Frank Rich on Obama: Liberal fears and illusions

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Frank Rich on Obama: Liberal fears and illusions
By Barry Grey
8 June 2010

In a column published Sunday (“Don’t Get Mad, Mr. President. Get Even”), New
York Times commentator Frank Rich expresses the mounting frustration and concern
of Obama’s liberal supporters over the president’s response to the BP oil spill.
Obama’s extraordinary deference to BP, his inability to articulate in any way
the anger of millions of Americans, has, warns Rich, raised “serious doubts
about his leadership.”

The column is significant, not for any insights it provides into the crisis of
the Obama administration, but rather as an indication of the sense within the
left-liberal constituency of the Democratic Party that the public mood is
shifting against the White House. Among American pundits, Rich is one of the
most prominent torch-bearers for Obama. He has written dozens of columns
denouncing the right-wing policies of the Republican Party and extolling the
supposedly progressive character of the Obama administration.

This political layer fears the growth of public disillusionment and anger toward
the administration and Obama’s inability to respond. What is particularly
striking about Rich’s column is the degree to which it is addressed directly to
Obama, rather than to the public. Rich is offering advice in an attempt to save
the administration.

In the process, Rich reveals his own perplexity and the intellectual and
political impoverishment of his outlook and that of American liberalism in
general. He is unable to understand or explain why Obama is not behaving as he
thinks he should.

Rich acknowledges that Obama’s prostration before the oil giant is not an
aberration. “But the credulous attitude toward BP is no anomaly for the
administration,” he writes. “Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs was praised by the
president as a ‘savvy’ businessman two months before the Securities and Exchange
Commission sued Goldman.”

He goes on to draw out the parallel between Wall Street’s crashing of the
financial system and BP’s poisoning of the Gulf. He notes: “BP’s reliance on
bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the MMS mirrors
Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the SEC, Federal
Reserve and New York Fed.” He fails to mention that Obama appointed the
president of the New York Fed as his treasury secretary and nominated the Fed
chairman for a second term.

Indeed, Rich avoids drawing any conclusions as to what Obama’s role says about
the objective social and class character of his administration. Instead, he
attributes Obama’s political difficulties to unfortunate character traits, a
flawed management style, bad advisers and a failure to present a convincing
“narrative” of the oil spill to the public.

In essence, Rich wants Obama to do a better job of convincing the American
people that he is on their side and opposed to BP. He does not propose any
concrete policies to deal with the Gulf disaster and evades the issue of private
ownership of BP and the rest of the oil industry.

The basic premise of his piece is that—despite the facts Rich himself
acknowledges—Obama is at heart a progressive reformer and his government is,
potentially at least, a progressive reform administration. “It’s this misplaced
trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent
Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed him,” Rich writes.

Obama is part of the “elite.” He is doing today—in regard to the oil spill as
well as the bank bailout, the restructuring of the auto industry, health care
“reform,” the assault on teachers and pubic education, and the demand for cuts
in basic social programs—precisely what he was groomed to do by corporate
backers from the start of his political career in Chicago.

His entire administration has been single-mindedly devoted to protecting the
wealth of the financial elite, while he has refused to take any serious measures
to provide jobs or relief for millions falling into poverty and social desperation.

Obama is striving to carry out his role as the chief political representative of
the American ruling class. Rich evades these class issues as well as any
consideration of the economic structure of American society.

He concludes his piece by invoking the example of Theodore Roosevelt as a model
for Obama in dealing with the oil spill. “If Obama is to have a truly
transformative presidency,” he writes, “there could be no better catalyst than
oil. Standard Oil jump-started Progressive Era trust-busting…

“This all adds up to a Teddy Roosevelt pivot point for Obama. … If he is to
wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that
have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.”

Here Rich evokes an image of American liberalism as the moving force for social
progress that is more myth than historical fact. The major social reforms in the
US were the result of the struggles of the working class against the most bitter
and violent resistance of the bourgeoisie. The predominant role of liberalism
was to hold back these struggles and block them from assuming revolutionary
forms. In the first two-thirds of the last century, the major means for doing
this was the implementation of limited social reforms and concessions to the
working class. But over the past 40 years, there have been no such reforms.

The invocation of Roosevelt ignores the vast differences historically between
that period and today. Roosevelt’s trust-busting occurred in the midst of
immense working class struggles and the growing influence of socialist and
revolutionary tendencies within the working class. Eugene Debs won 1 million
votes as the Socialist Party candidate for US president in 1912, one year after
the antitrust suit brought by the federal Department of Justice was upheld by
the US Supreme Court, forcing the breakup of Standard Oil.

Rich, who was written numerous columns warning against the growth of social
opposition from the working class, has no desire for a return to such conditions.

The political domination of big business and Wall Street has grown far beyond
even what it was in the heyday of the robber barons, along with a staggering
growth of social inequality.

Moreover, the middle-class intelligentsia at the turn of the 20th century was
far more oriented to the working class and sympathetic to socialist and
revolutionary ideas than its counterpart today. Within radical and even certain
liberal circles it was taken for granted a century ago that social justice,
equality and genuine democracy were incompatible with capitalism.

Via a long historical process since then the political and moral makeup of the
middle-class intelligentsia has undergone a profound change—overwhelmingly for
the worse.

The embrace by most of the American liberal intelligentsia of anti-communism
after World War II, which signified its lining up behind the hegemonic aims of
American imperialism, did immense damage to the political life of the country
and irrevocably compromised American liberalism.

Over the past three decades, substantial sections of American liberals have seen
their incomes rise as a result of the reactionary, anti-working class policies
of Reagan and his successors, including Obama. As a result, their political
views have shifted further to the right, with the open embrace of “free market”
nostrums and repudiation of any social reform program.

Rich is very much an expression of this process. He is an example of
contemporary American liberalism, fixated on questions of identity and
life-style, indifferent to the fate of the working class. The intellectual and
political impotence of his analysis, and its elements of cover-up and evasion,
are an expression of the bankruptcy of liberal thought as a whole.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/fric-j08.shtml

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