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Saturday, April 09, 2011

In the Coming Crises We Will Need Much More Drama from Obama

The first -- and, mind you, by far the easiest -- of the three government shutdown crises made inevitable in the year 2011 by the frankly idiotic mid-term election gains of Republicans in this most nihilist phase of their life as a party would seem to have been averted. Now, two more shutdown crises continue to loom as the nation confronts the necessity of raising its debt ceiling and then the necessity of coming up with its next budget.

By the way, one hesitates to describe entirely as an "aversion of crisis" last night's eventual resolution of a hostage crisis by GOP gangsters involving billions upon billions in spending cuts that harm always only the most suffering and vulnerable of our fellow citizens in a time of extreme economic distress while the incompetents and criminals responsible for that distress are rolling in dough (a state of affairs glibly designated as "shared sacrifice" by privileged pundits and politicos who seem to think cruelty is "courageous," magical market thinking is "seriousness," and who apparently never met an injury that didn't call out for the instant addition of an insult), especially given the fact that in an extreme recession aching to double-dip a nation caught in a liquidity trap what is wanted above all is the opposite of yesterday's actual result, what is wanted is stimulative spending and not depressive spending cuts.

Be all that as it may, economically illiterate and brutally cruel Republican cuts have been made in exchange for which the Republicans have kindly permitted the government they so crow about despising to continue to exist for a day.

Meanwhile, their warm gun remains unhappily aimed at our nation's temple and the hostage-crisis resumes for a threatened refusal to raise the debt ceiling, which, were it to occur, would of course prompt a new and needless global economic crisis and proclaim to the world the faithlessness and discredit of an American Republic beholden to the Randroidal Teatards of Movement Republicanism just in case anybody in the world has failed to notice this rather flabbergasting state of affairs already.

Needless to say, doll-eyed dolt Randroid Ryan's neo-feudalizing Medicare dismantlement proposal -- no doubt to be peddled as the Rainbow Brite Job-Bonanzification Magic Money-Tree Basket of Puppies Budget Act of 2011 -- will be the next occasion for Democrats to compromise sanity in the face of the now usual Republican berserker-choir of barking and bullets and blood-letting.

Although Ryan's early roll-out of his immiserating and hallucinating proposals did seem to inspire some fight in Nancy Pelosi and some other Democrats, I remain chilled to the bone by the spectacle of the Administration's pre-emptive accession to the economically false and morally reprehensible Republican framing of the deficit as first and most of all a profligate spending problem and Obama's subsequent "no drama" ascension to a space "above the fray" of congressional budgetary skirmishing. This created a near-empty space in which all that false reprehensible GOP framing endlessly ramified with what seem to me disastrous results even if the disaster of a government shutdown itself (in which GOP ideology would be subjected to devastating scrutiny along with many other, more terrible, consequences) was averted.

It may be that this hands-off strategy exposed the extreme fractiousness of the Republican caucus and revealed their vile hand ahead of the larger battles to come, but for that to be true requires an engaged, fighting Obama getting out ahead of the utterly predictable Republican talking points and gambits and framing these looming battles in terms congenial to Democratic priorities.

To the extent that Obama has begun his 2012 campaign, and hitherto Obama the campaigner has had more fight in him than has Obama the elected executive has seemed to, this is faintly encouraging but far from the pudding where the proof is. We have need of a bullhorn if not an actual bully at the bully pulpit in the months to come, and Obama cannot afford to be "above the fray" in the fights to come, not for a moment.

Unless No Drama Obama gets a Mo Drama makeover, we're all in the soup.

Many elected officials seem to me still to underestimate the present nihilist mood of the GOP (no doubt because many of them fail to grasp the extent to which unadulterated market pieties with which they still sympathize in qualified forms themselves in their bubbles of privilege actually really are indistinguishable from nihilism), and think there is no really and for true chance that Republicans won't raise the debt ceiling given the consequences, and I think this is a profound and perilous underestimation of the level of ignorance and bile driving the GOP at the moment.

Randroid Ryan's advocacy of the dismantlement of equitable civilization as some kind of fucked up holy cause calls forth a teachable moment in which a certain charismatic President I know must speak in simple straightforward terms about the contrary cause of Democrats who believe in equity, diversity, consent, and investment in the institutions and services without which equity, diversity, and consent languish and all but the richest of the rich suffer in vain.

These are dramatic times, with dramatic stakes, and dramatic dangers are looming. None of us can sit this one out, whether you are a disappointed progressive contemplating sitting out upcoming election contests and indulging demoralizing loose-talk of Republican-Democratic equivalences, or you are an opportunistic (not always the same thing as pragmatic, by the way) legacy-minded President with a temperamental tendency to mediate disputes on terms set by others when your responsibility, in large part, is to take a hand in setting them in the spirit of the people who put you where you are.

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