Why both the Left and Right are Wrong about Obama--and in the same Way

Opinion polls for President Obama are down--down enough to make his re-election seem unlikely.

But when the polls just ask whether people are satisfied with his actions, they conflate people who are dissatisfied because he's a Socialist with people who are dissatisfied because he's a Corporatist.

That is, the Left in general are unhappy because he isn't opposing the Republican Party enough,
while the Right is unhappy because he isn't surrendering to the Republican Party totally.

Lumping those two kind of unhappiness together leads to a severe misunderstanding of what the polls point towards in the next election, and to what the electorate is thinking now.

And the unhappiness with President Obama from both Left and Right stems--at least in part--from the unconscious belief that President = Ruler.

And though he has the bully pulpit to be sure, but in terms of actual power he's more like the chief administrator of the country. He can't pass legislation. He can't even initiate legislation. He can't overrule judges. And in our particular country, even if all congressional Democrats always do everything he asks of them, Senate rules in particular make it possible for a Republican minority there to make the Federal government incapable of sending any legislation to President Obama's desk, and incapable of confirming any presidential appointees, producing a hogtied government that lives down to Republican claims that government can't do anything.

An American president only wields the kind of power people think he had when his party isn't just in a majority in both houses, but which has 61 votes in the Senate that can always be relied on (difficult to maintain with senators in battleground states whose seats are vulnerable), and which has a Supreme Court majority that can generally be relied on. Bush II pretty much had that for most of his disastrous reign. Obama never did, and even during the four months he had a nominally filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, he was being forced to deal with the economic crisis the Republicans handed him (and then tried to blame him for), and with the fact that they proved willing to cripple the country through routine obstructionism for political gain.

It was like seeing two boxers fighting but each under different rules, one willing to hit below the belt and bite and kick, the other not.

These are all process observations which you can evaluate regardless of the actual policies involved.

The bottom line is that ideologues don't think about policy, they think about personality. Right wing ideologues call Obama a Socialist, which is beyond ridiculous, but they don't really mean they think he really wants a Soviet States of America. They clearly don't understand what the word means, or that every single person in America who does say he's a Socialist also says Obama is not remotely one of them. Mainly they use the word because they associate it with opprobrium, making it more like a junior high school schoolyard taunt than a serious political statement.

And left wing ideologues call him a Corporatist because, just like their right wing brothers in thought, they see things in black & white. So for them centrists like Obama are seen either as one thing or another, or as confused.

They're shades of gray-blind.

Obama has failed!....Really?

One Republican leitmotif, hammered on day in, day out, is that President Obama's policies have failed.

This ploy uses the assumed comparison.

That is, "failed" compared to what? Compared to the boom years of the Roaring 90s, sure, OK.

But that wasn't a possibility. The fact is that unless you state what you think a politician has failed compared to, you're blowin' smoke.

It's possible that Obama has failed to make America an economic paradise. However, it's also possible that despite our persistent unemployment, America is doing vastly better than it would have otherwise. What critiques of Obama's handling of the economy never prove is just what the alternative that he's being compared to, and how it would have been better.

Here's one way of looking at it: what is considered the safest place to put your cash today, worldwide?

US. Treasury bonds, that's what. S&P notwithstanding.

But also, it's not like Obama is our reigning monarch, or even prime minister. Even when he presided over a Democratic House and Senate, he still couldn't get his way without severe compromises, because Senate rules let a tiny minority stop everything unless your side can muster not a majority but a supermajority, and even if you have a nominal supermajority, one or two defections of senators in opposite-color states may well vote to save their hides instead of supporting their side.

And if Obama doesn't have full control of the levers of American government, he has even less control over the world economy we're inextricably bound to. So economic tumult abroad--such as the Arab spring sending gas prices soaring, sending ripples through the American economy every whichway--is entirely out of the American president's control.

This is why NYtimes columnist Tom Friendman is now arguing for a prime minister form of government for America--because ruthless exploitation of our system of checks and balances, starting with exquisite gerrymandering of congressional districts, has meant that neither party can be held fully responsible for what happens on its watch. It can always claim obstructionism by the other side, and it's often right. Both ways.

In a PM system one side can take us down the wrong direction rapidly, but at least you will know who did it--there's no evading the buck when it stops at the PM's desk. And if we don't like it we voters can then throw the bums out,.

Now both sides always have plausible deniability.

Just as the Second Amendment made sense for muskets but not for shoulder-mounted stingers and AK-47s, it may be that the beautiful mechanisms the Founding Fathers constructed don't work as intended any more, and will have to be drastically modified.

The irony is that it's the people who claim to be following the Founding Fathers' words and intentions most strictly who have brought us to this pass--who have done the most to break the very system they say they revere, not by the specifics of the policies they advocate, but by their unrestrained exploitation of every trick in the rulebook to effectively overturn the results of the last election.

And the measure of a democracy is what the side that loses the election  does after that loss. Obama is the president, not Grover Norquist. Not until 2012 at least.