FDR and Obama, Pt. III: Rhetoric

Drew Westin’s New York Times article on “Obama’s passion” marks one of the more recent in a long litany of pieces taking Obama to task for not employing the bully pulpit more sharply or constantly. Progressives have obvious reason to believe that Obama could wield real power by going out and giving more speeches. After all, Obama on the presidential campaign trail proved a remarkably powerful communicator; what other candidate has ever inspired a music video based solely on one of his speeches?

Here we find another area where Obama finds himself constantly compared with Franklin Roosevelt and deemed to fall short; particularly with regards to the strength of his speeches. Over and over one can find progressives bemoaning that Obama does not call out the Republicans by name or does not hit the banker class with more robust language. In many cases, Obama's timidity finds itself contrasted with Roosevelt's fire. Almost invariably, this leads to quotations from FDR’s “welcome their hatred” speech. This was the last address he gave during the 1936 campaign, delivered to a raucous crowd at Madison Square Garden. The key portion all progressives love to cite is this:

Fiery words for sure, some of the most radical rhetoric we’ve ever heard from a U.S. president. Here is the issue: Roosevelt did not go around giving speeches like this constantly. The context in which Roosevelt felt comfortable speaking such words is vital. He knew that he would win the 1936 election and by a wide margin. The audience for this speech almost certainly included much of his critical base in 1936: the rapidly expanding union movement, particularly the militantly progressive unions of the CIO.

Writers such as Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein have started to dub the idea that Obama could change everything through speeches the "magic bully pulpit." Their response is that presidential rhetoric rarely moves voters and can often prove counterproductive. There is a lot to this criticism. I would add that, in comparing Roosevelt and Obama, one should examine the media environment and technologies each worked within. Roosevelt literally had the ear of the nation through his constant fireside chats – he did not have to compete with hundreds of channels, Twitter, etc.

That said, one place where Obama seems noticeably weaker than Roosevelt is framing. Here I am not referring to one speech, but putting together a thematic narrative across many speeches and fireside chats (a number of which can be read here). Roosevelt as president pursued a wide range of policies, but wrapping them under the idea of a "new deal" gave some manner of coherence. In explaining why the U.S. needed a such a program, Roosevelt also acted like the college professor Obama actually was, and repeatedly explained the crisis, in terms which advanced a progressive vision of economic fairness and wariness towards the power of the corporate class. As his presidency advanced, Roosevelt managed to give all his actions a coherent framework: security. Whether old age pensions or national defense, the idea of security explained Roosevelt's vision for the United States. My friend Andrew Slack once suggested that, with his emphasis on health care, Obama should have used health as a frame: bringing health care, healing a sick economy and environment, etc. As with almost any recommendation, it is doubtful this would have transformed everything, but considering the small margins elections are decided often, every little strength can help.

On Abstraction and Social Movements

Dave Roberts of Grist recently wrote a column decrying the manner which climate activists have tackled global warming, criticizing the movement as "extremely intellectualized, top-down sort of undertaking." Roberts' piece inspired a response from Ezra Klein, who inquires whether there exists

[A] good example of the sort of social movement Roberts is talking about on an issue like climate change? Have we ever gotten people into the streets in order to reduce future risks that would fall hardest on poorer countries? Or even anything more abstract than a better life, right now?

Klein seems somewhat skeptical that one can mobilize a mass social movement of non-elites around such abstract issues. However, several historical episodes exist in which movements emerged that targeted problems that did not directly (or at least viscerally) impact the lives of those demonstrating. The most successful of such episodes have seen alliances (albeit often somewhat tenuous ones) emerge between elites and non-elites. Here are a few examples:

1. The Abolitionists: Both in England and the United States, significant numbers of whites organized and fought for emancipation, despite not being slaves themselves or even living with the possibility they might become slaves. Furthermore, for these activists, slavery existed as a rather abstract issue. Consider the English anti-slavery movement, which mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to sign petitions, organize boycotts, and work to elect anti-slavery politicians. Almost all English people had no actual contact with the “peculiar institution”: the vast majority of the thousands upon thousands of English people who signed petitions or otherwise never went to the English colonies in the Caribbean or even saw a slave ship docked in an English harbor. However, activists still mobilized, based on abstract moral concerns (closely tied with religion) that saw slavery as wrong. Furthermore, through the creation of all manner of art and mass advertising, the English anti-slavery activists managed to make slavery a more “real” issue and bring ever more people into their fold. English abolitionism had its many faults, and emancipation did not usher an era of total social justice for Africans. Still, one must give credit to the movement for playing a huge role in ending slavery throughout the English empire, a proposition that incidentally, did not come without its financial and strategic harms to the English empire.

One must be careful however in describing English anti-slavery to avoid making it seem only the work of white elites. Revolts in Haiti, Jamaica, and elsewhere, as well as less dramatic examples of slave resistance, put great pressure on the system and helped move towards emancipation. In England itself, a number of former slaves became activists who moved the problem from abstraction to reality. Most notable among these individuals was a man named Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography became a bestseller in England and whose multi-year book tours served as a crucial venue for grassroots organizing.

2. Environmentalism: It can be hard to forget that, particularly in the early 1970s, environmentalism was a mass social movement in the United States. An estimated twenty-two million U.S. citizens participated in one way or the other on the first Earth Day in 1970. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw an explosion in activism on the environment, with the creation of all manner of new organizations, ranging from D.C. based public interest law groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council to all manner of local, grassroots community organizations. Such groups waged successful efforts to help create the EPA and win the passage and enforcement of all manner of environmental legislation. While sometimes they targeted direct environmental issues whose impacts were quite immediate (smog for example), other campaigns, such as that aimed at halting the use of chlorofluorocarbons, represented an effort to tackle future problems or at least ones whose worst effects lay in the future.

3. The Global Justice Movement: Klein's specific question about whether activists have "gone into the streets in order to reduce future risks that would fall hardest on poorer countries" is perhaps the most easily answerable. After all, that perfectly describes the intense period of street protests, including those in the U.S., from the Seattle march in 1999 to Genoa in 2001 that took aim at institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or negotiations over specific agreements, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Now, you might disagree with the activists' analysis, but those protests focused not only on current problems faced in the Global South, but the threat those issues would worsen if global institutions and policies continued as they had. The goal of the Seattle demonstrations, for example, was to disrupt the WTO negotiations because activists viewed those talks as leading to new agreements which would further constrain Global South nations' to retain some ability to choose from a range of policies and development models. While the U.S. press obviously gave marches in this country the most attention, marches in Seattle, Quebec, and elsewhere represented only one part of a global movement, which included affected citizens in nations ranging from Bolivia to South Africa to Thailand. One could argue that the global justice movement’s brief moment of mass street demonstrations indicates weakness; however it is a hard case to make considering the impacts of the September 11^th attacks. Remember that right before 9/11, activists were mobilizing to protest the annual IMF-World Bank meetings, with police predicting that over 100,000 people would attend.

Now, for all these movements, I have not particularly addressed Klein’s point that climate change activism seeks to prevent future problems, not solve current ones. After all, while English activists were not themselves slaves, slavery certainly existed at that moment. The sad answer to this challenge for activists however would seem to be time; as scientists and activists continue to point out, climate change is here. Many people in this world, particularly in the Global South, are already experiencing as sea levels rise, weather patterns are becoming more severe, etc.

One need not travel to Tuvalu to find visceral examples of the damages of climate change or resistance to it, as West Virginia will suffice. Just as the abolitionists needed an Oladuh Equiano to make slavery’s horrors visceral, climate activists are increasingly targeting concrete pieces of the climate change monster to tackle. Most notable is the growing anti-coal activism in the U.S., whether seen in the growing movement to stop mountaintop removal mining, Mayor Bloomberg’s fifty million dollar donation to the Sierra Club or the current mass protests against the Keystone pipeline are only but a few of the most recent examples. Climate change might be abstract, but the damage done to mountains and to the air by the burning of coal is no more abstract than smog was for 1970s environmentalists or IMF structural adjustment programs for the demonstrators in 2001. In these cases, activists who live far from the coal fields have still become involved, working in coordination with locals who both recognize the larger dangers of climate change and the more immediate problems the industry causes. We cannot say for certain a mass and sustained social movement will arise to stop climate change, but there certainly exists historical examples offering hope for those seeking to challenge global warming.

FDR and Obama, Pt. II: Advisers

One area where Roosevelt’s presidency appears a better model than Obama’s lies in the realm of their economic advisers. Put simply, Roosevelt brought in a team of economic consultants from a diverse set of ideological beliefs and he took them all quite seriously. This meant that, just as with Obama, Roosevelt listened to a number of fairly conservative, Wall Street confidants. Most prominent was his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, who among other acts, played the key role in convincing Roosevelt in 1937 to push for a balanced budget, leading to an economic downslide which cost the New Deal significant support.

However, Roosevelt also had individuals such as Harold Ickes and Frances Perkins in his administration who pushed more left-wing economic notions. For example, it may come as a surprise that Roosevelt was not particularly keen to push for the creation of Social Security. It was his Secretary of Labor and long-time friend and ally Frances Perkins who provided the tireless voice, as well as a creative organizer, that eventually put the president fully behind creating the cornerstone of the U.S. safety net.

Turning to Obama, one is hard pressed to find comparable people. While I have seen some smart liberal bloggers make the case for Laurence Summers, even if he is not the devil some progressives believe, the man who championed financial deregulation so ardently cannot really be considered a standard bearer for U.S. social democracy. There certainly have been some progressive appointees working on economic issues: Craig Becker at the NLRB, Elizabeth Warren’s at the CFPB, and Hilda Solis at the Department of Labor for example. Yet, none of these people have ever really made up Obama’s core economic team – the people he most listens to in making policy decisions. Instead, from the start, Obama has relied on a circle of advisers such as Geithner, Summers, Gene Sperling, etc., who all essentially come from the same moderate wing of the Democratic Party.

Now, it can certainly be argued that a different set of advisers would have made no difference – all of the structural barriers remain. Certainly there is truth to that, but unless one believes the president is completely powerless before the whims of history, it is not hard to imagine how a wider spectrum of voices could have affected policy making. Take the stimulus bill for example. If, for example, a Joseph Stiglitz or Robert Reich had been a core part of that team*, it is easy to see a world where the initial proposed stimulus bill showcased more ambition – spending more money overall and concentrating those expenditures on more stimulative (and progressive) spending programs, instead of the significant percentage devoted to tax cuts. Of course, it is unlikely that such a stimulus would have passed as first offered, but in the inevitable whittling down that negotiations with Republicans would have produced, the end product could still have been larger and more impactful. Such advisers might also have pushed for more expansive programs to help struggling homeowners or tougher financial regulation.

In my next post, I will explore rhetoric as an issue uniting and dividing the two.

*Yes, Reich was a member of the economic transition team, but that is far different from being a member of the administration and being a constant counsel as the president makes decisions.

Comparing Franklin and Barack: Some Structural Differences

With President Obama recently signing legislation that (essentially) takes the Herbert Hoover approach to economic recovery, it seemed an opportune moment to delve more into every liberals' favorite presidential comparison game: Franklin Roosevelt vs. Barack Obama.

When Obama was elected, it seemed within the realm of possibility that the U.S. was about to witness a period comparable to the New Deal. Suffering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with large Democratic majorities in Congress, and an inspired and activated grassroots, Obama seemed to have all the pieces in place. Today, however, U.S. economic policy remains as trapped as ever within the right-wing paradigms bequeathed to us by Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement.

Why has this happened? Could U.S. progressives have expected more from this president? I will attempt to explore these issues by further interrogating the historical analogy always present in such conversations: that Obama could have been the twenty-first century FDR. In this post, I will note some factors weighing against an Obama presidency being as transformational on progressive economic grounds as Roosevelt's was. In subsequent posts I will delve into details of specific political actions and strategies differentiating the two and try to make some judgments as to what progressives could have reasonably expected from Obama, matched against how Roosevelt tackled similar challenges.

1. Worst Economic State, Fewer Filibusters

First, it is crucial to understand just how devastating the Great Depression was, even in comparison to the current Great Recession. The Great Depression saw national unemployment levels soaring to 25%, while the Great Recession has peaked (so far) at around 10%. By the time Roosevelt came to power, the nation was desperate for solutions that would turn the ship of state away from sinking further into disaster.

Along with majorities often larger than Obama's, Roosevelt also faced a Congress where the filibuster was a rarity (and most invoked on issues threatening white supremacy in the South). Take the Glass-Steagall Act, one of the cornerstones of 1930s financial regulation (and whose dismantling in the late 1990s became emblematic of our new Gilded Age). Glass-Steagall passed the Senate in 1934 without one vote cast against! Victories such as this proved much more plausible while the filibuster lay as a mostly dormant instrument. Obama’s first two years would certainly have witnessed more progressive legislation without the stunning growth in historical terms of the filibuster’s use by Republicans and conservative Democrats. Examining bills passed by the House of Representatives from early 2009 to late 2010 (health care with a public option, cap and trade) one can get a glimpse of the more progressive legacy the presidency could have left (and this ignores legislation such as EFCA which would have had a better chance in a filibuster-less world).

2. A Weak Business Lobby

As incomprehensible as progressives may find this, the business community's ability to influence policy became much diminished in the 1930s. In a rare incident in which the elite classes found themselves strongly divided, business leaders divided between those who wanted to accommodate (or even profit) from the New Deal order and those who hoped to combat and reverse it. Conservative business interests that wished to actively fight the New Deal found themselves a fairly marginalized part of the U.S. political dialogue.

Certainly opposition existed. A number of the most prominent businessmen in the country, including the du Ponts and CEOs at General Motors looked with shock at the reforms of the New Deal. By 1934 they began to organize, creating the American Liberty League. However, it was a mark of the changed times that the New York Times could declare that "nowhere in the country has the lack of any organization of conservative interests been more acutely felt than in the financial community." Despite representing monied interests, the Liberty League proved unable to exert much influence in a nation where, as historian Kim Phillips-Fein notes, "the contrast between the lives of its [the Liberty League's] members and those of the working population of the United States had simply grown too vast." This relative lack of corporate organization and politicization would persist until the early 1970s when a swell of organizing took place that led to everything from the founding of right-wing think tanks to the emergence of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a mainstay of right-wing free market organizing.

Thus, Obama faces a much different political atmsophere. Business did not take nearly as hard a hit, either financially or in its reputation, as it did after the Depression. Furthermore, corporations already have a well-established political infrastructure and a commitment to using it that did not exist to near the same extent.

3. Timing

When Franklin Roosevelt started his presidency, the U.S. was entering its third year of Depression. Although Herbert Hoover’s response to the Depression included government stimulus efforts (such as road construction), his attempts to explain the crisis and offer solutions always maintained a strong conservative strain. For example, in a 1931 speech, Hoover described government programs to help the unemployed, while cautioning that, “We must avoid burdens upon the government which will create more unemployment in private industry than can be gained by further expansion of employment by the Federal Government. We can now stimulate employment and agriculture more effectually and speedily through the voluntary measures in progress.”

By 1932 Americans were ready for something sharply different and Roosevelt offered that, both rhetorically and pro grammatically. While his 1932 campaign sounded some conservative themes, Roosevelt also stressed that he would govern to serve “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” and his promises of “bold, persistent experimentation” rang the loudest. Roosevelt also served as a sort of “professor-in-chief” during his campaigns and presidency, telling a clear story of who caused the Depression and who was going to solve it. Americans were as open as they ever have been to such messages as this from his 1932 nomination speech:

“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.

But it is not and never will be the theory of the Democratic Party.”

Conversely, Obama’s came into office mere months after the onset of the Great Recession. In attempting to comprehend what was happening, the American public found themselves bombarded by a jumble of messages as to the causes and solutions. While the greed of Wall Street seemed a clear culprit, the bipartisan nature of the bank bailouts (whatever one thinks of them as policy), confused the ability of many voters to ascertain who was at fault. Furthermore, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “Stimulus”) came not long after and, in many Americans’ minds, the bailouts and stimulus morphed into one nebulous massive government expenditure. Thus, the stimulus, both as policy and as a metaphor for a progressive solution to the crisis became confused with a pragmatic government move that saved the financial class from their own disaster. As the nation's economy sputtered, this jumble allowed the right-wing, through the vehicle of the Tea Party, to introduce a powerful counter-narrative of why the nation remained (and remains) in the doldrums.