Frank Rich on Obama: Liberal fears and illusions

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/fric-j08.shtml

Frank Rich on Obama: Liberal fears and illusions
Barry Grey
8 June 2010

In a column published Sunday (“Don’t Get Mad, Mr. President. Get Even”), New York Times commentator Frank Rich expresses the mounting frustration and concern of Obama’s liberal supporters over the president’s response to the BP oil spill. Obama’s extraordinary deference to BP, his inability to articulate in any way the anger of millions of Americans, has, warns Rich, raised “serious doubts about his leadership.”

The column is significant, not for any insights it provides into the crisis of the Obama administration, but rather as an indication of the sense within the left-liberal constituency of the Democratic Party that the public mood is shifting against the White House. Among American pundits, Rich is one of the most prominent torch-bearers for Obama. He has written dozens of columns denouncing the right-wing policies of the Republican Party and extolling the supposedly progressive character of the Obama administration.

This political layer fears the growth of public disillusionment and anger toward the administration and Obama’s inability to respond. What is particularly striking about Rich’s column is the degree to which it is addressed directly to Obama, rather than to the public. Rich is offering advice in an attempt to save the administration.

In the process, Rich reveals his own perplexity and the intellectual and political impoverishment of his outlook and that of American liberalism in general. He is unable to understand or explain why Obama is not behaving as he thinks he should.

Rich acknowledges that Obama’s prostration before the oil giant is not an aberration. “But the credulous attitude toward BP is no anomaly for the administration,” he writes. “Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs was praised by the president as a ‘savvy’ businessman two months before the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman.”

He goes on to draw out the parallel between Wall Street’s crashing of the financial system and BP’s poisoning of the Gulf. He notes: “BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the MMS mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the SEC, Federal Reserve and New York Fed.” He fails to mention that Obama appointed the president of the New York Fed as his treasury secretary and nominated the Fed chairman for a second term.

Indeed, Rich avoids drawing any conclusions as to what Obama’s role says about the objective social and class character of his administration. Instead, he attributes Obama’s political difficulties to unfortunate character traits, a flawed management style, bad advisers and a failure to present a convincing “narrative” of the oil spill to the public.

In essence, Rich wants Obama to do a better job of convincing the American people that he is on their side and opposed to BP. He does not propose any concrete policies to deal with the Gulf disaster and evades the issue of private ownership of BP and the rest of the oil industry.

The basic premise of his piece is that—despite the facts Rich himself acknowledges—Obama is at heart a progressive reformer and his government is, potentially at least, a progressive reform administration. “It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed him,” Rich writes.

Obama is part of the “elite.” He is doing today—in regard to the oil spill as well as the bank bailout, the restructuring of the auto industry, health care “reform,” the assault on teachers and pubic education, and the demand for cuts in basic social programs—precisely what he was groomed to do by corporate backers from the start of his political career in Chicago.

His entire administration has been single-mindedly devoted to protecting the wealth of the financial elite, while he has refused to take any serious measures to provide jobs or relief for millions falling into poverty and social desperation.

Obama is striving to carry out his role as the chief political representative of the American ruling class. Rich evades these class issues as well as any consideration of the economic structure of American society.

He concludes his piece by invoking the example of Theodore Roosevelt as a model for Obama in dealing with the oil spill. “If Obama is to have a truly transformative presidency,” he writes, “there could be no better catalyst than oil. Standard Oil jump-started Progressive Era trust-busting…

“This all adds up to a Teddy Roosevelt pivot point for Obama. … If he is to wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.”

Here Rich evokes an image of American liberalism as the moving force for social progress that is more myth than historical fact. The major social reforms in the US were the result of the struggles of the working class against the most bitter and violent resistance of the bourgeoisie. The predominant role of liberalism was to hold back these struggles and block them from assuming revolutionary forms. In the first two-thirds of the last century, the major means for doing this was the implementation of limited social reforms and concessions to the working class. But over the past 40 years, there have been no such reforms.

The invocation of Roosevelt ignores the vast differences historically between that period and today. Roosevelt’s trust-busting occurred in the midst of immense working class struggles and the growing influence of socialist and revolutionary tendencies within the working class. Eugene Debs won 1 million votes as the Socialist Party candidate for US president in 1912, one year after the antitrust suit brought by the federal Department of Justice was upheld by the US Supreme Court, forcing the breakup of Standard Oil.

Rich, who was written numerous columns warning against the growth of social opposition from the working class, has no desire for a return to such conditions.

The political domination of big business and Wall Street has grown far beyond even what it was in the heyday of the robber barons, along with a staggering growth of social inequality.

Moreover, the middle-class intelligentsia at the turn of the 20th century was far more oriented to the working class and sympathetic to socialist and revolutionary ideas than its counterpart today. Within radical and even certain liberal circles it was taken for granted a century ago that social justice, equality and genuine democracy were incompatible with capitalism.

Via a long historical process since then the political and moral makeup of the middle-class intelligentsia has undergone a profound change—overwhelmingly for the worse.

The embrace by most of the American liberal intelligentsia of anti-communism after World War II, which signified its lining up behind the hegemonic aims of American imperialism, did immense damage to the political life of the country and irrevocably compromised American liberalism.

Over the past three decades, substantial sections of American liberals have seen their incomes rise as a result of the reactionary, anti-working class policies of Reagan and his successors, including Obama. As a result, their political views have shifted further to the right, with the open embrace of “free market” nostrums and repudiation of any social reform program.

Rich is very much an expression of this process. He is an example of contemporary American liberalism, fixated on questions of identity and life-style, indifferent to the fate of the working class. The intellectual and political impotence of his analysis, and its elements of cover-up and evasion, are an expression of the bankruptcy of liberal thought as a whole.

When the Vice President Does It

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070107C.shtml

When the Vice President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 01 July 2007

Who knew that mocking the Constitution could be nearly as funny as shooting a hunting buddy in the face? Among other comic dividends, Dick Cheney's legal theory that the vice president is not part of the executive branch yielded a priceless weeklong series on "The Daily Show" and an online "Doonesbury Poll," conducted at Slate, to name Mr. Cheney's indeterminate branch of government.

The ridicule was so widespread that finally even this White House had to blink. By midweek, it had abandoned that particularly ludicrous argument, if not its spurious larger claim that Mr. Cheney gets a free pass to ignore rules regulating federal officials' handling of government secrets.

That retreat might allow us to mark the end of this installment of the Bush-Cheney Follies but for one nagging problem: Not for the first time in the history of this administration - or the hundredth - has the real story been lost amid the Washington kerfuffle. Once the laughter subsides and you look deeper into the narrative leading up to the punch line, you can unearth a buried White House plot that is more damning than the official scandal. This plot once again snakes back to the sinister origins of the Iraq war, to the Valerie Wilson leak case and to the press failures that enabled the administration to abuse truth and the law for too long.

One journalist who hasn't failed is Mark Silva of The Chicago Tribune. He first reported more than a year ago, in May 2006, the essentials of the "news" at the heart of the recent Cheney ruckus. Mr. Silva found that the vice president was not filing required reports on his office's use of classified documents because he asserted that his role in the legislative branch, as president of the Senate, gave him an exemption.

This scoop went unnoticed by nearly everybody. It would still be forgotten today had not Henry Waxman, the dogged House inquisitor, called out Mr. Cheney 10 days ago, detailing still more egregious examples of the vice president's flouting of the law, including his effort to shut down an oversight agency in charge of policing him. The congressman's brief set off the firestorm that launched a thousand late-night gags.

That's all to the public good, but hiding in plain sight was the little-noted content of the Bush executive order that Mr. Cheney is accused of violating. On close examination, this obscure 2003 document, thrust into the light only because the vice president so blatantly defied it, turns out to be yet another piece of self-incriminating evidence illuminating the White House's guilt in ginning up its false case for war.

The tale of the document begins in August 2001, when the Bush administration initiated a review of the previous executive order on classified materials signed by Bill Clinton in 1995. The Clinton order had been acclaimed in its day as a victory for transparency because it mandated the automatic declassification of most government files after 25 years.

It was predictable that the obsessively secretive Bush team would undermine the Clinton order. What was once a measure to make government more open would be redrawn to do the opposite. And sure enough, when the White House finally released its revised version, the scant news coverage focused on how the new rules postponed the Clinton deadline for automatic declassification and tightened secrecy so much that previously declassified documents could be reclassified.

But few noticed another change inserted five times in the revised text: every provision that gave powers to the president over classified documents was amended to give the identical powers to the vice president. This unprecedented increase in vice-presidential clout, though spelled out in black and white, went virtually unremarked in contemporary news accounts.

Given all the other unprecedented prerogatives that President Bush has handed his vice president, this one might seem to be just more of the same. But both the timing of the executive order and the subsequent use Mr. Cheney would make of it reveal its special importance in the games that the White House played with prewar intelligence.

The obvious juncture for Mr. Bush to bestow these new powers on his vice president, you might expect, would have been soon after 9/11, especially since the review process on the Clinton order started a month earlier and could be expedited, as so much other governmental machinery was, to meet the urgent national-security crisis. Yet the new executive order languished for another 18 months, only to be published and signed with no fanfare on March 25, 2003, a week after the invasion of Iraq began.

Why then? It was throughout March, both on the eve of the war and right after "Shock and Awe," that the White House's most urgent case for Iraq's imminent threat began to unravel. That case had been built around the scariest of Saddam's supposed W.M.D., the nuclear weapons that could engulf America in mushroom clouds, and the White House had pushed it relentlessly, despite a lack of evidence. On "Meet the Press" on March 16, Mr. Cheney pressed that doomsday button one more time: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." But even as the vice president spoke, such claims were at last being strenuously challenged in public.

Nine days earlier Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency had announced that documents supposedly attesting to Saddam's attempt to secure uranium in Niger were "not authentic." A then-obscure retired diplomat, Joseph Wilson, piped in on CNN, calling the case "outrageous."

Soon both Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Congressman Waxman wrote letters (to the F.B.I. and the president, respectively) questioning whether we were going to war because of what Mr. Waxman labeled "a hoax." And this wasn't the only administration use of intelligence that was under increasing scrutiny. The newly formed 9/11 commission set its first open hearings for March 31 and requested some half-million documents, including those pertaining to what the White House knew about Al Qaeda's threat during the summer of 2001.

The new executive order that Mr. Bush signed on March 25 was ingenious. By giving Mr. Cheney the same classification powers he had, Mr. Bush gave his vice president a free hand to wield a clandestine weapon: he could use leaks to punish administration critics.

That weapon would be employed less than four months later. Under Mr. Bush's direction, Mr. Cheney deputized Scooter Libby to leak highly selective and misleading portions of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to pet reporters as he tried to discredit Mr. Wilson. By then, Mr. Wilson had emerged as the most vocal former government official accusing the White House of not telling the truth before the war.

Because of the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation, we would learn three years later about the offensive conducted by Mr. Libby on behalf of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush. That revelation prompted the vice president to acknowledge his enhanced powers in an unguarded moment in a February 2006 interview with Brit Hume of Fox News. Asked by Mr. Hume with some incredulity if "a vice president has the authority to declassify information," Mr. Cheney replied, "There is an executive order to that effect." He was referring to the order of March 2003.

Even now, few have made the connection between this month's Cheney flap and the larger scandal. That larger scandal is to be found in what the vice president did legally under the executive order early on rather than in his more recent rejection of its oversight rules.

Timing really is everything. By March 2003, this White House knew its hype of Saddam's nonexistent nuclear arsenal was in grave danger of being exposed. The order allowed Mr. Bush to keep his own fingerprints off the nitty-gritty of any jihad against whistle-blowers by giving Mr. Cheney the authority to pick his own shots and handle the specifics. The president could have plausible deniability and was free to deliver non-denial denials like "If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is." Mr. Cheney in turn could delegate the actual dirty work to Mr. Libby, who obstructed justice to help throw a smoke screen over the vice president's own role in the effort to destroy Mr. Wilson.

Last week The Washington Post ran a first-rate investigative series on the entire Cheney vice presidency. Readers posting comments were largely enthusiastic, but a few griped. "Six and a half years too late," said one. "Four years late and billions of dollars short," said another. Such complaints reflect the bitter legacy of much of the Washington press's failure to penetrate the hyping of prewar intelligence and, later, the import of the Fitzgerald investigation.

We're still playing catch-up. In a week in which the C.I.A. belatedly released severely censored secrets about agency scandals dating back a half-century, you have to wonder what else was done behind the shield of an executive order signed just after the Ides of March four years ago. Another half-century could pass before Americans learn the full story of the secrets buried by Mr. Cheney and his boss to cover up their deceitful path to war.