Category Archives: Barack Obama

could the president pivot to anti-corruption?

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Based on recent polling, Andrew Levison argues that a minority of Americans (call them the supply-siders) believe that a combination of federal spending cuts and tax cuts would boost the economy. A different minority (the Keynesians) believe that federal spending increases would help people economically. But a significant third group remains undecided. For them, the issue is not whether government programs could stimulate the economy and create jobs. The issue is whether government would succeed, given its (perceived) incompetence and corruption. A lot of people believe these statements, drawn from focus groups:

“Government can’t really solve problems. It always screws up anything it does. It can throw money around, but that’s about it.”

“The politicians in Washington don’t give the slightest damn about people like me. They take care of their fat-cat contributors and big business lobbyists and sell the average person down the river every chance they get.”

I sort of tend to believe these points myself–which is why I spent two years of the 1990s working for Common Cause and wrote a book about political reform–and my doubts have been reinforced by the way Congress responded to the financial crisis. Thus, for substantive rather than merely political reasons, I’d favor making corruption a major issue from now on in the Obama administration. And I would define corruption as the influence of money on policy.

The question is whether President Obama could make corruption his theme at this point–with any credibility and any chance of success. It would not be easy, but he did have a pretty strong record in both Illinois and the US Senate. During the presidential primary season, he regularly attacked lobbyists and Political Action Committees and saw “the issue as a bright line [between himself and] Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.” I cannot find evidence now, but I am pretty sure that he and Clinton argued about campaign finance inside the Senate Democratic caucus, with Obama taking the pro-reform position.

In the general election, I thought his campaign soft-peddled corruption somewhat, and I would attribute that decision to several factors:

  • A lot of “base” Democratic voters believed that the cause of corruption lay solely with Republicans, so defeating them in a national election would end the problem. Addressing the underlying causes of corruption was unnecessary to motivate these base voters.
  • Incumbent Democratic elected officials did not want serious reforms and would have thrown up obstacles.
  • The Obama people believed that a combination of better transparency and more small donations over the Internet would actually mitigate corruption–beliefs with which I happen to disagree.
  • “Process” issues like campaign finance reform were much less urgent in the middle of an economic free-fall than the stimulus package and health reform. The strategy was to pass those bills despite special-interest pressure.

All those factors make the lack of attention to political reform at least forgivable. But the result was wasteful economic policy that benefited banks and rich taxpayers more than it had to; and now the whole federal policy agenda has stalled.

After Obama was elected, the Supreme Court made the situation starkly worse with the Citizens United decision that legalized campaign contributions by corporations. Whether because of Citizens United or for other reasons, the amount of private money spent on elections quintupled between 2006 and 2010 (successive midterm years).

Citizens United creates a rhetorical opening for the president. Even though the majority didn’t exactly say that corporations are persons (they rather cited corporations as associations under the First Amendment and treated money as speech), the decision is certainly unpopular–and for good reasons. Besides, from a narrowly partisan perspective, it’s easier for a Democratic president to attack the funding perquisites of Congress when the House happens to be in Republican hands.

Thus I think the President has an opportunity to say: “I have always criticized wealthy special interests and fought for reform. I chose not to make campaign reform my first priority when I entered the White House in the middle of an economic collapse, but now I think that was a mistake. I didn’t fully grasp the insidious power of money and how it frustrates our efforts to restore the real, working economy of America. In any case, now that the Supreme Court says that corporations can give unlimited money to candidates to get the policies they want, I realize this is our number-one issue. It’s a precondition for making the government work for people, not for rich interests.”

The next question is what he would actually fight for. I would recommend a Constitutional Amendment for campaign finance reform, not as a panacea, but as a helpful policy that would also send a strong public message that government and the market are two different spheres and that money is problematic in politics. Wealthy interests will always have disproportionate political power, but that does not mean that their deliberate efforts are respectable. Money is not speech, lobbies are not civil society, and corporate pressure is not “government relations.” Restoring these elements of our traditional public philosophy would put some constraints on the most egregious behavior.

an overlooked win for civic renewal: federally qualified health centers

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My chief complaint about the health care reform of 2010 was its apparent failure to include active citizens as designers of the bill (the public could have been asked to deliberate about health reform, as Senators Wyden and Hatch proposed), or as proponents of the bill (the administration could have unleashed a grassroots movement to demand passage), or as active participants in administering health care (the bill could have empowered health insurance co-ops).

Yet the bill actually contains many excellent provisions that have received little attention. One reform is a major increase in the authorized funding level for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FGHC). The extra money should raise the number of such centers to 15,000. An FQHC is a local provider, serving a needy community, that gets favorable Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates, access to the National Health Service Corps, and other federal supports. It must be a nonprofit organization or a public entity, and it must have a board of which more than half are current clients of the center who demographically represent the population that the center serves.

Overall, the trend in public administration has been toward centralization and expertise. Based on data collected by Elinor Ostrom, I estimate that the proportion of Americans who serve on any public board has declined by three quarters since the mid-20th century, due to consolidation of public authorities and the replacement of elected offices with professional positions. This means that we have lost powerful educative experiences for our citizens. At the same time, our public institutions have grown remote and distrusted, and we have missed the energies and ideas of people not deemed to be “experts.”

Controlling health care costs is a classic “wicked problem,” involving complex, interconnected systems, rapid and unpredictable change, valid but conflicting values and interests, and misaligned motives. In general, wicked problems are best addressed by decentralizing control and empowering mixed groups of people, including those most affected by the problem. The administration’s support for Federally Qualified Health Centers promotes this populist approach and deserves recognition.

Matt Leighninger on a vital moment

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You should read Matt Leighninger’s paper for the Bertelsmann Foundation, “Vitalizing Democracy Through Public Participation: A Vital Moment” (pdf). Here are some quotes to give a flavor, but the whole argument is important:

    Obama was educated in the same community organizing tradition that has influenced the broader evolution of democratic governance and local politics. His campaign speeches were full of civic language. “I won’t just ask for your vote as a candidate; I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am president of the United States,” Obama said while campaigning in Iowa. “This will not be a call issued in one speech or program; this will be a cause of my presidency.”

But …

    The confusion and unexplored questions about the Obama administration’s approach to governance have been evident from the beginning. Soon after the 2008 election, tensions arose around the fate of Obama for America, the campaign?s vast infrastructure of organizers and volunteers (and the massive database of email addresses they built). Amidst strident objections from people like Marshall Ganz, the longtime community organizer who helped direct the campaign, Obama for America was renamed Organizing for America (OfA) and incorporated into the Democratic Party.

    This shift in the mission of OfA reflected one vision of active citizenship: At least some leaders within the White House saw participation activities primarily as a vehicle for encouraging citizens to support the president?s legislative agenda. …

    While the fate of OfA was being debated in the months after the election, another set of administration staffers was experimenting with online tools to solicit ideas for how the president should govern. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) initiated an online brainstorming session aimed at producing a “Citizen’s Briefing Book,” engaging thousands of people in developing and prioritizing policy proposals. The effort generated negative publicity when the two policy ideas with the most votes turned out to be the legalization of marijuana and a request for an investigation into whether Obama had in fact been born abroad (which would make him ineligible to serve as president). …

    These online participation efforts embody a somewhat different vision of citizenship: the citizen as a consumer and analyst of online data, who then uses that information to formulate new proposals for how government should function.

    A third conception of citizenship evident in the White House is the vision of the citizen as volunteer. Soon after taking office, the president signed the Kennedy Serve America Act, which tripled the size of AmeriCorps and provided opportunities for 250,000 Americans – mostly young people – to serve for one year as volunteers in various charitable causes. …

    These three visions of citizenship – as legislative supporter, as online data-consumer and as volunteer – are being advanced by three different sets of people within the Obama administration, and their formulas for democracy reform rarely seem to intersect. One reason for the success of the Obama campaign may have been that it offered all three opportunities for active citizenship, combined in the same structure and the same experience. Without that holistic appeal, the administration has lost much of the power of its message about democracy, and much of the civic momentum it generated during the campaign.

Wilentz v. Ganz on the Obama social movement

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During the 2008 presidential primary campaign, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz was a strong backer of Hillary Clinton and critic of Barack Obama. He launched many debating points. For example, the Obama Campaign allegedly showed “indifference–and at times, even pride” about the fact that white working class voters were opposing Obama in the primary. Wilentz predicted “a Democratic disaster among working-class white voters in November should Obama be the nominee.” Obama was supposedly the anti-political candidate, the heir of goo-goo reformers like Adlai Stevenson and Jimmy Carter, whereas Hilary Clinton, like Franklin Roosevelt, relished partisan combat and understood how to pass legislation. When she insisted on the importance of elected national leaders in the civil rights struggle, she was correct about history, and her critics were just playing the race card by claiming that the movement had achieved its victories at the grassroots.

And now Wilentz gets his chance to say, “I told you so.” His recent New Republic piece is headlined, “Live By the Movement, Die By the Movement: Obama’s doomed theory of politics.” “Clearly,” he writes, “the hopes and dreams that propelled Obama to the White House are in disarray. The social movement politics that some of his most fervent followers ascribed to him–the idea of electing a ‘post-partisan’ president as the leader not of a nation or even of a political party but of a personalized social movement–has failed.” Wilentz names Marshall Ganz as the source of this failed idea.

Of course, Ganz’ diagnosis is the precise opposite. A moral social movement, rooted in Democratic Party cadres and angry about conservative abuses, swept Obama into office over the technocratic Hillary Clinton and the fake populists McCain and Palin. But after Inauguration Day, Obama “chose to demobilize the movement that elected him president. By shifting focus from a public ready to drive change–as in ‘yes we can’–he shifted the focus to himself and attempted to negotiate change from the inside, as in ‘yes I can.'” In other words, there was no progressive social movement when it really counted, and that is why the president couldn’t make more headway on policy. President Obama actually governed the way Wilentz had hoped President Hillary Clinton would govern.

Wilentz writes:

    Fundamental to the social movement model is a conception of American political history in which movements, and not presidents, are the true instigators for change. Presidents are merely reactive. They are not the main protagonists. Obama himself endorsed this conception constantly on the campaign trail, and has repeated it often as president, proclaiming that ‘real change comes from the bottom up.’

But this theory was only one theme during the campaign, and a deeply submerged theme in the administration so far. Much more prominent is the idea that Wilentz seems to endorse: Democratic presidents solve our problems by negotiating and implementing smart policies. As I observed months ago, the President’s rhetoric has been subtly shifting from civic empowerment to a focus on his own personal leadership–from “we” to “I.” Seeking the nomination in Iowa, Barack Obama said, “I hold no illusions that one man or woman can do this alone.” More than two years later, responding to the Massachusetts Senate election, he said:

    So long as I have some breath in me, so long as I have the privilege of serving as your President, I will not stop fighting for you. I will take my lumps, but I won’t stop fighting to bring back jobs here. (Applause.) I won’t stop fighting for an economy where hard work is rewarded. I won’t stop fighting to make sure there’s accountability in our financial system. (Applause.) I’m not going to stop fighting until we have jobs for everybody.

Whether change comes from the grassroots up or from national leaders down is a worthy topic of debate. How the president should govern is certainly a worthy and difficult topic. But it’s important to get clear on the factual basis of the debate. First, the “post-partisan” and “anti-political” themes, if they were present at all in the campaign, have nothing to do with the embrace of a social movement and bottom-up change. The social movement that elected Barack Obama was partisan, political, and ideological. Second, the campaign and the administration never embraced Marshall Ganz’ strategies, except at the margins. Thus the Obama Administration’s first two years are no test of Ganz’ theory, which remains basically untried.

(I’ve never read Sean Wilentz’ historical writings and would surely learn from them. But I’ve been watching his public interventions for a long time and marking them as an example of a certain kind of elitist liberalism that contributes, in my view, to the weakness of the left. During the impeachment hearings of Bill Clinton, he lectured House Republicans, predicting that “history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness.” I was certainly against the impeachment, but I don’t think that professional historical expertise was particularly relevant to the decision, nor that Professor Wilentz could see into the future. To me his testimony rang of Ivy League disdain, an effort to make a particular moral worldview look like the only intelligent position. Ganz is certainly a moralist as well, but he respects and engages with the core moral commitments of other Americans.)

Obama, race, and democracy

I spent Friday and Saturday at an excellent conference on “Barack Obama and American Democracy.” It was organized by Tufts historian Peniel Joseph and drew a diverse group of scholars and students, predominantly experts on African American history, politics, and culture. The discussion was rich and complex: this Twitter feed offers a feel for it.

The question for the final panel was simply: What does Barack Obama mean for American democracy? I said it was too early to tell, but I would break the assessment into three parts.

1. Obama as policymaker will strengthen democracy if he makes government work better and more equitably. Compared to some of the other speakers who explicitly addressed his policymaking, I was more supportive. I think passing a health bill like the one now before Congress would be quite a remarkable achievement, relative to my expectations about what is possible.

2. Obama as political reformer would help fix some of the grievous structural and procedural problems with our democracy, such as campaign finance abuses and the indefensible misuse of the filibuster. Such issues did not figure much in the 2008 campaign, presumably because they were not popular causes then. Thus Obama has no mandate for procedural reforms. Besides, the executive branch has relatively little leverage over these matters (as compared to its leverage in appropriations and foreign policy). Yet demand for deep procedural reform could build in response to the deepening crisis of our institutions, in which case the Obama years may be an era of reform, even if that doesn’t originate in the White House.

3. “Democracy” also means the whole repertoire of civic and political acts undertaken by citizens. In many Americans’ minds, that repertoire has shrunk to occasional voting and noncontroversial service, and wealthier Americans dominate even those acts. Barack Obama understands the full range of civic action better than any occupant of the Oval Office: he has a record of practicing, teaching, and studying robust and innovative forms of citizenship. His campaign was notable for its creativity in promoting active citizenship. His administration so far has not advanced that cause, but it will be difficult to do so from the White House and I am happy to give the Obama team some time to find its way.

Finally, strengthening democracy means tackling the specific crises facing the African American community. After this weekend’s conference, I am more sensitive to the dilemmas of Black politics under the administration of the First Black President. African Americans in general are extremely supportive of Barack Obama and want to minimize criticism of him. That means that many are leery of directly advocating issues that disproportionately affect African Americans, lest they put the president in the position of having to pick between Black opinion and White opinion. Yet all other constituencies and interest groups feel free to make explicit demands.

Take health reform, for example. The best estimate (albeit with various caveats) finds that a lack of insurance causes 45,000 deaths in the United States each year. Twenty-five percent of adult African Americans lack health insurance, as compared to 15% of whites (source). Thus, in a sense, health reform is an “African American issue.” A moderately disproportionate share of the lives saved will be Black people’s lives.

On the other hand, if any individual or group seriously assessed the highest priorities for African Americans, I don’t think health insurance reform would make the top three. Sentencing reform, educational equity, and youth unemployment would top my list. But all of these issues are more divisive and more difficult for a Democratic president to address than health care is. If the president were White, African Americans and others concerned with Black issues would be pressing for reforms on those fronts. With Barack Obama in the White House, the pressure is muted, and that’s a problem.