SALON
Saturday, Jan 17, 2015 08:00 AM EST
The president's more popular than he's been
in nearly two years. Here's why that should have neoliberals scared
Elias Isquith
Topics:
Andrew Sullivan,
Jonathan Chait,
sam wang,
neoliberalism,
Rahm Emanuel,
Andrew Cuomo,
Bill Clinton,
Hillary Clinton,
Tony Blair,
Third Way,
Affordable Care Act,
Obamacare,
Ronald Reagan,
Editor's Picks,
Media News,
News,
Politics News
For
quite some time now, the media’s desire to see the American economy
return to its ’90s-era peak — or at least improve enough to be safely
ignored in favor of a new overarching narrative — has been nearly
palpable. Which is why it’s not shocking to see how
a spate of good news about the economy has changed the conventional wisdom about the President Obama’s record, with “objective” reporters describing him as
on the rebound, and with his most ardent defenders busting out superlatives like it’s 2008. Andrew Sullivan is once again calling him
the center-left version of Ronald Reagan. And
Jonathan Chait believes
history will ultimately recognize his performance as not just good but
capital-G great. That’s that, I guess; do we really need to bother with
the rest of his second term?
Even though I snark, and even though the
persistence of stagnant wages means we’re still experiencing
a McJobs recovery,
it’s certainly true that the president’s followed his second midterm
shellacking with a surprisingly good few weeks. His poll numbers are
looking better than they have in almost two years, and Princeton
election analyst Sam Wang says it’s “
a real phenomenon,”
not a fluke. But while Sullivan, and especially Chait, write as if
Obama’s comeback were basically inevitable, I think there’s a case to be
made that the president’s rising popularity — while certainly due in
part to his decision to enact less crippling austerity than the Eurozone
has and Republicans wanted — has more to do with recent actions of his
that were a
break from the approach that defined most of his second (and nearly all of his first) term.
Before
I describe that change, though, I want to make a few things clear up
front, so nobody gets the wrong idea. As Chait partially acknowledges,
and as
any political scientist will tell you, Americans give their presidents entirely too much blame
and credit for the state of the economy (usually
their No. 1 metric),
which is often considerably outside any politician’s immediate control.
What’s more, there’s reason to believe that at least some part of
Obama’s recent good fortune owes to
the plummeting price of oil, which despite what politicians of both parties tell you when they’re campaigning, has
essentially nothing to do with whatever’s happening in the Oval Office. Last but not least, the president’s approval rating is
not the product of an exact science;
it’s more like a blurry snapshot of a moment in time. So we shouldn’t
conclude too much from the recent polling, one way or another.
All
that said, both Wang’s data and an anecdotal impression of recent
(not-conservative) media will tell you that Obama’s ascending popularity
kicked off sometime between late November and mid-December. Not
incidentally, this was also the period when the president began not only
acting more aggressively in terms of using his power unilaterally,
which he’s actually been doing in some form or another
since last year,
if not earlier, but also supporting policies that could be easily
characterized as typically liberal. In November, he announced a major
change in how the federal government handled undocumented immigrants,
which predictably
cost him support from working-class whites but further established his party as the pluralist, multicultural alternative to the
overwhelmingly white GOP. And in December, he not only spoke
more frankly about his blackness than he had at any point in his presidency, but also announced a break from a half-century-plus-old policy by taking steps to
normalize relations with Cuba.
Having
walked head-on toward what have historically been two of the
Republicans’ most effective attacks on Democrats — the party’s
association with nonwhites and its “softness” in the realm of foreign
policy, especially regarding communists — Obama went even further in
January by unveiling
a plan to offer millions of Americans a college education
for free. He did this despite the fact that the policy would easily be
described by conservatives as promoting “big government” (
as indeed it was),
and despite the fact that the plan’s funding would be unapologetically
redistributionist. Much more than the Affordable Care Act, which also
relied on using high-end taxes to provide health insurance for the
working class and the poor but did so through an embrace of subsidies
and by relying on market incentives, Obama’s college plan represented a
straightforward argument for having government do what a broken market
could not. This was not a
DLC, neoliberal-style proposal to
encourage the market to act, through outsourcing and tax incentives. This was simply using government.
To
many, that probably seems like a distinction without a difference. But
that would only be true if the neoliberal model of deregulation,
outsourcing, privatization and free trade that was made Democratic Party
orthodoxy by Bill Clinton (and Labour Party orthodoxy by Tony Blair)
could actually reach traditional liberal ends through traditionally
conservative means. You’ll certainly be able to find those who disagree,
but I believe the verdict is in, and
it is negative.
That doesn’t mean the era of neoliberal government is over, of course;
there are still plenty of high-profile “New Democrats,” like
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel,
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo or the woman who is likely to be
the party’s next presidential nominee. For that matter, Obama’s recent “
My Brother’s Keeper” initiative and his continued support for the
Trans-Pacific Partnership trade proposal show that he himself has hardly made a clean break from the “
third way.”
Still,
even if his steps are halting, and even if part of his willingness to
flirt with old-fashioned liberalism stems from his knowledge that a GOP
Congress all but ensures none of his proposals will come to pass during
the rest of his term, Obama’s clearly begun to reverse the rightward
drift his party has experienced over the past generation. (Or at the
very least, he hasn’t been an implacable foe of
those who’d like to reverse the trend further.)
Posterity may look back at this as a far cry from the center-left
Reagan and transformational president liberals dreamed of back in 2008,
but American politics changes at a glacial pace, and if President Obama
leaves office in 2016 with the mainstream to the left of where it was
when he first started, that would be no small thing.
Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at
@eliasisquith, and email him at
eisquith@salon.com.
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