Unequal to the Moment
Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama
By Eric Alterman, Nation Books, 214 pages, $14.99
Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House
By Richard Wolffe, Crown Publishers, 312 pages, $26.00
ROBERT KUTTNER | The American Prospect, February 7, 2011
How do we explain President Barack Obama's failure to rise to the challenge that history dealt him, and the inversion of a Franklin D. Roosevelt moment into a new period dominated by the corporate elite and the far right? After the epic 2010 midterm defeat, the optimistic scenario for progressives would be for a damaged Obama to squeak through to re-election in coalition with an almost certain Republican Congress. The pessimistic picture would be for Republicans to capture both branches. Either way, the national narrative increasingly blames government rather than market excesses for the economic catastrophe. And the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party stays in the wilderness for several more years.
Obama has already adapted to the Republican takeover of the House by moving further center-right. When he named as his new chief of staff Bill Daley, more a Wall Street lobbyist than a "business leader," Obama won praise from The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, all of whom want nothing so much as to destroy Obama's presidency. As our colleague Robert Reich recently observed, "Obama's failure is that he won't challenge this Republican narrative." He has governed as if his sole task were legislative, rather than seeking to move public opinion and thereby generating popular pressure for deeper reform.
The first batch of books from relatively friendly analysts of Obama's presidency falls into two broad categories. Some, like Jonathan Alter, Richard Wolffe, Bob Woodward, and David Remnick, were so taken with the man, his life odyssey, and his intellect and decency (as well as their access to him) that they cut him a huge amount of slack. He was, after all, facing a severe recession, the collapse of the financial sector, and a dysfunctional political system in which 41 determined senators could block any legislative action. Others, such as Ari Berman, emphasized the fragmented Democratic Party but also faulted Obama's failure to convert a campaign movement into a governing strategy.
Eric Alterman has single-handedly created a third category in his important new book, Kabuki Democracy. This short volume, an elaboration of an influential essay that he published last year in The Nation, is surprisingly kind to Obama--maybe a little too kind--and instead takes systematic stock of structural barriers to American progressivism. Others have worked this territory, but Alterman goes well beyond the standard checklist (big money, the filibuster, right-wing media) and gives us a more complete and depressing grid.
The Beltway view of Obama, Alterman reminds us, is that he just tried to do too much--"moving policy too far left, sparking an equal and opposite reaction in the rightward direction," as Alterman quotes Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib. The far right simply brands him a socialist. This talk drives progressives nuts, given Obama's rather modest and conciliatory approach to everything from economic stimulus to banking reform and health overhaul. For the left, Obama quickly gave up inspirational change in favor of small-bore deal-making. But all of this is mostly beside the point, according to Alterman.
For the truth, dear reader, is that it does not much matter who is right about what Barack Obama dreams of in his political imagination. Nor are the strategic mistakes made by the Obama team really all that crucial, except perhaps at the margins of any given policy. The far more important fact for progressive purposes is simply this: the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.
Alterman then takes stock of all the ways in which the system is rigged, and it's quite a tour d'horizon. Hence his book's title: "If our politicians cannot keep the promises they make as candidates, then our commitment to political democracy becomes a kind of Kabuki exercise"--whose failure to deliver only depresses faith in government and in democracy itself, further weakening progressivism, which depends on both.
Some of this will be familiar--the time bombs left by the Bush-Cheney presidency; the weakness and ideological division within the Democratic Party compared to the GOP ("conservatives enjoy a genuine political movement"); the multiple tools and uses of legislative obstructionism; the increasing dominance of big money; and, of course, the asymmetric power of right-wing media. Though we've read some of this before, Alterman's contribution is to add new insights and to connect more dots, since all of these dynamics are mutually reinforcing. His richest chapter is the one on the area he knows best--right-wing media.
I have two quibbles with this very useful and readable book. First, Alterman is too gentle on Obama's plainly disappointing leadership and strategic style. Why, he asks, wasn't the health legislation stronger? "Well, it wasn't the president's cowardice, his short-sightedness, a lack of character or an absence of cojones. ... Without powerful interests lined up on Obama's side, the battle for reform would have been lost before it had begun. As it was, Obama won it by the skin of his teeth."
But that static view of the array of political forces lets Obama off the hook too easily, because it ignores the unique role--or absence--of presidential leadership in occasionally transforming public opinion. You could have written a book similar to Alterman's about all of the structural forces arrayed against Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933 or against Lyndon Johnson's efforts to finally enact civil-rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. But somehow these leaders rose to the occasion and broke through, with their potent combination of insider leadership, mobilization of public opinion, and alliance with social movements on the ground.
The second weakness is what my friend, the late Bennett Harrison, called "the Chapter 10 problem"--what do we do about this depressing picture? Alterman's concluding chapter offers the right Hail Mary passes--build a movement, leash political money, reform Senate obstructionism--but is short on what it would take politically to bring them about. As consolation, he quotes Obama, speaking after the 2010 election loss: "It took time to free the slaves. It took time for women to get the vote. It took time for workers to get the right to organize." Well, yes, but leaders of those radical movements detested lectures about patience and gradualism. And they required allies in government who did not set back their cause.
Alterman's is the opposite of an insider book. It reflects a smart synthesis of materials available on the public record and displays the mind of an astute observer of politics. Richard Wolffe, by contrast, has written the ultimate insider book. After his fawning treatment of the Obama campaign in his earlier book, Renegade, Obama and his aides allowed Wolffe the run of the White House for two months and then gave him several additional interviews with every senior West Wing official from the president and vice president on down. They will not be disappointed by the resulting book, though other readers should be.
With this sort of access, a journalist can complement his insider interviews with other reporting and deliver a telling account. Or he can mainly hope to be invited back. Wolffe chose the latter course. You would think such a book would produce new insights on how the Obama White House works--the fault lines and the strengths and weaknesses of Obama's leadership. What it produces mainly is adorable quotations, such as this one from adviser David Axelrod speaking of his leader: "He's the first person to be concerned if you're having a bad day. He's attuned to people's moods in ways you don't expect."
Wolffe concludes his narrative just after Obama's come-from-behind win on health reform. So his is a story of defeat and redemption, or as he puts it, "From the depths of a brutal winter inside the Oval Office to the beginnings of spring in the Rose Garden, this is a tale of despair and discovery, or survival and revival." Unfortunately for Wolffe's story line (and for the country), the win on health care was prologue to another roller-coaster descent into the political pit.
In order to create some dramatic tension, Wolffe divides Obama's top aides into "revivalists" and "survivalists." The former, according to his interviews, wanted to rekindle something of the insurgent spirit of the campaign, while the latter were more minimalist and transactional. Clearly the ultimate leader of the survivalist camp is the president himself. Wolffe's quotations, both attributed and anonymous, are mostly predictable, pedestrian, and often just plain lame. After a period of bitter tension between Obama and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Wolffe credulously quotes the president on their blissful relationship: "'I don't think Nancy is difficult to negotiate with at all," he told me. "I think that Nancy is very mindful that she is leader of her caucus. ... I actually had fun negotiating with Nancy.'" Since he is embedded in the White House, Wolffe evidently doesn't pursue Pelosi's side of the story. His story is reconstructed from White House staff interviews and press clips.
What passes for analysis is poorly written, almost like filler between the quotations of extended interviews. For example, Wolffe reports a sense of crisis when CIA agents were lured into a trap and killed in the Afghan mountains near Pakistan. He then writes: "Would the Afghan attack weaken the president's will to reform a failed system to defend the homeland? He seemed to veer between challenging the intelligence community and threatening the terrorists." Say what?
One can fault other insider books, such as those of Bob Woodward, for also being too soft on their willing collaborators. But at least Woodward manages to break news. Not Wolffe. The most interesting few pages come in the section on Larry Summers, who was evidently even more of a bull in a china shop than previously reported. "Summers," Wolffe writes, "clashed with almost every other member of the economic team and his love of contrarian argument seemed to aggravate technical policy differences." The book is worth reading, mainly for the occasional nugget, but sheds little useful light on what makes this president tick.
Everyone has heard of the Great Man theory of history. But what about the Lesser Man theory? Historians will long be debating the relative weight of systemic constraints versus Obama's personal weakness as a leader, in what is shaping up as one of American history's epic missed moments. Alterman, at least, is asking the right questions.
Reviews of When Presidents Lie
Washington Monthly (November, 2004)
The Boston Globe (10/24/2004)
The Boston Phoenix (09/24/2004)
St. Louis Post Dispatch (09/19/2004)
Los Angeles Times Book Review
September 26, 2004
Tripped up by the truth
When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, Eric Alterman, Viking: 448 pp., $27.95
By Jon Meacham, Jon Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek, is the author of "Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship."
On the evening of Nov. 30, 1943 -- a late autumn Tuesday in Tehran -- Winston Churchill, flanked by Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin, was celebrating his 69th birthday. It was the final night of the first wartime conference of the Big Three, and it had been a tumultuous few days as the Allied leaders fought over the timing of a cross-Channel invasion and the shape of a postwar United Nations. But at the table, as the champagne and wine flowed, there was much candor and good cheer in the dining room at the British legation. Amid many toasts, the talk turned to deception schemes designed to mislead the Germans about plans for Operation Overlord. "In wartime," Churchill said, "truth is so precious that she should always be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies."
Though Churchill's aphorism from this long-ago night has often been cited to justify all sorts of deceptions, it is important to remember the context: He was talking about deploying falsehoods to protect a military operation, with lives at immediate stake. He was not proposing that a democracy routinely resort to lying to perpetuate itself. Yet the evocative "bodyguard of lies" is one of those phrases that now gives politicians convenient Churchillian cover when they choose to mislead the people.
Churchill, then, is something of a victim of his own eloquence, but in the long run an expression's currency is more important than its coinage, since it is in its usage that it reaches from the past to shape the present. Is lying inextricably bound up with statecraft? Are democracy and deception ultimately compatible? When do the ends justify the means -- and who decides? These are ancient questions. (It was an exasperated Pontius Pilate, after all, who muttered, "What is truth?" amid the trial of Jesus.) Into this perennial debate -- one made more urgent by the intelligence disasters on the road to the war with Iraq -- comes a provocative, intriguing and insightful new book by Eric Alterman, "When Presidents Lie." Alterman, a combatant in the partisan wars of the moment (a columnist for the Nation and co-author of "The Book on Bush: How George W. [Mis]leads America"), takes a broad, complex and satisfying view in his latest work, examining four cases of deception by U.S. presidents in the 20th century. He chooses well: FDR, Truman and Yalta; JFK and the Cuban missile crisis; LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin; Reagan and Iran-Contra. In Alterman's parlance, a lie is "presidential dishonesty about key matters of state," and such lies, he says, are "ultimately and invariably self-destructive." Acknowledging that we live in the real world, he notes that leaders should use confidentiality, not mendacity, to protect the state. "Keeping a secret," Alterman writes, "is not the same as telling a lie." His eye is on deceptions about policy. His prescription for the presidency: Lying "should be avoided at all costs. Period."
Before the Bush-obsessed left leaps to its collective feet to applaud, though, it should know that Alterman's case is more subtle than the conspiracist-minded Michael Moore wing of the American political class would probably like. Granting that a certain amount of deception is necessary in the presidency, Alterman goes far beyond moral finger-wagging -- in fact he purposely avoids moral judgments altogether -- to assess large lies about large things, from the Crimea in 1945 to Iraq in 2003. He argues that Roosevelt and Truman, not Stalin, initially failed to live up to the promises made at Yalta, particularly on the question of a postwar Polish government. The resulting disintegration of Big Three relations, Alterman writes, helped press Stalin to take a tougher line and, in the end, led to a prevailing Western impression that "no American president could or should trust any Communist leader to keep his word on any matter of mutual interest. When problems arose, they would be settled exclusively by the threat of force." Alterman's is an interesting revisionist view and, like many revisionist views, is open to argument on the details. (To think Stalin would have long remained a friendly kinsman in FDR's envisioned family of nations strains credulity, but Alterman makes a nuanced case that is worth weighing.)
His reading of the Cuban missile crisis connects Yalta with the Gulf of Tonkin and Vietnam. Hating to be seen as "soft," the Kennedys covered up the crucial step in the resolution of the standoff with the Soviets: the deal to remove American missile bases in Turkey in exchange for removing Moscow's nukes from Cuba. The public message: Compromise is for the weak. Alterman's conclusion: "The false rendering of the crisis taught President Johnson, his advisors, and the American people an updated version of the lesson that Harry Truman says he learned at Potsdam: 'Force is the only thing the Russians understand.' " In 1964, Johnson used the murky incident in the Gulf of Tonkin to escalate the U.S. military effort in Southeast Asia — even though it was unclear that American forces had been attacked. "I am not going to lose Vietnam," Johnson said, "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went." So the truth did not matter, the larger mission did, and Johnson sold the country a war on a false pretext. In a devastating chapter on Iran-Contra, Alterman details the Reagan administration's march of folly in Central America — a case study in the imperial presidency run amok. Citing the false claims that justified the war with Iraq, Alterman dubs the current Bush administration a "post-truth" White House. I might quibble with that phrasing: Bush is a theological president, one who believes in a truth that may or may not be supported by facts.
One of the more chilling points Alterman makes is that presidents tend to lie not only to us but also to themselves, convincing themselves of things that may not comport with the facts. We all do this in our own minds, recasting uncomfortable or inconvenient feelings or events in a more flattering light — doctoring, in a way, the scripts of the movies that play in our heads. But when presidents rewrite unfolding history, there are real, lasting and frequently adverse consequences. Ideally there would be no deceit in a democracy, for a public armed with disinformation cannot make intelligent political decisions. But we do not live in an ideal world. The best we can hope for, it seems, is that the people we choose to lead us will understand that, in the end, history rewards presidents who concentrate on saving lives rather than saving face.
Alterman argues concisely and well, if sometimes a bit too clinically. At the heart of each of the lies he delineates with such skill and clarity is the human tragedy of a man or men struggling to lead the nation through what George Eliot called the "dim lights and tangled circumstance" of life. Captive to their experiences, bound to the devices and desires of their own hearts, consumed by their own needs, they made mistakes and the rest of us paid for them. Still, these were good and even great men, and in each case one can see why they did what they did. We now know Yalta as the last act of the war, but Roosevelt did not, obviously, since his essential sense of invulnerability did not allow him to contemplate his own death. FDR may have left the Crimea with a bad deal for Poland, but he believed he could make things come right in the end, and he usually did. The Kennedys were understandably sensitive to being portrayed as soft on a totalitarian foe: Their father, after all, had wrecked his own political and diplomatic career by appeasing the Third Reich just 20 years earlier. Johnson recoiled at the idea of losing a war that he thought JFK would have won. And Reagan dwelled so much in his own imagination that America had to take the good with the bad. The good was Reagan's romantic belief that he could defeat communism like a heroic movie star; the bad was that he let his vision of reality, rather than reality itself, color the course of his government.
Is Alterman's prescription for the presidency -- never lie, period -- practical? Even with the distinction he draws between lying and keeping secrets, I don't think so. But I admire Alterman for doing about the only thing one can to further the cause of truth in a world riven with deceit: explain the failings of the past to the powers of the present in the hope that example will do more good than exhortation. Stories are almost always more effective than sermons, and the stories Alterman tells in "When Presidents Lie" are important reading for the men and women making the life-and-death decisions of our own time. 