How Obama Became a Publicist for His Presidency (Rather Than the President)

[KoKo]

(Interesting article pointing out why many Progressives in the Dem Party have been so frustrated with President Obama. Bromwich puts into perspective the actions and inactions of the first five years of his Presidency.)

Some Snips:

By David Bromwich
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/10-1

“Leading from behind” was a motto coined by the Obama White House to describe the president’s posture of cooperation with NATO, when, after a long and characteristic hesitation, he took the advice of Hillary Clinton’s State Department against Robert Gates’s Defense Department and ordered the bombing of Libya. Something like that description had been formulated earlier by reporters covering his distant and self-protective negotiations with Congress in the progress of his health-care law. When the phrase got picked up and used in unexpected ways, his handlers tried to withdraw it. Leading from behind, they insisted, did not reflect the president’s real attitude or the intensity of his engagement.

-----------snip------

The curious fact remains that, in Obama’s conception of the presidency, leading from behind had a concrete meaning long before the Libyan intervention. When approached before the 2008 election by labor leaders, community organizers, foreign policy dissenters, and groups concerned with minority rights and environmental protection, each of which sought assurance that he intended to assist their cause, Obama would invariably cup his ear and say, “I can’t hear you.”

The I-can't-hear-you anecdote has been conveyed both in print and informally; and it is plain that the gesture and the phrase had been rehearsed. Obama was, in fact, alluding to a gesture President Franklin Roosevelt is said to have made when the great civil rights organizer A. Philip Randolph put a similar request to him around 1940. Roosevelt, in effect, was saying to Randolph: You command a movement with influence, and there are other movements you can call on. Raise a cry so loud it can’t be mistaken. Make me do what you want me to do; I’m sympathetic to your cause, but the initiative can’t come from me.

It was clever of Obama to quote the gesture. At the same time, it was oddly irresponsible. After all, in the post-New Deal years, the union and civil rights movements had tremendous clout in America. They could make real noise. No such combination of movements existed in 2008.

And yet, in 2008 there had been a swell of popular opinion and a convergence of smaller movements around a cause. That cause was the candidacy of Barack Obama. The problem was that “Obama for America” drank up and swept away the energy of all those other causes, just as Obama’s chief strategist David Plouffe had designed it to do. Even in 2009, with the election long past, “Obama for America” (renamed “Organizing for America”) was being kept alive under the fantastical conceit that a sitting president could remain a movement leader-from-behind, even while he governed as the ecumenical voice of all Americans. If any cause could have pulled the various movements back together and incited them to action after a year of electioneering activity on Obama’s behalf, that cause would have been a massive jobs-creation program and a set of policy moves to rouse the environmental movement and address the catastrophe of climate change.-

Civil Dissociation

By the middle of 2009, Barack Obama was no longer listening. He had already picked an economic team from among the Wall Street protégés of the Goldman Sachs executive and former economic adviser to the Clinton administration, Robert Rubin. For such a team, job creation and environmental regulation were scarcely attractive ideas. When the new president chose health care as the first “big thing” he looked to achieve, and announced that, for the sake of bipartisan consensus, he was leaving the details of the legislation to five committees of Congress, his “I can’t hear you” had become a transparent absurdity.

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/10-1
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David Bromwich is editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, and co-editor of the Yale University Press edition of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.; He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Huffington Post.

[JoePhilly]

1. Ah yes, he's an appeasing dictator.

A weak thug.

A stupid intellectual.

An inner city elitist.

[blm]

2. Not acknowledging that the corporate media has been acting as stenographers for

the corporate elite whose GOP puppets have been marching in lockstep against everything Obama has tried to do since DAY ONE.

I'm sure that would have NEVER happened to any other Democratic president.

[KoKo]

3. blm...this article goes beyond the RW Obstructionists...

This is about the "FORCE" for "CHANGE" that Obama had coming into that Election and the Dem House and Senate we had until 2010 where he could have RAMMED THROUGH what we voted for him to do....and instead...this is what happened.

After 2010 he had little he could do. But, this article shows that MASS VOTING POWER from the LEFT (all of us after those terrible Bush Years) couldn't change because he was who he was and we need to examine this as part of History as to What Went Wrong!

Sorry for the Full Caps... I'm not shouting at you but wanting to do Emphasis to ask you to listen because you and I have been on DU forever...and we've sparred in the past but I've always respected you....so I'm not shouting...just trying to get you to listen. We are both Democrats...and we know that about each other after all this time. It's just that we are often on different sides of the Dem Party.

PEACE!

[blm]

4. Untrue - GOP used procedure to block in those first 2 years because there was NO supermajority

in the senate as the lazy minded media claims.

They kept FRanken out of office till summer, then also had Kennedy and then Byrd in poor health and eventually passing away. There were only 24 working days where there was a Dem super majority - and that wasn't till the end of that congress in 2010. GOP knows how to distort and the lazy minded media lets them. It makes Obama look way worse that way. None of us should help them by buying into the distortion and furthering it for them.