Tony Abbott, we’re told, is “real”. Able to mix with the battlers (just like Joe Hockey, another product of the North Shore Jesuit Fathers, and just like yet another, Barnaby Joyce, the accountant in the Akubra), he’s “authentic”.
Kevin Rudd is real too. He really is a wonky, nerdy bureaucrat. Perish the thought that we would want to vote for someone who knew something about policy?
But why is it assumed that the persona doesn’t mask something else? Could Tony Abbott be the one spinning a web of symbolism? Wasn’t George W. Bush the candidate we’d rather have a beer with?
[Rhetorical questions in the mode of KRudd.]
Now, I haven’t read Tony’s tome. Be interested to hear from anyone who has. But, Geoffrey Barker has, and he wrote this in the Fin Review today:
SocProf links to a really fascinating piece on Obama’s Nobel Prize [previous LP discussion here] by Don Waisanen at ThickCulture, riffing on Weber’s characterisation of modernity as disenchantment of the world.
It would appear that the Nobel committee at least partially picked Obama for his renewed faith in public discourse to bring about peace and change in the world. Tim Rutten argues in the Los Angeles Times that the award was rightly given to the President for “words” rather than “deeds.” I would further argue the prize most appropriately went to Obama for finding a midway through Weber’s predicament in the above passage. Obama’s rhetoric has sought to enchant the political realm through sublime values that no human being can live without—for example, through the trope of “hope”. At the same time, these are values that are grounded in direct and personal human relations, or in abductive intersubjectivity rather than deductive, non-contextual assertion. There is much to critique in Obama’s administration, but it has at least evidenced an empirical concern for active listening and diplomacy as consequential in politics.
I think that’s a very consequential set of observations. It also makes me wonder if there’s not a continuity between Bush and Obama’s administration (beyond the obvious maintenance of core aspects of the US’ war-imperial machine, which is at the heart of the left objection to his acceptance of the award). Thinking back to the infamous comments from a Bush administration official about remaking reality, it strikes me that both administrations are fundamentally postmodern in their use of rhetorical discourse to reshape facts. That’s about as far as you can get from Weber’s modern government as “administration of things”.
The reasoning for the award, such as it is, can be found here. It’s quite odd. I really don’t think Obama has achieved much at all internationally. Probably it’s for not being George W. Bush.
There’s a paradox here. On one hand, it’s very US-centric – as if the US really were the ‘leader of the free world’. On the other, it’s most unlikely to do the President any domestic good.
But this isn’t about domestic politics, or about what he’s done yet. President Obama has changed how the world feels about America. He’s lifted the planet’s mood. This guy is global Prozac.
Lordy. I think a lot of people in the world would quite like America not to think it was the centre of it. Perhaps, in particular, people in those countries currently occupied by US troops. I thought Crooked Timber was supposed to be some sort of high falutin’ academic blog.
With George W. Bush having a little over a week in office left to go of what has been a very long eight years, it’s timely to turn to the question of the long term implications for the political strength of the right of stances which refuse to engage with reality. In that context, John Quiggin has an interesting post on science and the right. I don’t agree with all he says about the “science wars”, but I think he’s spot on both with his lapidary analysis of the affinities between climate change denialism and right wing politics and in this observation:
The issue is not going to go away, regardless of the short-term success or failure of attempts to reach a global agreement to stabilise the climate. The more clearly the political right is identified with the anti-science side of this debate, the harder it will be to salvage any of its existing institutions.
Kevin Rudd’s rhetoric in 2007 recognised that Australian politics deals particularly badly with long term issues. Our statist political culture means that interest groups of all kinds seek to cut deals for whatever their short term interests require, and the veneer of “ideas” – particularly neo-liberal ones – is particularly thin, hardly sufficing to pave over the cracks of corporate self-interest. Rudd, of course, has hardly fulfilled the hopes he himself aroused. But surely it’s worth wondering what long term costs the right will bear after the time passes when denialism loses any patina of plausibility.
The former Dear Leader has received his reward – something a little more prestigious than the weirdly named awards from obscure right wing think tanks he spent some time trotting over to America last year to collect. John Howard will be awarded the “Medal of Freedom” by another soon to be former leader – George W. Bush. Apparently it’s “America’s highest civilian honour”, but I can’t read the name without thinking of all those wingnuts who have “blog[s] of freedom” or whatever.
Anyway, this might be an opportune time to link to a post from Possum – wherein he has crunched some polling data comparing the first year of Howard’s first term with the first year of Kevin Rudd’s. As is his wont, Possum has provided some nifty graphs. A comparison of their respective performances is worth filing away next time the “one term” stuff pops up in the media.
It’s hard to know whether to blame the pollies or the press gallery more for the sorry standard of political and economic debate in this country. Did that golden age Paul Kelly used to talk about when Paul Keating had everyone trained to cross swords on the arcana of economic levers actually ever exist? Anyway, as non-farm growth fell into negative territory and the Reserve Bank cut rates again (moving them back into an expansionary posture), all eyes were on Julie Bishop’s cat claws, and her non-performance was at the centre of the parliamentary stage.
But perhaps, although he presumably wouldn’t welcome the Bishop meltdown, Malcolm Turnbull isn’t too worried about the level of triviality in the great economic management debate. The budget deficit yardstick went missing yesterday (that was so… last week) and Turnbull might not like to be reminded of his inconsistency and constant contradiction – whatever happened to that “economic narrative” we apparently were awaiting from him? Anyway, Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t think there’s much of a global financial crisis any more – because he hasn’t heard of any “big events”. Presumably events only happen if they’re on the front page of Australian newspapers. He might like to check out the leading indicators of the credit crisis which suggest we’re not exactly back to normality. But so parochial are our political leaders and media that debates about the restructuring of global finance and the dangerous leadership interregnum in the United States are apparently off our radar.
Space policy hasn’t a topic of major interest in American presidential elections since the 1960s. But this year, the planned retirement of the Space Shuttle, and its implications for the Space Coast, meant that both Obama and McCain actually spent some time on the issue. In between restructuring the American economy, negotiating an agreement at Copenhagen, getting the USA out of Iraq, fixing health care, and whatnot, Obama, or his staff, given that the boss might be a teeny bit busy – face some important decisions in a relatively small but highly symbolic policy area – what to do about the US’s human spaceflight program.
The G20 Summit has come and gone, and if today’s coverage in the Australian press is any indication, the most important of the tea leaves to be read is whether George W. Bush snubbed Kevin Rudd over the “Kirribilli leak”. Yep, a non-story that has burbled along for weeks, now diverted into intra-press gallery trading of accusations and a tedious talking point for the opposition – that’s the most important aspect of the events in Washington according to our “quality” media. As far as I can work out, if Bush is indeed upset that his ignorance of the function and nature of the G20 was revealed to the world, that just confirms what a lot of folks have always known about W – that’s he’s at best unengaged, at worst ignorant. But I suppose our fearless journos aren’t allowed to draw that conclusion lest a global diplomatic crisis add to our woes from the global financial crisis!
But, anyway, the lame duck President made his ritual obeisance to the virtues of American leadership and the glories of the free market. One imagines there’s some personal and political imperative there, but the reality of his governance is better disclosed in the fate of the TARP funds which Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was given by Congress – it appears that crony capitalism and socialism for the rich is the name of the game according to American blogs such as naked capitalism, Obsidian Wings, firedoglake and naked capitalism again.
But Bush will soon be fading into history, and Barack Obama sensibly declined to act at the summit without executive authority, so what emerged from the G20 is more in the nature of a directions statement for the way forward, as The Big Picture foresaw:
Hopefully, a long term agenda for regulatory cooperation and communication can be set with the next meeting’s agenda decided upon. Far better to talk then not, but no real decisions will come out of this meeting. There will be gnashing of teeth and venting of rage at the mess that excess securitization has created, and the international regulation of and accounting for such derivatives will probably be a focus.
Remember all that McCain campaign rhetoric about how Obama’s August 2007 statement on the need for sporadic pursuits of Al Qaeda into Pakistan without prior diplomatic notice showed that he was an irresponsible loon who should never be commander-in-chief? (and a few Democrats sounded off as well before Obama won the primaries)
There’s been a lot of discussion over the last few weeks about whether today’s vote would signal the end of the Reagan era. That discussion had two interlinked referents – the combination of militarism and small government rhetoric (if not practice) which marked Reaganite governance and the enduring electoral pattern Reagan’s win in 1980 ushered in. It may well be that these predictions are on the money, though we’ll need a few more electoral cycles to be sure (and one very useful thing the Obama administration could do would be reform of the voting process, which might make a fair bit of difference in and of itself). Certainly the red state/blue state frozen electoral map has begun to shift – with the state level strength in the West for the Democrats now translating nationally and the South becoming more competitive (and as Cliff Shecter observes, the demographics in Texas and South Carolina are heading in the same direction):
In other words, Barack Obama and the Democrats are a national party now, while the GOP has become regionalised and fallen behind the times. What a difference a few years can make. It will now be up to Obama and other leading Democrats to solidify these gains through smart politics and smarter policy. So we can all breathe a bit easier, by putting the Bush years behind us forever.
What’s a little surprising is that in the midst of these debates, there’s been little discussion of the exact significance and dimensions of the repudiation of Bushism. As publius says at Obsidian Wings:
Any way you slice it, the 2008 election should be seen as a massive repudiation of the George W. Bush administration.
And not just in psephological terms, as the Republican right may have driven Hispanic voters away for a long time. Let’s make no mistake about it. The collision of neo-con Republicanism and reality has not been kind to the latter. Publius again:
…recent events have repeatedly proven the progressive “sphere” more correct than the conservative “sphere.” Progressives’ policy assumptions seem to jibe better with empirical reality than the fairy tale world inhabited by many in the conservative sphere. In short, in the laboratory of ideas, progressives are winning.
It’s all over, red rover, and Barack Obama, with 200 electoral votes in the bag and enough in the bag to come from the West Coast and Midwest to come, has won the presidential election. Lots of interesting stuff still to come, including the all important Senate races and the ballot iniatives, and the size of the victory both in the electoral college and in the popular vote. And the turnout, which is looking huge.
What’s intriguing about this win is that Obama will exercise influence immediately. George W. Bush is the lamest of lame ducks, and arrangements have already been made for the next president to participate in shaping economic policy, and former Times Economics Editor Anatole Kaletsky thinks that influence will make a difference quickly:
If tomorrow’s election delivers a clear economic mandate to a competent new Administration, the financial markets will soon stabilise — and the US economy could recover surprisingly quickly from the blundering incompetence of Henry Paulson and George W. Bush.
Obama will be naming cabinet members and other key administration figures very quickly, and we won’t have the traditional waiting game for policy and names to trickle out before mid January.
How will he govern? One of the most interesting comments he’s made is when he told Jon Stewart that difficult times enable a President to achieve big things. There’s a bit of an FDR game in play, perhaps, with the modest promises of the campaign potentially being eclipsed by the pressure of events. We’ll see – expectations will certainly be high.
Related posts: The archive of all US election 2008 posts at LP can be accessed here.
Update [by Mark]: The text of Obama’s speech is here.
I’m not sure if I’m the only one who found the juxtaposition on the news last night of discussion of global regulation at a meeting between Chinese and EU leaders and George W. Bush’s “free markets are great!” remarks rather odd. I suspect two things are at work here – first, the defensive reaction to loudly proclaim your ideological purity even at a time when your actions belie your words, and secondly, the related posturing of the Republicans doing their level best to damn Obama as a socialist (which is also rather strange as John McCain wants to spend $300 billion buying up mortgages). For what it’s worth, it doesn’t look like the red smear is working – unsurprisingly polls are finding that a large majority of US voters don’t mind the idea of higher taxes on those earning more than $250000 a year to fund a healthcare plan. Conjuring up these atavistic spectres (“communism!”, “socialised medicine!”) isn’t spooking too many people.
The GOP might also be a tad influenced by Alan Greenspan’s concession that his ideological predispositions led him into errors which contributed to the global financial crisis, which John Quiggin argues illustrates the bankruptcy of the “efficient markets hypothesis” and demonstrates that financial markets have a tendency towards creating instability, rather than the other way around.
So, I think there’s a bit of projection going on – amidst the ruins of their ideological landscape, the GOP are trying to cast the Democrats in the role of the enemies of market freedoms, whose benefits (in the form in which they existed) are looking quite illusory. Continue reading ‘The Reds are coming!’
Working on the picture being worth a thousand words concept, Pundit Kitchen (from the ICHC team) encourages reader submissions. It does tend to lean leftish, which doesn’t bother me, but if it bothers you then leave a link to contrarian PolMacros in comments. Here follows an assortment (image heavy, so unfriendly to dial-up (sorry):
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