Authors lament how Obama compromised too much, left working class behind

Bill Press, a liberal radio and television host, has written “Buyer’s Remorse,” a distillation of the Obama years that comes down to “yes, but.” Yes, President Barack Obama got a stimulus bill through Congress, but it was too small. Yes, he passed the Affordable Care Act, but he punted on the public option. Yes, he signed the Dodd-Frank Act, but he left Wall Street’s power largely intact.

Yes, Obama ended torture as a tool of U.S. national security, but he didn’t prosecute any high-ranking officials responsible for it. Yes, he made history as the first black president, but he spoke out only reluctantly on racial injustice. Yes, he ended the war in Iraq, but he’s getting sucked into a new conflict there. Yes, he raised crazy money for Democratic candidates, but the House and the Senate went Republican on his watch. “The transformative new era of leadership Obama promised never happened,” Press laments. “His presidency looms as a huge opportunity wasted.”

While Press details everything Obama has done to disappoint him, political historian Thomas Frank is more interested in why the president disappoints. It’s not that Obama has abandoned liberalism; it’s that liberalism has abandoned the working class.

Over the past four decades, Frank argues in his new book, “Listen, Liberal,” the Democrats have embraced a new favorite constituency: the professional class — the doctors, lawyers, engineers, programmers, entrepreneurs, artists, writers, financiers and other so-called creatives whose fetish for academic credentials and technological innovation has infected the party of the working class. Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, is a member in excellent standing of this class and a natural protector of it.

“When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people — when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people — issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns,” Frank concludes.

Together the authors offer an early postmortem on the Obama presidency and a bleak, bitter vision of where liberal elites are taking the Democratic Party. In the 2016 campaign, anger and disappointment are not the sole province of the right. Some of this disappointment is inevitable.

“Let’s be honest: Liberals, as a group, are never satisfied,” Press admits. “In our heart of hearts we let the great become the enemy of the good, and get too easily dismayed by half-measures.”

Still, he says, he’ll accept not getting 100 percent of what he wants, “as long as you fight like hell for that 100 percent before you compromise for much, much less.” The problem with Obama, Press contends, is that the president didn’t fight hard enough before settling; consensus-seeking and the endless pursuit of compromise were Obama’s default setting, particularly on economic policy.

“Determined to be the nation’s first ‘postpartisan president,’ he dove into deficit-cutting full bore, and spent much of the next two years in countless, pointless meetings with Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders, trying to negotiate a ‘balanced’ budget deal consisting of both new spending cuts and new revenue,” Press writes. It never happened, and Press says the energy wasted there could have furthered other liberal objectives.

Press goes after Obama for not doing more — and doing it right away — on climate change, immigration reform, labor rights and Guantanamo Bay. Of course when everything is a priority, nothing is, and Obama had to deal with the small matter of preventing another Great Depression. Press’ criticisms can come off a bit muddled, particularly on foreign policy, where he attacks the president for not using force in Syria, for using it in Libya, for not using enough of it against the Islamic State.

Frank acknowledges the power of intransigent congressional Republicans but insists Obama could have better used the executive branch to “do big and consequential things about inequality.”

While other liberal journalists, such as Politico’s Michael Grunwald, portray Obama as the second coming of FDR, Press and Frank linger on a June 2015 interview revealing Obama’s limited view of his own powers. “Sometimes the task of government is to make incremental improvements, or try to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south, so that 10 years from now, suddenly we’re in a very different place than we were,” Obama explained. “But at the time, at the moment, people may feel like, we need a 50-degree turn, we don’t need a 2-degree turn. … And you can’t turn 50 degrees.”

Or, to update the 2008 mantra: Yes, we can, but only a bit at a time, and it’s hard, so back off. There are electoral coalitions, and then there are governing ones. In their campaigns, Obama and the Democrats may reach out to unions, minority groups, millennials and other members of that “coalition of the ascendant” that is supposed to deliver Democratic presidents in perpetuity. But when it’s time for action, Frank writes, Democrats are in thrall to the elite, professional class.

By Obama’s second term, Silicon Valley had replaced Wall Street in the liberal imagination, campaign events and the revolving door of Washington. Now it’s all Google and Uber rather than Goldman and Citi, but the Democrats’ worship of disruptive innovation is just as detrimental to working-class interests as their respect for financial engineering, Frank cautions.

“Many of our most vaunted innovations are simply methods — electronic or otherwise — of pulling off some age-old profit-maximizing managerial maneuver by new and unregulated means.” So for those like Press who wonder why Obama and his team didn’t push harder for liberal causes, Frank offers a simple, damning possibility. “They didn’t believe in doing those things. … they didn’t want to do those things.”

In hindsight, of course, both authors think they should’ve seen all this coming. “It’s also possible — and fact, it’s altogether likely — that we fundamentally misread Barack Obama,” Press admits. Perhaps the candidate simply seemed liberal because Republicans had traveled so far right. “At best, he’s a bona fide centrist, or centrist-left,” he concludes.

And Frank blames himself for not realizing that Obama was more about consensus than confrontation. “After all, the magical healing properties of consensus had been one of the great themes of Obama’s pre-presidential career,” Frank notes, both in his famed 2004 Democratic National Convention speech and in “The Audacity of Hope,” his 2006 best-seller.

If you dare suggest that the Democratic Party must adapt to a changing global economy, or that the power of the presidency has been curtailed regardless of who inhabits the White House, you become part of the very mind-set the authors vilify. Even so, these books make a persuasive case that the other side has remade itself already, away from the causes that once defined it.

“Every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard,” Frank concludes. “This cannot go on.” It can.

Unless Bernie Sanders pulls off a miraculous resuscitation, the old Democratic Party is dead. Depending on where you stand in the 2016 campaign and the 2016 economy, it was either a noble death or a suicide.

This story was originally published March 26, 2016 at 4:40 AM with the headline "Authors lament how Obama compromised too much, left working class behind."