Franklin's Focus 6/10/10

The Absurdity of Calling Obama a Socialist

I was about to tackle this very subject when an essay by Sam Smith
showed up in my email that does exactly that. Since a piece by Sam was
certain to be superior to anything I could write, I'm simply passing
his piece along, thusly giving me a one day respite from Focus.

Sam is not a socialist, but he certainly knows what a democratic
socialist looks like, and Obama ain't it.

And he ain't it in a big way.

Enjoy.

Warmest regards,
Richard

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WHY PEOPLE CALL OBAMA A SOCIALIST. .. AND WHY IT MATTERS

Sam Smith

In trying to figure out why so many people think Barack Obama is a
socialist, it finally occurred to me that it wasn't a matter of
politics or ideology at all, but one of class and culture.

Because of the way Americans have been raised - in school, in the
media and in the barroom - they have come to think that there is only
one type of governmental cloud that can descend and ruin their day. To
them, Hitler was the only fascist ever made, communists are so 1950s,
the excesses of conservatism are hardly noticed, and no one’s ever
heard of corporatism. What’s left is socialism.

By any logical standard, Obama has hardly a socialist bone in his body
but we don’t live in a time when logic owns definitions. Still, if one
accepts that many feel something is going on that is intrusive,
indecipherable, and uncomfortable, then it is the discomfort rather
than the misnomer that should be examined. And politics may have
surprisingly little to do with it.

For example, we live in a time of class disparity unlike any in recent
history. A few examples:

- Income inequality is at an all time high

- Since 1980, the richest Americans have seen their incomes quadruple,
while for the "lowest" 90% of America, incomes fell.

- The average real wage is lower today than it was in the 1970s.

- In 1950 the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average
worker's was about 30 to 1. Since 2000 that average has ranged from
300 to 500 to one.

- Between 1978 and 2008, almost 35% of America's total income growth
went to the top one-tenth of one percent.

- From 1990 to 2008, middle class incomes rose just 20%, and most of
that happened in the 1990s. Since then, income has stagnated for
people in the middle, yet home prices shot up 56%, college costs 60%.
As for health care, it's up 155%.

- Today, men in their 30s earn 12 percent less than the previous
generation did at the same age.

- Percent of workers with defined benefits pension plan is down 50%
since mid 1980s

- Long term unemployment rate is the highest since 1948.

- In 1983 middle class debt held at 67% of income. By 2007, middle
class debt had gone over the falls to 157% of income.

-Personal bankruptcies are up 400% since the 1980s

Bad as these conditions are, they are exacerbated by ineffective
action to deal with them by our elected leaders and seemingly only a
passing interest by these leaders and the media.

To them an oil spill or a war is just far more interesting to worry
about. But terrible as either may be, they don’t immediately and
directly affect the average American the way economic factors do.

Imagine, if all the cable coverage we've had of the oil spill had been
given to the mile deep, hidden malfunctions of our economy.

But this won't happen because the top controls the media as well as
our politics.

And it's not just about economics. For example, only about nine
percent of our population has been to graduate school, yet it is this
segment of the population that is increasingly controlling our policy
choices. Similarly nearly half of Congress is composed of lawyers,
which these days means, among other things, people who do legal work
for corporations.

And both these groups are bipartisan. Just look at the contributors to
Barack Obama's election and you'll find that every thing you were
taught about the political views of big business is just about as
wrong as, say, what an average Tea Party member thinks about socialism.

Or consider the lack of small business people, labor leaders,
teachers, or social workers in Congress other political bodies.

It helps, therefore, to jettison - at least temporarily - the
ideological and political divisions and look at the matter more
anthropologically. Because what really divides the leadership of the
country from ordinary citizens is class and culture.

And not necessarily the sort of culture we like to talk about. For
example, the election of Obama was buried in an influx of commentary
on the ethnic implications. But have you noticed how little this has
actually mattered?

Obama has done practically nothing that can be attributed positively
or negatively to his ethnicity. It turns out that it was not that he
was black that mattered; it was that he was a Harvard Law School
graduate steeped in the perspective, biases, arrogance and assumptions
of an elite subculture that has an increasingly difficult time
relating to those not of their class.

This is not to say it has to be like that. FDR and JFK showed
otherwise. Of course, FDR lived in a smaller, less economically
segregated America and JFK was a war hero.

Even Bill Clinton, who went to Yale and Oxford, was save by an
Arkansas accent, which helped him until he lied and got laid once too
often. It may also be one reason no one noticed that 77% of Clinton’s
initial cabinet were millionaires, beating out both Reagan and Bush in
this category. And that one third of his top appointments came from
Harvard and Yale.

Obama has continued this strange new Democratic Party tradition. The
Washington Post reported that 22 of his first 35 appointments had "a
degree from an Ivy League university, MIT, Stanford, the University of
Chicago, Oxford or Cambridge. Since then, Obama has appointed a
Harvard alumnus as education secretary, a Nobel-prize winning Stanford
physicist as energy secretary, and a handful of Harvard law school
classmates."
Further, his appointment of Elena Kagan insures that Harvard will
retain a super majority on the Supreme Court.

Increasingly, the people running our country act as though they belong
to a private club. The Washington media, of course, doesn't mention
this, because it belongs to the same club (albeit on probation
depending on what it writes) So only occasionally is there a true
glimpse of what is going on.

For example, Lorraine Adams, a onetime Pulitzer Prize-winning
investigative reporter for The Washington Post, left the paper and
became a novelist. In her latest book she has a character modeled on
Bob Woodward. Asked on a PBS program to elaborate, Adams said:

"I think if you're a student of American journalism, Bob Woodward is
an undeniably potent figure. . . . I think he practices access
journalism, which is different from what I did at the Post.

"[I] would talk to the people who have no power and who are affected
by the people in power, and that gives a much more useful picture of
the way policy affects the human soul. Woodward, who started as a
reporter who did that, who knocked on doors and talked to people on
the ground, became a celebrity. In becoming a celebrity, he invariably
saw it as a much better deal for him, in terms of making money, to
talk to other celebrities inside Washington: presidents, their chiefs
of staff, vice presidents, their chiefs of staff.

"We have learned that Deep Throat was an FBI official, not an agent,
an official. He was on, what we call the 7th Floor. I think Woodward's
capitulation to interviewing people in limousines, as opposed to
people on the subway, is something I feel is partly responsible for
the fact that we ended up in Iraq. Because so many reporters, Judith
Miller is the most egregious of them, spoke to Scooter Libby and some
other higher officials, and never spoke to intelligence people on the
ground. They swallowed wholesale Colin Powell at the U.N., and
[ultimately] their limousine reporting meant that 100,000 Iraqis lost
their lives."

The assumption of the capital club class is that ordinary Americans
will buy into limousine politics and limousine reporting. But they
don't. They may not understand it, they may mistakenly call it
socialism, and they may not have the slightest idea what to do about
it, but they recognize the gap between their lives and what is going
on in Washington. And it makes them mad.

In another era, a populist progressive movement might have gathered up
that anger and put it to good use for a social revolution or two. But
the potential for such a movement these days has been emasculated by a
horde of indentured liberals willing to line up behind anyone who
calls themselves a Democrat. And as they do so, their beloved
president of the moment - a Clinton or Obama - moves the country
further to the right with impunity, even as an increasingly angry
populace becomes an ever greater market for the real right.

All of which is not helped in the slightest when a president - hailed
as eloquent - can't even get the public to feel his pain over the oil
spill. Imagine a White House news briefing exchange like the following
- only with a FDR, Harry Truman, JFK or LBJ - and you can sense the
problem:

Chip Reid, CBS: You said earlier that the President is enraged. Is he
enraged at BP specifically?

Press secretary Robert Gibbs: I think he's enraged at the time that
it's taken, yes. I think he's been enraged over the course of this, as
I've discussed, about the fact that when you're told something is fail-
safe and it clearly isn't, that that's the cause for quite a bit of
frustration. . . Which is one of the reasons you heard him discuss the
setting up of the oil commission in order to create a regulatory
framework that ensures something like this doesn't happen again.

Reid: Frustration and rage are very different emotions, though. . . .
Have we really seen rage from the President on this? I think most
people would say no.

Gibbs: I've seen rage from him, Chip. I have.

Reid: Can you describe it? Does he yell and scream? What does he do?
(Laughter.)

Gibbs: He said. . . he has been in a whole bunch of different
meetings. . . clenched jaw. . . even in the midst of these briefings,
saying everything has to be done. I think this was an anecdote shared
last week, to plug the damn hole.

Again, what we face is not an ideological problem, but a class and
cultural one; a president so practiced at self-protective reserve that
he can't get cross when he needs to. By trying so hard to act
intelligent and measured, he ends up seeming distant and a bit dumb.

But the problem extends far beyond speech and manners. For example,
the techniques of traditional politics are fading, largely replaced by
what is presumed to be good public relations, although often seeming
like just one more bad cable TV news clip.

I was reminded of this when Obama recently went to Capitol Hill to
meet with Senate Republicans. My first reaction - thinking politics
rather than PR - was, "Uh oh, this isn't going to go well."

Turns out, I guessed right, as the Chicago Tribune explained later:

"One angry Republican accused Obama of treating members of the
opposition like political props, saying the president's bipartisan
words have repeatedly been followed by partisan deeds on such issues
as regulation of Wall Street, healthcare and economic stimulus.

"'I told him I thought there was a degree of audacity in him showing
up today,' said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who accused the
administration of sabotaging efforts to write a bipartisan Wall Street
bill. 'I asked him how he was able to reconcile that duplicity.'

"Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Obama's response to the GOP criticism
showed he was so 'thin-skinned' that he should 'take a Valium' before
he comes to talk to Republicans again."

Real politicians would have seen it coming. But because the PR ethos
has so overwhelmed politics, real politics is pushed aside in favor of
easy to puncture performances.

Lyndon Johnson would have had Bob Corker and Pat Roberts over for
drinks, given them the pork they were looking for, and you wouldn't
have even read about it until the next volume of Robert Caro's
biography came out.

But the public relationists of today's politics get so wrapped up in
sending a clever message that they completely forget the other side
gets to speak into the microphone as well.

o

The capital club class also works on a restricted set of assumptions
on how to best get something done, assumptions that involve an
overwhelming reliance on centralized decision-making, endless review,
public messages, and data that spews itself over the capital as from
an uncapped well head.

Thus the sense you often get is that people who should be leading are
behaving more in the manner of someone writing a college thesis or
appearing on a CPAN panel; they explain, analyze and calculate; they
just don't know quite what to do.

And here is where socialism raises its head again. It is part of the
popular belief that socialism is, if not a dictatorship, a system run
tightly from the top. There is no sharing of power, no
decentralization of authority, no letting difference places do things
their own way.

This is not an accurate description of socialism, but it is, I think,
a fair description of much popular thought on the subject.

Thus the irony of a small group of corporate-sponsored politicians,
devoid of any real ideology other than the maintenance of their own
power, becoming regarded in popular culture as mean and nasty Marxists.

Obama has produced a series of overly complex, almost indecipherable
pieces of legislation that share an additional common trait:
extraordinary centralized control by his administration. Worse,
perhaps, some of this legislation will clearly result in ordinary
citizens having to fill out more forms, go through more procedures,
and feel rationally confused about this or that.

Right now, for example, small businesses and small non-profits are
facing significant additional tax reporting requirements.

The health bill includes an ungodly aggregation of uncertainties and
new obstacles to doing things simply.

The stimulus package had so many restrictions that the paperwork alone
would have prevented a reiteration of New Deal public works efforts.

Further, the Obama administration has been clearly unwilling to share
power on these matters. It even wants to restrict Congress' budget
power by a back door approach to the line item veto.

But perhaps more importantly, there is no sense that Obama and his
staff have any feel for the fact that governors and mayors are part of
our government as well and that if he wants to look good, they have to
look good, which means sharing power. This doesn't even have to be a
matter of honor, just good politics.

In public education, he is working to eliminate the whole two century
tradition of local control over public schools. Underlying a lot of
this is the assumption that people like the Obamites know best how to
do things. After all, they have fine law degrees and MBAs from some of
the best universities.

And so we find FEMA coming close to causing a disaster on the Portland
Maine waterfront by declaring it a flood zone on which no further
major construction could ever take place. It wasn't true, but it took
not only the Maine congressional delegation but the Portland fire
chief coming down to Washington to explain to FEMA that they didn't
now what the hell they were talking about.

And while Obama represents these values, he is far from alone. The
Supreme Court recently decided a case desribed by Time's Adam Cohen:

"Van Thompkins, a criminal suspect, was not interested in talking to
the police, and he never affirmatively waived his right to remain
silent. But the court ruled that by not saying clearly that he was
exercising his right to remain silent, he in fact forfeited the right
- and that a one-word answer he gave late in the questioning could be
used against him.

"The ruling flies in the face of the court's long-standing insistence
that a suspect can waive his rights only by affirmatively doing so."

Now, mind you, this was a 5-4 decision of the court. This means that
the average purported perp without even a GED has to know a bizarre
ruling that silence only matters if you first say you're being silent
and also has to choose which of the Harvard Law grads on the court to
believe on the topic. You don't get more culturally out of touch than
that.

O

Finally, the oil spill story still has too many loose ends to analyze
fairly, but what we do know is that local talent and judgment, and
alternative approaches, have been squashed in favor of a one big
solution (actually a series of one big solution) which has yet to come

A problem with people with fine law degrees and MBAs from some of the
best universities is that they are unlikely to know squat about oil
spills.

Of course, there's at least a partial solution to this: find out who
does. This might be called the reporter's approach to life. A good
reporter wakes up in the morning not knowing a thing about Topic X,
but by the end of the day or week will have found a whole bunch of
people who do. Essential to this, however, is first admitting that you
don't know a thing about Topic X.

The problem is that those in the capital club class don't think like
this. They see themselves and their friends as the best source of
knowledge.

Which may be why you heard so much of late about the "Nobel Prize
winning Energy Secretary," Mr. Chu.

If you've got a Nobel Prize winner, what more do you need? But as
Eugene Robinson pointed out the other evening on MSNBC, Chu didn't get
his prize in ending oil spills but in the "development of methods to
cool and trap atoms with laser light."

Much of the public sees the Obama administration as arrogant, power-
hoggng and indifferent ot the concerns of the ordinary citizen. A
strong case can be made that this is true. This, of course, doesn't
make Obama a socialist, but the misappropriation and misuse of power
is a far great offense than a mundane misnomer. Besides, whatever you
call it, it's not helping the Democrats or the country one bit.

End