[BwayDems] Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics

[Paula Diamond Roman]

Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics 
The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall 
Street, and independents think he's a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the 
president may just end up outsmarting them all.  by Andrew Sullivan   | January 16, 2012 12:00 AM EST
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sullivan-how-obama-s-long-game-will-outsmart-his-critics.html
  


You hear it everywhere. Democrats are disappointed in the president. 
Independents have soured even more. Republicans have worked themselves 
up into an apocalyptic fervor. And, yes, this is not exactly unusual. 


A president in the last year of his first term will always get attacked 
mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier 
members of his base. And when unemployment is at remarkably high levels, and with the national debt setting records, the criticism will—and 
should be—even fiercer. But this time, with this president, something 
different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques 
of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The 
attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies 
aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.


A caveat: I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. I did not 
expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already, thank you very much. And there have been many times when I have disagreed with decisions Obama 
has made—to drop the Bowles-Simpson debt commission, to ignore the war 
crimes of the recent past, and to launch a war in Libya without Congress’s sanction, to cite three. But given the enormity of 
what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains 
simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right 
and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term 
outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, 
in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original 
election in 2008.

The right’s core case is that Obama has governed as a radical leftist 
attempting a “fundamental transformation” of the American way of life. 
Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of 
wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing 
in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the 
real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. 
According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America 
and an empty suit who couldn’t run a business, let alone a country.The Case Against Liberal Despair: Michelle Goldberg issues a 
reality check to those liberal activists who now despair electoral 
politics, Obama and the squalid compromises of governing.


Leave aside the internal incoherence—how could such an incompetent be a 
threat to anyone? None of this is even faintly connected to reality—and 
the record proves it. On the economy, the facts are these. When Obama 
took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. 
The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 
percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial 
system, and unemployment and debt—lagging indicators—were about to soar 
even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the 
next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment. 
Economies take time to shift course.
But Obama did several things at once: he continued the bank bailout begun 
by George W. Bush, he initiated a bailout of the auto industry, and he 
worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.


All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The 
job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not 
enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 
280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has 
declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop 
of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To 
listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government 
socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment 
down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition 
economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent 
prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely 
because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only 
shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical 
miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) 
and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a 
spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.


You’d think, listening to the Republican debates, that Obama has raised 
taxes. Again, this is not true. Not only did he agree not to sunset the 
Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered 
taxes on most Americans. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, affecting 95 percent of taxpayers; he has cut the payroll tax, and recently had 
to fight to keep it cut against Republican opposition. His spending 
record is also far better than his predecessor’s. Under Bush, new 
policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 
trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have 
added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense 
discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama. Again: 
imagine Bush had been a Democrat and Obama a Republican. You could 
easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative 
than his predecessor—except, of course, that Obama has had to govern 
under the worst recession since the 1930s, and Bush, after the 2001 
downturn, governed in a period of moderate growth. It takes work to 
increase the debt in times of growth, as Bush did. It takes much more 
work to constrain the debt in the deep recession Bush bequeathed Obama.


The great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than 
its critics have claimed. The Congressional Budget Office has projected 
it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s 
unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the 
individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage 
Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It 
does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the 
drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also 
pioneered by the right. It’s to the right of the Clintons’ monstrosity 
in 1993, and remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal. Its passage 
did not preempt recovery efforts; it followed them. It needs improvement in many ways, but the administration is open to further reform and has 
agreed to allow states to experiment in different ways to achieve the 
same result. It is not, as Romney insists, a one-model, top-down 
prescription. Like Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative, it sets standards, grants incentives, and then allows individual states to 
experiment. Embedded in it are also a slew of cost-reduction pilot 
schemes to slow health-care spending. Yes, it crosses the Rubicon of 
universal access to private health care. But since federal law mandates 
that hospitals accept all emergency-room cases requiring treatment 
anyway, we already obey that socialist principle—but in the most 
inefficient way possible. Making 44 million current free-riders pay into the system is not fiscally reckless; it is fiscally prudent. It is, 
dare I say it, conservative.


On foreign policy, the right-wing critiques have been the most unhinged. 
Romney accuses the president of apologizing for America, and others all 
but accuse him of treason and appeasement. Instead, Obama reversed 
Bush’s policy of ignoring Osama bin Laden, immediately setting a course 
that eventually led to his capture and death. And when the moment for 
decision came, the president overruled both his secretary of state and 
vice president in ordering the riskiest—but most ambitious—plan on the 
table. He even personally ordered the extra helicopters that saved the 
mission. It was a triumph, not only in killing America’s primary global 
enemy, but in getting a massive trove of intelligence to undermine al 
Qaeda even further. If George Bush had taken out bin Laden, wiped out al Qaeda’s leadership, and gathered a treasure trove of real intelligence 
by a daring raid, he’d be on Mount Rushmore by now. But where Bush 
talked tough and acted counterproductively, Obama has simply, quietly, 
relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader 
propaganda war. Since he took office, al Qaeda’s popularity in the 
Muslim world has plummeted.

Obama’s foreign policy, like Dwight Eisenhower’s or George H.W. Bush’s, eschews short-term political hits for long-term strategic advantage. It is 
forged by someone interested in advancing American interests—not 
asserting an ideology and enforcing it regardless of the consequences by force of arms. By hanging back a little, by “leading from behind” in 
Libya and elsewhere, Obama has made other countries actively seek 
America’s help and reappreciate our role. As an antidote to the bad 
feelings of the Iraq War, it has worked close to perfectly.


But the right isn’t alone in getting Obama wrong. While the left is less 
unhinged in its critique, it is just as likely to miss the screen for 
the pixels. From the start, liberals projected onto Obama absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country, where 
anything requires 60 Senate votes even to stand a chance of making it 
into law. They have described him as a hapless tool of Wall Street, a 
continuation of Bush in civil liberties, a cloistered elitist unable to 
grasp the populist moment that is his historic opportunity. They rail 
against his attempts to reach a Grand Bargain on entitlement reform. 
They decry his too-small stimulus, his too-weak financial reform, and 
his too-cautious approach to gay civil rights. They despair that he 
reacts to rabid Republican assaults with lofty appeals to unity and 
compromise.


They miss, it seems to me, two vital things. The first is the simple scale 
of what has been accomplished on issues liberals say they care about. A 
depression was averted. The bail-out of the auto industry 
was—amazingly—successful. Even the bank bailouts have been repaid to a 
great extent by a recovering banking sector. The Iraq War—the issue that made Obama the nominee—has been ended on time and, vitally, with no 
troops left behind. Defense is being cut steadily, even as Obama has 
moved his own party away from a Pelosi-style reflexive defense of all 
federal entitlements. Under Obama, support for marriage equality and 
marijuana legalization has crested to record levels. Under Obama, a 
crucial state, New York, made marriage equality for gays an irreversible fact of American life. Gays now openly serve in the military, and the 
Defense of Marriage Act is dying in the courts, undefended by the Obama 
Justice Department. Vast government money has been poured into noncarbon energy investments, via the stimulus. Fuel-emission standards have been drastically increased. Torture was ended. Two moderately liberal women 
replaced men on the Supreme Court. Oh, yes, and the liberal holy grail 
that eluded Johnson and Carter and Clinton, nearly universal health 
care, has been set into law. Politifact recently noted that of 508 
specific promises, a third had been fulfilled and only two have not had 
some action taken on them. To have done all this while simultaneously 
battling an economic hurricane makes Obama about as honest a 
follow-through artist as anyone can expect from a politician.


What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a 
show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to 
him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit 
for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for 
dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his 
Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to 
move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of “don’t ask, 
don’t tell” was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen. This took time—as did his painstaking change in the rule barring HIV-positive immigrants and 
tourists—but the slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner in which 
it was accomplished made the changes more durable. Not for the first 
time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long 
view. Because he does.

Or take the issue of the banks. Liberals have derided him as a captive of 
Wall Street, of being railroaded by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner into a too-passive response to the recklessness of the major U.S. banks. But 
it’s worth recalling that at the start of 2009, any responsible 
president’s priority would have been stabilization of the financial 
system, not the exacting of revenge. Obama was not elected, despite 
liberal fantasies, to be a left-wing crusader. He was elected as a 
pragmatic, unifying reformist who would be more responsible than Bush.


And what have we seen? A recurring pattern. To use the terms Obama first 
employed in his inaugural address: the president begins by extending a 
hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he 
demonstrates that they are the source of the problem; then, finally, he 
moves to his preferred position of moderate liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an ideologue or a divider. This 
kind of strategy takes time. And it means there are long stretches when 
Obama seems incapable of defending himself, or willing to let others to 
define him, or simply weak. I remember those stretches during the 
campaign against Hillary Clinton. I also remember whose strategy won out in the end.


This is where the left is truly deluded. By misunderstanding Obama’s 
strategy and temperament and persistence, by grandstanding on one issue 
after another, by projecting unrealistic fantasies onto a candidate who 
never pledged a liberal revolution, they have failed to notice that from the very beginning, Obama was playing a long game. He did this with his own party over health-care reform. He has done it with the Republicans 
over the debt. He has done it with the Israeli government over stopping 
the settlements on the West Bank—and with the Iranian regime, by not 
playing into their hands during the Green Revolution, even as they 
gunned innocents down in the streets. Nothing in his first 
term—including the complicated multiyear rollout of universal health 
care—can be understood if you do not realize that Obama was always 
planning for eight years, not four. And if he is reelected, he will have won a battle more important than 2008: for it will be a mandate for an 
eight-year shift away from the excesses of inequality, overreach abroad, and reckless deficit spending of the last three decades. It will 
recapitalize him to entrench what he has done already and make it 
irreversible.

Yes, Obama has waged a war based on a reading of executive power that many 
civil libertarians, including myself, oppose. And he has signed into law the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial (even as he 
pledged never to invoke this tyrannical power himself). But he has done 
the most important thing of all: excising the cancer of torture from 
military detention and military justice. If he is not reelected, that 
cancer may well return. Indeed, many on the right appear eager for it to return.


Sure, Obama cannot regain the extraordinary promise of 2008. We’ve already 
elected the nation’s first black president and replaced a tongue-tied 
dauphin with a man of peerless eloquence. And he has certainly failed to end Washington’s brutal ideological polarization, as he pledged to do. 
But most Americans in polls rightly see him as less culpable for this 
impasse than the GOP. Obama has steadfastly refrained from waging the 
culture war, while the right has accused him of a “war against 
religion.” He has offered to cut entitlements (and has already cut 
Medicare), while the Republicans have refused to raise a single dollar 
of net revenue from anyone. Even the most austerity-driven government in Europe, the British Tories, are to the left of that. And it is this 
Republican intransigence—from the 2009 declaration by Rush Limbaugh that he wants Obama “to fail” to the Senate Majority Leader Mitch 
McConnell’s admission that his primary objective is denying Obama a 
second term—that has been truly responsible for the deadlock. And the 
only way out of that deadlock is an electoral rout of the GOP, since the language of victory and defeat seems to be the only thing it 
understands.


If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, 
not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with 
grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises 
not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet 
has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once 
wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, 
record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they 
were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather 
than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.
  
©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
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