don’t blow it.
.
By George I think they’ve blown it!
.
I guess in the partisan heat of the election campaign, no one took Obama’s “post-partisan” rhetoric seriously.
.
Well Clinton tried the same thing – triangulation. Thing is he’s still widely popular and he was a total moral vacuum!
.
It was pretty obvious, I thought, that he meant what he said.
.
I hoped he meant what he said. There’s this feature in American politics where the shrill and irrational voices seem to take predominant place. On the left the most extreme example of what people mean when they speak of ‘liberals’ with contempt was the Sandra Bernhardt rape riff viz Palin – Yuk! On the Right well you’re spoilt for choice. Michael Savage is my favourite. Only in America could such a dumb-arse weasel make a million writing books.
.
Obama seems to want to cut thru the crap. What he’s aspiring to do, provided he managed to avoid having the economy karking it, is wean the States off oil. That will be hard. And then there’s the health care thing and the reinvigoration of science.
.
It’ll help him heaps if he has broad support. 5 days and no mo’ Dubya! Yee-ha!
Adrien, I think a lot of us were ‘true believers’ only in the sense that we were absolutely willing K07 to win. The “don’t f*ck it up” meme referred to the election, not what he would do in government. I think most people in Australia on the left are more than sufficiently well aware of the ALP’s record in government not to have expected some sort of leftie utopia to be inaugurated on 25 November 2007. And it was pretty obvious K07 was serious with the socially and economically conservative bit. By contrast, and maybe it’s the primary contest with Hillary (who was arguably more liberal than Obama) and Edwards (who was definitely more liberal than Obama), the American bloggers and commenters – or a large number of them anyway – really seemed to think that Obama would usher in the millennium. Perhaps it also has to do with the different symbolic power of the Presidency in their system and the role of soaring rhetoric in American politics, compared to boredom central here in Oz.
Hi,
I am Stella Fernandis and I am new here. I was reading the above article and I think it is in the nature of parties. I think it is a useful stuff. Thank you so much for sharing.
Stella
Real Estate
Or, in other words, “So long suckers!”. There’s something to disappoint everyone in every presidency, and the queue for refunds opens on the 20th. Business will be brisk because it always is. The nutroots were always going to be disappointed because their goals are, well, mostly carpet-gnawing insane. Whatever else Obie is, he isn’t insane.
Now Congress, on the other hand…
Huggy: I take it this is more of your cunning satire. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
On the other hand… (from Patriot Post)
MarkL
Canberra
Well it was a joke Mark.
.
Still there’s been enough Rudd sells out posts here to say that the joke’s got a serious side.
.
Soaring Rhetoric or Boredom Central? Pretty much sums up the difference. I think the latter works better. We don’t expect politicians to be saints. We know they’re scumbags. We just wanna know whether they can hack the job. Still it’s probably related to the reason why America is The Great Culture and we’re a bit how ya goin’. To be grand requires a priori delusions of grandeur.
.
If you wanna Lefty Utopia come on down to the People’s Republic of Moreland.
And via Club Troppo Martin Wolf says Obama’s plan ain’t gona cut it – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d7ff9856-e191-11dd-afa0-0000779fd2ac.html
.
I suspect it ain’t the whole plan. Still Shit Happens. Recessions are inevitable under capitalism but nevertheless a huge improvement on famines and plagues of locusts. Shit happens is the first law of the universe as created by The Great Practical Joker in the Sky.
Worth a quiet chuckle, though.
MarkL
Canberra
I’m not jumping up and down with glee till I see what Obama does in the White House. Rudd has made me cautious and suspicious.
Though I’m very, very glad Obama’s there.
Oh, hell, I am jumping up and down. Next Wednesday The American Imbecile puts on his cowboy hat,moves to the Deep South and goes fishing, and the world becomes a better place, whatever doubts one might have about whether Obama can live up to his promise.
Craig Mc @ 5 nothing really, just trying to point out that the monster that is US Imperialism will not go away with the change of President
Perhaps you believe it is some boys own utopia where the Leader gets to change its nature?
I and other critical lefties are being painted as negative. Maybe. But I prefer to call myself a realist. It is not the person but the position which will define Obama’s actions.
That means he will continue the war on terror because it is in the interests of the US economic elite. Withdrawing from Iraq is sensible recognition of the US defeat there; increasing troops in Afghanistan is an attempt to overcome the Iraq syndrome, re-establish US hegemony in the region and tell China the US is the military power in the world and will use that power to retain economic dominance.
Domestically I can’t see how, given the US crisis of profitability, Obama can do anything to stop or reverse Bush’s war on workers. After 8 years US worekrs are worse off. Rel wage cuts plus loss of asset value – home prices have fallen 20 per cent int eh last year, and pensions are plummeting on the back of the stock market collapse.
It seems to me Obama will be driven by the logic of the capital accumulation process to continue Bush’s attacks on workers. That may mean some sort of compromise on health care which will result in universal coverage, and further cuts to wages and conditions. Plus accepting job losses. Now Obama may try to ameliorate the impacts and so is not just a Bush clone but he accepts the fundamental logic of capitalism and US imperialism and will act accordingly.
If that is being negative then so be it. But the HowRudd Government here in Australia I think shows there is some truth in what I am saying – these people are about managing capitalism and so accept its logic and manage the system accordingly. If that means attacking workers to restore profit rates, they’ll do it. If it means killing innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ll do it. If it means letting Israel slaughter the Palestinians to destroy Hamas and impose a quisling Palestinian Authority ‘Government’ on Gaza, they’ll do it.
I am doing a discussion on this issue next week in Canberra, and it will partly reflect my blog article All Change at Obama Station (http:enpassant.com.au). But that will need updating because after 9 days we will at least have heard something more concrete from Obama on Palestine, and how to deal with the economic crisis. On the latter, I fail to see how Obama’s stimulus package will address the crisis of profitability in US capitalism. Let’s see.
Oops. In the previous post I say “That may mean some sort of compromise on health care which will result in universal coverage …”
I left out a not. It should say … which will not result in universal health coverage.
King Barry’s been tracking right now so far and so fast I’m almost getting whiplash.
However the way he rose up through the power of many small net-enabled donations remains a most incredible profound and exciting change and hope for a free future.
Open source politics!
Also we anarchists are organizing a convergence on Jan 20 and hope for a million or so GIBLETS, a million or so Muslims, a million or so Ron Paul revolutionaries and as many others as we can help assemble in order to demonstrate grass-roots people power over monarchism.
See ‘ Infoshop ‘ for more details.
Long live the free internet
Passy/John Passant; well put. US imperialism will not change much – no matter what Obama wants. His enthusiatic acceptance of the US invasion of Afghanistan is proof also that he does not want to change things in any real way. More worrying is the apointment of mad dog Hillary. She would be very pleasured by the nuking of Iran.
Huggy
Ah, yes, Hillary. She always has been a bit of a worry. One can only hope Obama won’t let her nuke Iran.
Well that gives us something to look forward to then.
Hours of lefty angst and endless fact-challenged and rabidly emotive speculative posts on the topic of “will she/won’t she”.
Should be fun.
Adrien, There’s a huge difference between the post-partisanship that Obama espouses and triangulation. Triangulation is about splitting the difference between your opponents and supporters so you get to stay in power at the cost of only getting through half the program.
What Obama advocates is trying to find compromises where the total outcome is a net gain – like the story they tell children about the two sorts of compromise over an orange. In one case its cut in half, in the other people realise that one wants the juice and the other the rind, so they can both get what they want.
Of course it is much, much more difficult to actually deliver the post-partisanship than to talk about it, and it is quite possible it will slip back to triangulation by another name. But Obama is aiming a lot higher, and it is far too early to say he has failed.
How about waiting and seeing what Obama actually does when he becomes President before passing judgement?
How boring is that Spiros, this is the Hintertubes.
Obama will fail because:
a. the logic of capitalism.
b.the Us is broke.
c. the fact of US empire.
d. no matter how much he ran against the DNC he has to accomodate them ’cause otherwise he will get more grief from the democrats in congress than the repubs.
e. he doesn’t understand the problem.
f. China is going to fracture at the seams and go down the gurgler and they won’t mind taking India and the US with them.
g. [insert your own apocolypse]
or
Obama will succeed because;
a. he is genuinly different and the smartest person in the room.
b. he has the will and best wishes of the people of the USA behind him.
there is so much more to write about in the first list. Lets face it it just gets boring clacking away about what those dingbat Palin supporters are spouting on the various Palin 2012 orientated websites.
Personally i’ll be happy if he makes it to the 2012 election in one piece and gets a decent universal health care proposal up and gets out of Iraq. I don’t think that either is certain. I’ll be spending a bit of time over the next week reading a bit about the Clinton and Carter admins to try and find a base for so called reasonable expectations. tho i’ll prob just end up reading a bunch of Doonesbury comics and Hunter S. pieces.
As a simple matter of public service I have to say (and I’m trying to be useful here, and not snarky) that oftentimes the general level on this blog of understanding of US politics and culture is (pretty much inevitably, since the US is a distant foreign country after all, and a lot more foreign and distant than you think) …is –how can I say this nicely?– not so penetrating as you maybe think it is. There’s an enormous amount of stuff that perforce escapes your notice, I don’t have enough hours in the day to even point out a tenth of it.
This isn’t a knock, mind you — my understanding of Australian society is probably at an even more basic level, as it inevitably must be, since I’m a foreigner to you good folks. I merely point it out as a helpful corrective, since anyone would be well advised, when evaluating a foreign society, to always consider the possibility that Everything You Know Is Wrong.
Just have a healthy grain of skepticism about your determinations is all I’m sayin’, since in the time I’ve been visiting this space I’ve witnessed enough misperceptions of US society to make it seem like a terrier was being described as a narwhal. Not that I’m any better: I assume of course that Australia is full of flying chariots and man-eating snails, and I look forward to someday having a chance to speak with your Robot Emperor, who I’m given to understand is a sort of half-amphibious creature who only converses in pantomime. We should get along splendidly, I’m guessing.
Too late, I’m afraid, Japerz. He was voted out of office more than a year ago.
But if you’re quick, you can hustle down to Blair House and meet him before he leaves. You’ll recognise him by his grateful expression and a large tin medallion round his neck.
I was about to say that our most famous silent half-amphibian robot died a few years ago, Katz.
J_P_Z “There’s an enormous amount of stuff that perforce escapes your notice, I don’t have enough hours in the day to even point out a tenth of it.” Totally agree J_P_Z, the US constantly surprises me, i mean who knew that Wall St was just an extension of Vegas with a sideline in ponzi schemes. Seriously tho the same has to be said about the citizens of both our countries, i met so called lefties in North Carolina who had never heard of the Munroe Doctrine or the Marshall Plan, supporters of W in Orange County and Pasadena who couldn’t name a single South or Central American country that the US had ever messed with other than Mexico. I saw a crowd of ‘Patriotic Americans’ erupt in ecstacy when told the Rapture was just six months away, and it would be precipitated by clashes between US and Russian troops in Iraq, this was before the invasion. Exactly what is patriotic about floating up into the sky just as your country is starting WW3/4/5 i just don’t know. So you are right i will never know even a tenth of what is going on in the US, but I certainly understood more about the US and my own country after I had been to the US and Europe.
Japerz, I wouldn’t be surprised if readers of this blog are, in US politics/culture/history knowledge terms, WAY above the domestic US average.
FDB,
but that’s setting the bar very low, is it not?
You and j_p_z may both be correct. The level of knowledge on this blog may well be quite low, by j_p_z’s lofty standards, and simultaneously be WAY above the average of US citizens.
Sad, but not surprising.
Had a look at Obama’s chapter on Indonesia/foreign countries in “Audacity of Hope”. He was young in 1967 when his Mom moved to Jakarta with her new hubby.
People wouldn’t talk of the aftermath of 30 September 1965. Interesting that he talks of a wave of arrests & murders but no mention of PKI or the “30th Sept incident” (botched coup attempt?? abduction then murder of several Generals on the edge of Halim Air Force base). Does he think it wasn’t a PKI coup attempt? Or….
i) it may have been, but the Cold War spectacles must now be put aside [??]
ii) it was, but any such coup attempt didn’t excuse the politically-based, religion-based slaughter that followed [??]
Ambigulous, it’s actually quite doubtful that the PKI had much to do with the September 30 incident, notwithstanding the ‘confessions’ provided at later show trials.
The left-wing officers who staged the coup were pro-Soviet (the USSR was the major arms supplier to Indonesia at this stage) but not necessarily allies or stooges of the PKI. The PKI managed to do nothing to exploit the coup, and stood frozen like a rabbit in the headlights as Suharto’s counter-coup came barrelling down.
Harold Crouch has an excellent forensic analysis of this in ‘The Army and Politics in Indonesia’. He concludes that there was most likely no puppet-master behind 30 September: the coup plotters really were acting on their own behalf.
http://www.equinoxpublishing.com/army/default.htm
I’m now awaiting the Tom Cruise movie of the incident (hey, why not, it’s every bit as dramatic as the Stauffenberg plot!)
dylwah: “Seriously tho the same has to be said about the citizens of both our countries, i met so called lefties in North Carolina who had never heard of the Munroe Doctrine or the Marshall Plan…”
Yes it’s a strange world, isn’t it. I meet Australians online all the time who can’t even spell the Monroe Doctrine.
Next!
Thanks, Paulus.
fair cop MBBAB.
Feral Sparrowhawk #18 – Yeah. The difference is that Clinton was a moral vacuum.
.
Part of the difference has already manifested. Obama is willing to forgo rewarding allies with jobs in favour of appointing people who can do the job. Hence Gates, whose strategy appears to’ve turned the Iraq situation around or at least improved it PR-wise stays on to finish the job. Something unthinkable to Dubya who’d appoint any old clod as long as they used to get drunk and sniff coke together back in the day.
.
I think the actual ideological disputes are de facto gone cold now. Actual people in actual government tend to regard the techniques of laissez-faire and social democracy as tool-boxes more than religious objects of moral affiliation. Part of what Pilger calls the one-ideology state.
.
In my opinion this could be a good thing for the time being. Provided that the citizenry recognize it and stop expecting govt to be the avatars of their private sense of morality. The question then becomes not so much about what candidate (say they) stand for, but what they can do and what specific policies they will pursue.
.
For those committed to ideological affiliation this seems like an amoral disaster. But I think this organization political ideas into opposing camps is an artifact of the 19th century best left aside fr now. A lot of the ideas associate with that period are redundant, some are neglected, some tarnished. They could all use an upgrade and a spring clean. Meantime it might be better if we recognize government as simply a series of jobs needs doing and stop kidding ourselves that those who do it stand for something.
I don’t expect Obama to denounce capitalism (though he might have to go for a kind of New Deal, which was never anti-capitalist anyway as I understood it.Its been years since I read up on FDR.) Nor do I expect him to resile from modern American imperialism (though ploughing all the money spend on the military and devious forms of economic imperialism back into the domestic economy for a few years might be a quick way out of the GFC). However, I’m pretty sure he’s going to exert some sort of positive moral authority that has been missing from international politics and diplomacy for a little less than a decade, pretty quickly, probably in the first 100 (or even 10) days. That in itself can only be for the better.