what are barack obama's flaws?

xpost
its like any social scene. "ex-":(wall street firm)::"ex-":(local indie rock band)

if Taibbi really wanted to play to his audience, he should ask them why their belief in Obama was just as superficial as most Bush supporters' belief in Bush. I feel better knowing Obama is in the White House than Bush but the fact that people are voting on projections and impressions and not on actual policy decisions means that if anyone who is elected actually gets anything substantive done, it will be pretty incidental to the rationale that allowed that person to be in the position to accomplish those things.

Taibbi is just justifying the ignorance that got us here, and incidentally marginalizing progressive voices who argued that this was going to happen in the first place by writing from the perspective of this "surprise" instead of from the perspective of "intelligent people knew this all along but you folks ignored them as if the only purpose of their alarmist viewpoints was to 'harsh your buzz'".

Yes, but these people probably are more useful than some one with no Wall Street background.

I should also add that many of those people worked in the Clinton administration which was a time of great prosperity.

Actually the Geithner/Obama connection goes back to Geithner's dad, who ran the Ford Foundation and was friends with/boss of Obama's mother.

I knew someone was going to make that analogy, cuz I've puzzled over it myself. The difference here, micheline, is that instead of one Joe Kennedy you have seventeen.

― Hell is other people. In an ILE film forum. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, December 12, 2009 4:22 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what?

omg ppl know each other

ive argued with gabbneb on the internet but i certainly hope that doesnt retard my future career options

im sympathetic to the idea that some of these dudes are philosophically not really helping things esp w/r/t employment numbers but i should hope u guys can come up w/ something a lil more specific -- say, motives -- instead of this guilt-by-association inference b.s.

im not saying this because i think there isnt any other reason, but because i would genuinely like to know if there is

I don't like seeing the "revolving door" in action between Wall Street and government - or between any regulated industry and government. It definitely creates an appearance of possible conflict of interest. And I do wish there was a better representation in among Obama's economic advisors of non-financial people - it would be nice to see more "real" business leaders in government. I mean people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and so on. However, I don't think that people like Larry Summers, Rahm Emmanuel or even Tim Geithner are really such Wall Street insiders as this article makes it sound. Yes, I know that Emmanuel and Summers both made a lot of money in brief stints at financial firms - but I wouldn't assume that they feel beholden to the industry in general because of that. They never spent a lot of time inside that culture. Geithner was always a government guy - a regulator. He's never worked for a Wall Street firm, as far as I know. He knows those guys, since he was their regulator, but I'm not sure he's really "one of them".

'OMG ppl know each other' is pretty much the tinder for Taibbi's box.

Remembering the primaries, I recall there was a ton of pressure for former members of Team Clinton to hold off on throwing their weight behind Obama while Hillary was still in play and people who were very young serving Clinton were getting the pitch hard from both sides.

yeah but for lefties "omg ppl know each other" when it's a repubican admin gets re-coded as "fuckin cronyism of the worst kind, backscratching/logrolling has no business in the public sphere, these ppl are shameless" etc etc

kinda gross imo

but of course the president is above all that, he doesn't even resemble every other politician ever in any way

um john cheney cutting deals for oil buddies isnt exactly the same thing

yeah but for lefties "omg ppl know each other" when it's a repubican admin gets re-coded as "fuckin cronyism of the worst kind, backscratching/logrolling has no business in the public sphere, these ppl are shameless" etc etc

kinda gross imo

That talk only occurred during the era of Bush II because it was true, i.e., Hurricane Katrina.

well cronyism of the worst kind is when you have some demonstrably unqualified bozo like michael brown or bernie kerik in a position of real responsibility solely because of who they know or how good they are at stroking their bosses' egos. cronyism of the not-worst-but-still-bad kind is when you choose demonstrably qualified people (which i think summers, geithner et all are) but you choose from a small, incestuous pool where everyone knows everyone and not enough diversity of experience or opinion is available. that's more like the obama econ model.

hellzapoppa,

The problem is groupthink not the fact that these people came from Wall Street.

is that really the case ? what happened to the team of rivals

xpost: the problem is both. but that's what i mean about diversity of experience and opinion.

J0hn, you really can't infer that I haven't worked out that Barack Obama's connections are similar to other politicians', so am wishing you wouldn't.

Yeah wrt Wall Street, in as much as you need poachers turned gamekeepers in an organization, you really shouldn't allow it to become a case of roulette players turned dealers.

the "team of rivals" idea seems much more true in foreign policy, where there does seem to be real debate and push and pull. and also, i think obama feels more confident in foreign policy, he understands it more, and so is maybe more comfortable presiding over a wide-ranging debate. economics is more of strange land to him, and that plus what seems like the summers-geithner combo's sharp elbows -- summers in particular is obviously a steamroller -- i think has hurt.

so with all that it'll be interesting to see who the next treasure secretary is, since that's a post that tends to rotate every 2 or 3 years. (jamie dimon? yikes.)

See, I am not econ-ish and really hate Summers for misogyny (but sometimes that's quite enough).

See, I am not econ-ish and really hate Summers for misogyny (but sometimes that's quite enough).

"These people know where the bodies are buried" = "We'll see the REAL Clinton in his second term!"

THEY ARE REFORMING FUCKING NOTHING.

we did see the real clinton in his second term -- a gladhanding incrementalist who couldn't keep it in his pants.

suzy I was more talking to deej for whom cronyism in the obama admin = "well of course, what are you, an idealist?" as vs. in a republican admin "oh this is some bullshit"

it is the same fucking bullshit.

Taibbi is just justifying the ignorance that got us here, and incidentally marginalizing progressive voices who argued that this was going to happen in the first place by writing from the perspective of this "surprise" instead of from the perspective of "intelligent people knew this all along but you folks ignored them as if the only purpose of their alarmist viewpoints was to 'harsh your buzz'"

I don't get this at all. Like I said earlier, Taibbi writes for readers of Rolling Stone, which put Obama 67888 times on its cover; moreover, he's explained the problems with subprime loans, hedge funds, and the erosion/extinction of Glass-Steagall better than anyone I read. That's why I called him a muckraker: he's a populist, and populists almost always use gaucheries and hysterical prose. Someone needs to point out these compromises with Crayolas, and he's done a damn fine job of it.

the "team of rivals" idea seems much more true in foreign policy, where there does seem to be real debate and push and pull. and also, i think obama feels more confident in foreign policy, he understands it more, and so is maybe more comfortable presiding over a wide-ranging debate. economics is more of strange land to him, and that plus what seems like the summers-geithner combo's sharp elbows -- summers in particular is obviously a steamroller -- i think has hurt.

i'm not so sure that Obama really is all that out-to-sea wr2 economics as all that. i remember throughout the campaign how he and his campaign people talked about how he'd developed ties w/ and adopted ideas from the University of Chicago -- not the right-wing/libertarian Milton Friedman-types, but folks like Goolsbee and Cass Sunstein (both of whom ARE in the Obama Administration) and Obama's interest in behavioral economics. i also think that it means something that there ARE folks w/n the Obama Administration who don't fall directly in line with the Geithner/Summers way of thinking (even if, for the moment, they've been pushed aside).

financial reform bill passed the house, the wh is pushing it cos the problems are, as always, in the senate

wr2 geithner, i keep the term "stockholm syndrome" in mind. no, he didn't work for Goldman Sachs and spent just about all of his formative years as a regulatory bureaucrat (so he isn't as directly conflicted as, say, paulson or anyone else who initially worked on Wall Street). but still, his job as a regulator meant that he was in regular contact w/ Wall Street folks and their way of thinking became very familiar (maybe TOO familiar) to him.

Digby posted this LRB shattering account of the Obama administration's record thus far.

Obama is sufficiently humane and sufficiently undeceived to take no pleasure in sending soldiers to their deaths for a futile cause.

Evidence, please.

Thanks for the LRB link, Alfred. I'm going to quote at length one of its paragraphs:

Malthus’s doctrine on population and the necessity of many living in adversity, Hazlitt wrote, was a gospel ‘preached to the poor’. Equality in the United States in the early 21st century has become a gospel preached by the liberal elite to a populace who feel they have no stake in equality. Since the Reagan presidency and the dismemberment of the labour unions, America has not known a popular voice against the privilege of the large corporations.

I just spent a couple of weeks with my American parents visiting me here in Paris. A number of strikes went on during their visit (and continue today): museum strikes, transportation strikes in the Ile de France. My parents were astonished that labor could still organize like that. My father, having lived in the deep South for twenty years now despite being an immigrant, assailed the strikers as typical examples of French laziness. I pressed him to justify the counterbelief that Americans work harder---an absurdly general claim, but I knew he was speaking incoherent thoughts. He's breathed in too much of Cheney. He blamed the security checks at the Orsay on "Arab terrorism", but had no answer to my questions about Timothy McVeigh's legacy. He is angry but he has no voice.

I don't know that technocrats can give voices to people without voices. But how else can the Left reach the people? Who else besides the technocrats do we have to offer? Obama offered us hope in this direction with his voice but as we all knew, this has been an overwhelmingly technocratic administration.

Yet without such a voice from below, all the benevolent programmes that can be theorised, lacking the ground note of genuine indignation, have turned into lumbering ‘designs’ espoused by the enlightened for moral reasons that ordinary people can hardly remember. The gambling ethic has planted itself deep in the America psyche – deeper now than it was in 1849 or 1928. Little has been inherited of the welfare-state doctrine of distributed risk and social insurance. The architects of liberal domestic policy, put in this false position, make easy prey for the generalised slander that says that all non-private plans for anything are hypocritical.

This is deep and insightful: "moral reasons that ordinary people can hardly remember". And it's the root of what ails us. In his Oslo speech this week Obama promoted "the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us." Have we as a nation ever believed this? A president can't reteach a nation to be moral: if this was ever possible for political leadership, it's not in our era. Leaders can tap into what's latent. I presently lack faith that a desire to care for others is latent in America's moral character at present. The Democratic technocratic dream is to care for others through public policy. Institutionalize caring. This is how the social security apparatus functions here in France. But that's not to change people's hearts; it's to permit hearts to remain hard while the needy are cared for anyway. America is not a Christian nation in the sense Obama hopes it is (not that it ever was). Our moral compass, such as it is, is aimed at our own material prosperity.

My hope for this administration was that it would, somehow, foster a sense of common purpose in the USA, that would allow some rebuilding of our moral compass away from the merely individual. It all rides on the "somehow". The smartest guys in the room can't figure out how to do that (not that most of them want to, anyway).

Matt Taibbi must be following this thread:

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/12/13/obamania/

suzy I was more talking to deej for whom cronyism in the obama admin = "well of course, what are you, an idealist?" as vs. in a republican admin "oh this is some bullshit"

it is the same fucking bullshit.

― a full circle lol (J0hn D.), Saturday, December 12, 2009 6:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

um, how is this what im saying?? im just asking for context so i dont have to just take it on faith that "lol dude worked in wall street -- ergo hes obviously totally corrupt & bad for america"-type shit. i dont care how justified it is, thats guilt-by-association as long as yr repeating it w/out actually explaining context etc

Brad DeLong has posted some fact-checking of several of Taibbi's assertions in that RS piece linked above. Apparently Taibbi fell prey to a case of mistaken identity: the James Rubin who was involved in the Obama economic staff search is not Bob Rubin's son. Lots of other good stuff here:

Ten Things on Which Matt Taibbi Really Does Not Know What He Is Talking About

yeah there's a whole back and forth about fact checking that article

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/12/11/fernholz-vs-taibbi/

omg ppl know each other

deej this isn't "asking for context," it's "wtf, you paranoid fucks, who could possibly imagine cronyism in washington"

Matt Yglesias has written an excellent post on why Taibbi's outrage is misplaced:

The implicit theory of political change here, that pivotal members of congress undermine reform proposals because of "the White House's refusal to push for real reform" is just wrong. That's not how things work. The fact of the matter is that Matt Taibbi is more liberal than I am, and I am more liberal than Larry Summers is, but Larry Summers is more liberal than Ben Nelson is. Replacing Summers with me, or with Taibbi, doesn't change the fact that the only bills that pass the Senate are the bills that Ben Nelson votes for.

The problem here, to be clear, isn’t that lefties are being too mean to poor Barack Obama. The problem is that to accomplish the things I want to see accomplished, people who want change need to correctly identify the obstacles to change.

http://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/12/matthew-yglesias-on-matt-taibbi.html

yeah yglesias has been really on-point about how the #1 obstacle to a progressive agenda is the senate--not this administration, not the cabinet, not the house, but the senate, and specifically, ben nelson, evan bayh, and fuckin droopy dog lieberman

not that that should stop j0hn or morbs from gettin their self-righteous on w/r/t to obama, just, like--lets not pretend that obama is the problem here

That's well and good, but, even accounting for the changed environment (the old "Boll Weevils" are now southern Republicans), has Obama done what Reagan did in '81 to get his economic program passed? He spared no expense in cajoling, dealing, and threatening legislators. And Obama has an even bigger mandate than Reagan.

not that that should stop j0hn or morbs from gettin their self-righteous on w/r/t to obama, just, like--lets not pretend that obama is the problem here

Obama never said this is what I want. He's never said the "public option" is non-negotiable.

lets not pretend that obama is the problem here

lol of course not, only the insane could imagine obama being the problem

Obama never said this is what I want. He's never said the "public option" is non-negotiable.

― Hell is other people. In an ILE film forum. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, December 14, 2009 10:28 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

im not sure that i buy the idea that obama can snap his fingers and get 60 democratic votes

why can't they both be the problem

He's never said the "public option" is non-negotiable.

because he doesn't want to be boxed in. he wants to be able to call whatever comes out a win. i understand that as far as his public position. where he's fallen down (on health care and other issues) is his either inability or unwillingness to play hardball behind the scenes. supposedly that's what rahm was supposed to be for, but we haven't seen enough evidence of it. too much pulpit, not enough bully.

He's never said the "public option" is non-negotiable

I think he's smart enough to realize when he doesn't have the votes for something, and going out on a limb and saying something is non-negotiable when it will end up being negotiable is a great way to waste lots of political capital and get a lot of egg on his face.

xp

lol of course not, only the insane could imagine obama being the problem

― a full circle lol (J0hn D.), Monday, December 14, 2009 10:29 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

john, serious question, do you think a strongly progressive president could get healthcare passed? or financial reform?

obama is NOT PERFECT and i would really appreciate it if youd avoid straw-manning me--but it can be more than a little frustrating when we have ben nelson and joe lieberman in the senate obstructing serious progressive legislation and the guy in the white house is getting ten times as much flak as they are!