It's A Trap! or, Why Obama Lost a Technocratic Debate

Throughout this campaign, Romney has willingly played the far right nut job. His infamous 47% comments simply confirmed what most people, particularly liberals, already suspected about him: that he hates working people, has a pro-corporate and pro-1% mindset, and has no room in his platform for any compromise with the liberal agenda. Call it Tea Party influence, an unruly base, a personal disgust for people who aren’t as privileged as he is, but the outcome is the same: myore taxcuts for the rich; the appointment of Paul Ryan; promises of deregulation; recommitting to dirty energy; etc.

This has allowed Obama to play the “Reasonable” card for the entire election. Obama has made policy sacrifices over and over in order to build a reputation as the Great Compromiser, willing to take “good ideas from both sides,” and not at all the anti-white socialist his more…unstable critics have painted him as. But there is a problem with being “reasonable.” Obama has felt the need to distance himself from economic policies that liberals prefer in order to distance himself from being considered a liberal. Raising taxes and raising spending have been taken off the table in an attempt to occupy the center of the electorate. His base has more or less become an inconvenience; he isn’t just distancing himself from the radical left, but even from “pragmatically” left folks that do all the groundwork for him. In other words, to be reasonable, Obama has more or less adopted the GOP’s platform from 15 years ago. His cover for this rightward move derives from the extremeness of Romney’s campaign; the more rightward the GOP moved, the more safely Obama could move to the right, because liberals seem committed to voting for ANYTHING as long as it is not as bad as a Republican. If Romney was Goldwater, Obama could safely be Reagan. If Romney were to decide to go full Nazi, Obama could become John Birch. With no credible threat to his left, the possibilities for “compromise” were endless, because he could simply pick up more voters from the center while continuing to hang onto liberals who feared a President Romney far more than a less and less liberal Obama (well, some liberals still love Obama as a liberal paragon, but I try not to think about those people). Not to mention the hacks at MSNBC were always there to assure fidgety liberals the Obama was still a liberal, despite all evidence to the contrary.

All this beget one surprising(?) fact: Obama is a fiscally center-right Democratic presidential candidate. He is running as a Blue Dog, not a liberal.

This is what set the stage for the Obama’s debate loss Wednesday night. Obama proudly laid out his “reasonable” principles. Cut taxes and cut spending. Corporate tax rates are too high. Small businesses need to be unburdened. The deficit in priority number one. Etc. And all this center-right nonsense would be okay, because Obama merely had to point out that Romney favors even more taxcuts for the rich than Bush did.

Except something happened that the Obama campaign did not expect. All at once, with no warning whatsoever, Romney stopped playing the right wing nut job. In a mad rush back to the center, Romney disavowed the right wing mantle that the Democrats had been putting on him since the primaries, and became a classic centrist Republican again, à la his days being the Governor of Massachusetts. Obama was visibly stunned at this, particularly when Romney walked away from his tax plan and claimed to have no idea what Obama was talking about. Obama looked across the podium and was shocked to see his ideological equal (at least as far as economics are concerned).

The problem for Obama was twofold. The first was that in a race between two candidates that agree on principle about everything, the advantage goes to the challenger. Incumbents have a real record to defend, where sacrifices have been made, where mistakes have occurred, and where the inevitable downside to all these right-wing policies have to be explained away. You’ve got to make excuses for failures, and no one likes to hear excuses for failures. A challenger can present ideas that are devoid of downsides, because they haven’t been enacted in the real world. These ideas can only be weighed in abstract, because there is no empirical evidence of their adverse effects. They are not weighted down by the consequences of having been implemented (of course, all these ideas have already been implemented, but Romney can claim otherwise because he’s new to the scene, after all; he actually claimed that “No one has ever done what I’m suggesting”). Obama could not defend his policies on the basis of having principle differences with Romney, because throughout the campaign, Obama and the Democrats have been convicted to the same center-right principles that Romney was suddenly espousing. Without being able to say, “There were some downsides to policy A but it was worth it because I care more about XYZ then you do,” the debate was reduced to a technocratic duel. And Romney is more believable as the technocratic better of the two, not least of all because he probably is. Romney’s entire career is built on the idea that he’s a competent bureaucrat. His history of being an ideologue is actually rather short.

The second downside, or so I believed, was that Romney was removing the cover Obama had for adopting this center-right platform. Obama didn’t appear to be any more liberal than Romney during the debate to me. When Romney spoke about the role of government and his plans for jumpstarting the economy, whether he was lying or not, he seemed to be saying, “I would do what Obama is trying to do, I would just do it more effectively and efficiently.” They both agreed on the importance of education going forward, and Romney (rightly) pointed out that education under Obama has not improved. They both agreed on the central place of small business (their definition aligns up to 3%). They agreed on Social Security. They agreed on the principles of Obamacare, with Romney attacking Obama on technical specifics, not overriding principles. They agreed that tax rates are too high, and the tax code too complicated. The one real place where they seemed to disagree was the idea that cuts should be offset by a smaller amount of revenue, but let’s face it, even this is a matter of degree, not of principle. Also Medicare--even the voucher system is being presented as a technical fix to better meet the same principles that Obama holds (Romney even leapt out left of Obama by again claiming it was Obama who had designs on cutting Medicare).

The liberal side of mainstream politics was noticeably absent. Where were the attacks on the 47% comments? Defense of Keynsian stimulus? The all important role of government in protecting oppressed people? Vigorous defense of government intervention into healthcare?  Significant cuts to defense? The promised cutting of tuition rates? Bailing out the auto industry? Punishing the banks for the financial collapse? Punishing corporations for outsourcing, and Romney’s lifetime complicity in this? Where was talk of Bain Capital, for that matter?

Absent. And with this absence, I felt that the fundamentally conservative nature of the Democratic Party was finally and accidentally being laid naked for all to see. The right wing cover that Romney had provided was gone. I predicted rage from liberals across the country, directed at a Democratic President that they suddenly realized had no interest in representing his base.

How naive of me.

At first I got what I expected. MSNBC tore into the President as soon as the debate was done. There was what I have to assume to be authentic outrage that a liberal contender didn’t show up. Chris Mathews specifically blasted Obama for not being informed on the liberal talking points, saying that he should tune into MSNBC more often. Watch:

“Game changer,” I thought. Liberals will be furious, and maybe some will begin to see the futility of supporting this man who is participating in the very rapid slide backwards that we are currently enduring. At worst, I thought, the Obama campaign will finally be held responsible for adopting so many center-right positions, and be forced leftwards. In either case, I could smugly watch the fury build.

But alas, Thursday morning came, but Christmas didn’t. It turned out that Liberals were not angry at Obama for being too right wing. They were, get this, angry at Romney for not being right wing enough! You can’t make this stuff up!

Liberals everywhere were enraged at Romney for trying to reinvent himself as a centrist. Ostensibly, they were mad that he had lied about his record (shocking behavior from a politician, I know). And so the liberal news all day was harping on the fact that Romney is a liar, and Ed Shultz and Chris Mathews got hammered for “abandoning the President” by criticizing Obama at all for his performance. But it seems to me that liberals wouldn’t mind if Romney lied to make himself look more right wing than he had previously seemed. In that case, they could have continued having the principle debate that they have been having all year. What liberals were actually mad about was that Romney was swooping in on the center-right spot that Democrats had been leisurely occupying throughout the election cycle, and when suddenly contested for this spot, it became clear that Obama is not fit to hold it. He must move left to remain competitive. He must demonstrate some type of ideological difference with Romney. But instead of being happy about what is essentially a liberal victory—that is, they succeed in shaming Romney into moving to the left, and mainstream politics to the left with him—they have been doing everything they can to keep Romney out in the far right, and let Obama sit uncontested at center-right.

 In effect, this the equivalent of liberal ideological suicide. Liberals don’t seem to believe in their own politics as much as they hate the politics of the far right.  As a consequence, they have abided a center-right president running a center-right campaign because it increases his electability. Simultaneously, it ensures that no truly liberal policies will ever be enacted again. Compromise has become a drug for liberals, making them forget the reason they wanted liberal policies in the first place (you think they work better, don’t you remember that?). Glenn Greenwald made while a similar point a couple of years ago while attacking Lawrence O'Donnell; that Democrats would be better off enacting truly liberal policies that work rather than watered down liberal policies that fail, because then they could go to the electorate and say, “Hey look, this Healthcare Bill or the economic stimulus really works, not just partly, but all the way! Let's keep doing things like this!”

The difference between me and Glenn Greenwald is I don’t think even the most robust liberal policies would do anything besides make the rich richer and the poor poorer, just the same as “conservative” ones. To me, this liberal suicide couldn’t happen fast enough, because liberalism is an anti-working class, anti-revolutionary ideology built on privilege and Paternalism. Once liberals have given up pretending that they can influence politics at the poles, and come to see that their only “vote” is the way the same pro-corporate agenda is spun (with even the spin starting to sound a hell of a lot alike), then maybe we can start building a movement that can actually achieve something.