Obama-pology

Some things to keep in mind regarding Obama-hating by the left:

1. A good portion of the newer Democrats in Congress come from fairly conservative districts. Obama's public support is not necessarily that beneficial to these members. Consequently, Obama has little direct sway over them, especially regarding any kind of highly visible and salient issue.

2. The only domestic policy decisions the President can make directly are executive orders. And while the range of policy decisions that are subject to Executive Orders is a matter of some constitutional complexity, it is clear that there ARE limits. The President's other main tool is the appointment power, and that has been highly constrained by a filibuster-happy Republican minority in the Senate.

3. Despite the recent rise of the Democrats, the mass public is ideologically more moderate than the Democratic Party. The public is to the right of the Democrats and to the left of the Republicans. Liberals (and, in truth, ideologues from the right AND the left) have trouble accepting the following fact: most people in the country DO NOT AGREE WITH YOU!! It may very well be that Obama got elected and has pushed moderate policies because a) he is a moderate and b) government responds to public opinion.

4. The fractured media market the President faces today makes the bully pulpit less powerful than it once was. No longer can the President interrupt some prime-time sit-com and expect to reach the vast majority of the American people. That makes it difficult to marshal public enthusiasm for policy change.

5. As much as I hate to say it, the government cannot willy-nilly ignore and fuck over corporations. Government depends on corporations to provide input, expertise, and jobs. Charles Lindblom explains this unpleasant truth in his Politics and Markets (1977). Why have we allowed BP to continually fuck up the oil spill stoppage? Because nobody else in the Federal government is more qualified than BP to do the job. We have structured our society in a way where corporations always have government by the balls (what Lowi calls "permanent receivership"). Don't get me wrong...I think we should regulate THE SHIT out of the oil industry, and this was undoubtedly a failure of oversight and regulation. But we also cannot blindly impose impractical, ineffective, or unduly damaging regulations on businesses. As long as we depend on markets to distribute goods and services (i.e., as long as we are fundamentally a capitalist society), business will enjoy a "privileged position," as Lindblom would say.

So, why hasn't Obama shoved through more radical reforms on health care, energy, financial sector reform, etc? Well...because he's probably a fairly moderate guy by nature, and because even if he wanted something more radical, the office of the President is simply not powerful enough to do it without a sense of urgency and broad based consensus in the mass public. Bush had that after 9/11; when it faded, his domestic agenda turned to a giant pool of diarrhea. Obama is making deliberate, noticeable improvements on a variety of fronts. If he were trying for anything more...well...we might be looking at a tall glass of ass piss instead of the warm glass of mountain dew that we've achieved. I'll take warm mountain dew over ass piss any day.