Yesterday, in the discussion thread of my diary, "Obama, man of anti-principle, strikes again--gives assist to mosque-haters and al Qaeda ", there was a vigorous debate about whether Obama had done the right thing in making his second statement about the Manhattan mosque. There was even a vigorous debate about whether he had said anything different in the second statement. There were very articulate arguments on both sides.
But then, at the end of the day came Harry Reid's announcement that he was joining Sharon Angle on the side of the haters, and Obama's leadership failure immediately became clear. Now, via wobbly's quick hit, we read that the mosque's proponents may be about to withdraw, in a vain attempt to appease the haters.
Newt Gingrich, Osama bin Laden and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are jumping for joy.
Obama's leadership failure has empowered them above all others.
One could argue endlessly about the rightness of Obama's position as a lecturer in constitutional law. He certainly would have made a perfectly adequate guest for a segment on an MSNBC program. But leadership is not just about what you do or say in an abstract, classroom-correct sort of way. It's about what you communicate to inspire the soul. Or to dispirit it.
Somehow, in the abstract, Obama realized perfectly well that this was all about us as Americans. But he utterly failed to get that very same message in his own gut.
At Media Matters, Joe Strupp reported on how two top former military men--one also Colin Powell's former top aid when he was Secretary of State--saw this as a disaster for us:
A retired general and a former Bush Administration official harshly criticized efforts to block the building of a mosque in lower Manhattan, contending such a position is unconstitutional and could harm U.S. relations overseas.
Major General Paul Eaton, a retired Army commander who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, both slammed right-wing opposition to the Mosque.
"What we are seeing out of the Republican Party here is just appalling," Eaton told me Monday. "From a constitutional perspective, from a common sense perspective and from a military perspective."
...
Both men also pointed to a detrimental impact such opposition can have on U.S. relations overseas with Islamic countries, and even put U.S. military men and women at risk.
"It is like offering your opponent two or three whips with which to beat you," said Wilkerson. "The impact on our military people would be injurious if we say 'no.' It would put another instrument in the hands of those who want to exploit the fear that Americans are at war with Islam and not the radical elements within it."
Eaton echoed that view, noting: "It is a slap in the face to a great many people we wish to have as allies. We are trying to make allies of our colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan and this is not helpful."
He also added, "This is unhelpful to the American fighting men and women and counter to the image we wish to portray in Afghanistan and Iraq."
It's now clear that we're looking at a failed presidency. Regardless of whatever else happens, even if he wins re-relection, Obama has utterly squandered the promise he held out for us all. He empowers the haters and evildoers of the world by only opposing them academically, while giving way to them in every practical sense.
And the longer we refuse to see this obvious fact, the more complicit we are in betraying his promise as well.
Yesterday, Matt Yglesias posted a strongly worded rebuttal to a portion of my Left Ed diary this Sunday. Rather than continuing with the harsh push-back I posted on the QuickHit from Mark Matson, I'm going to try to see if there is some common ground that Matt and I can agree on so that there can be some concerted effort among the progressive community to do right by the nation's school kids.
First off Matt, can you and I agree on the impact that poverty and socioeconomic conditions have on children? When you say that "it's difficult to obtain unimpeachable statistical data on how to improve life outcomes for children," I hope you would at least understand that there's nothing difficult at all about concluding that poverty has a huge impact on the outcomes of children. I would hope that you understand that the most far-reaching study of influences on student achievement, the Coleman Report, concluded that out-of-school factors - such as poverty, health, and homelife - had far and away the most influence on the "life outcomes of children" and that statistically schools had only a small influence on the trajectory of children's lives.
Second, I would hope that you agree that the next most influential set of factors affecting student achievement have to do with school level factors such as having a safe place to learn and having a guaranteed and viable curriculum. And I would hope that you would agree that a "teach to the test" approach where students are drilled in a direct instruction mode to do well on reading and math high-stakes tests is anything but a viable curriculum, because that approach ignores so many other aspects of a well-rounded education - like history and the arts.
Third, I would hope that you agree that the best instructional methods should be available to all children, regardless of their socioeconomic and cultural background. I would hope that you understand that a "one size fits all" approach to teaching simply doesn't work for every child. That instruction needs to be differentiated because we all learn in the different ways. And that children from poverty deserve the same access to instructional approaches that you and I want for our children. Since children of poverty are not inherently different from our kids, are they?
Next, I would hope that you understand that the opportunity costs (a business term I'm sure you value) of pursuing false approaches to improving our nation's schools - like the charter school movement, which produces in your words "about the same" as what we are currently achieving - are something to be avoided? Especially when we know that the results of charter schools are not just "about the same" as public schools, as you maintain, but actually worse for some kids. And especially when you know that results of KIPP charter schools in particular are grossly distorted by those schools selectively and attrition rates.
Instead of hurtling down these roads to nowhere, don't you think it would be better to talk about how we should address the root causes of low achievement with universal early childhood education and better health care for kids, which we know can work? True, these are long-term solutions, but isn't every year that we spend nitpicking around the edges of real progress with proposals such as "more charter schools" yet another year lost in the work of rescuing low-achieving kids?
Finally, I would hope that you understand the true dynamics of racism. I learned a long time ago from a public school teacher in Iowa that whenever you hear about what's best for "those kids" and how "they" should be treated differently from your children that what you're hearing in actuality is the language of racism. I grew up in Texas on the tattered edge of suburban Dallas during a time when there was something called "desegregation" going on. I went to a small, all-white elementary school perched high on a caliche knob where the September winds shocked our morning flag raising into immediate furl. After we recited the Pledge of Allegiance we were informed about the "new students" that were going to be bussed from the other side of town to "our school" and how they were "different" from us. Our political leaders back then told us that it would be better if those black and brown kids kept to their own schools because those schools were what "those kids needed." Back then, in the South, those politicians were all Democrats.
Today, as Linda Darling Hammond points out, "the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988," and a "growing share of African-American and Hispanic students" now find themselves in "highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities." And once again, as I saw on the blackland praries of my childhood, we have Democratic leaders telling us to support a charter school movement, which tends to foster highly segregated schools, as numerous studies have shown.
So my last question to you Matt is what kind of Democrat are you?
I don't oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.
Why do I have the feeling that ignoring this is a huge practical and moral mistake?
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met Sunday with Pakistan's president, and both men urged the international community to step up efforts to help the millions affected by flooding in Pakistan...
He said he has visited scenes of natural disasters worldwide, but has seen "nothing like this. The scale of the disaster is so large -- so many people and in so many places, in so much need."
"Thousands of towns and villages have simply been washed away," Ban said. "Roads, buildings, bridges, crops -- millions of livelihoods have been lost. People are marooned on tiny islands with the floodwaters all around them. They are drinking dirty water. They are living in the mud and ruins of their lives. Many have lost family and friends. Many more are afraid their children and loved ones will not survive in these conditions."
When you read about the effects of climate change, you see these moving maps where large parts of the land mass become submerged and you think, "boy that's really something." But what this shows is the depth of human misery that mass flooding causes. And the probability that this will be happening with frequency and sometimes simultaneously going forward is quite high. What that translates into, aside from the aforementioned human misery, is political instability, mass migration and social upheaval. This is a peek at our future, and it's happening in one of the most dangerous places on earth.
Gosh, ya think?
At the same time, General Patreas is putting on a grand show to convince all the serious people (who laugh at global warming 'cause it snowed last winter) that we really can and should "win the war" in Afghanistan where less than 100 al Qaeda operatives may still be.
And "winning" that war will... do what exactly? Because I do have a much, much clearer sense of what it would mean to win the war on global warming. Another war in which we're very, very clearly fighting on the wrong side.
Of coure, global warming doesn't "cause" these sorts of things directly. It "merely" loads the dice more and more heavily in the direction of a different climate regime, and what we're experiencing now are the transitional effects as what were once highly unusual conditions become increasingly frequent.
First, let me be clear that Open Left will continue on in my absence. There will be other announcements about the future of the site in the coming weeks, but the site is not shutting down. We knew this was coming, and it is why I have had a reduced role in the front page for the past few weeks.
Second, while I am often a very dry writer, it is difficult to write this post without real emotion. Working with everyone here at Open Left--from the community members, to the other writers, to many people behind the scenes--has been a life changing experience for me in many ways. Leaving is not something that I do lightly, or without a huge amount of soul searching.
But, the time has come for me to do something new. Being able to continue the inside-outside work we have done here at Open Left on Daily Kos is incredibly exciting to me. I live in D.C., now, and I have been reading Daily Kos for eight years. Along with MyDD, it was actually the first blog I ever read. Both sites came to my attention as a result of a Google search for info on the 2002 midterms back in August of 2002.
It will be an honor to work at Daily Kos, just as it has been an honor to work with all of you for the past three years. I only hope that in making this transition I can help your desire for progressive change be more broadly manifested. This is about building an effective progressive movement that can deliver real change, and it is larger than any one person or any one blog.
Thank you to everyone who has joined me here at Open Left over the past three years. Please, continue to visit.
...and one more quick note. If you want to keep following me on Twitter, please follow @ThisBowers
While this is obviously good news in itself, it also begs the question, since there are similar trends with respect to civil rights and women's rights, but we're still dominated by rightwing nonsense political discourse and can't get much of anything done despite having a significant Democratic trifecta, (a) What the fuck does it mean anyway? and (b) Why doesn't it mean more?
But first, a glance at some trend data showing what I was talking about regarding civil rights. While the most intense part of the struggle occured before the advent of the General Social Survey in 1972, there was still some very important shifts in attitude that the GSS managed to capture. And not the least of these was the shift that left Rand Paul's defense of private discrimination in the dust-bin of history. Lest anyone still buy his "I would have marched with Martin Luther King" shtick, here's how actual attitudes toward the "right to discriminate" were gradually turned from the overwhelming white majority position to a margin view:
Last year's debate over cramdown (ie. forcing banks to renegotiate the terms of their predatory loans) highlighted a central philosophical divide inside the Democratic Party. Should the power of the government be used to force banks to the negotiating table when it comes to the foreclosure crisis, or should the power of the government be used to effectively try to bribe the banks into modifying their behavior? As I've written before, this is a question gets to the deeper substantive difference between the term "progressive" and "liberal" - and the last few years gives us clues as to which is a more productive public policy posture.
President Obama quite clearly believes the latter. Despite campaigning for president as a supporter of cramdown, Obama ultimately pressured congressional Democrats to drop their advocacy of the provision. He has also supported the TARP bailout and opposed a serious crackdown on executive bonuses. This is, in short, an administration that believes the best way to confront the financial crisis is to hand over taxpayer money to banks, in the hope that the banks will return the favor with more humane behavior.
But, as the Hill newspaper reports, here's the problem with that concept:
There was a superficial incoherence to Gibbs' hippy-punching, but that only masked a deeper incoherence. The superficial incoherence was (a) essentially dissing the "professional left" as elitist, out-of-touch & politically irrelevant while (b) blaming it for bringing Obama down.
But the deeper incoherence is Obama's own political philosophy, strategy, and ideology. He'd be fine, it could at least be argued, if he was up against Eisenhower-era Republicans like his grandparents and their friends. But no sane person in the world thinks that he is. And since he's not, everything he does is taking place in a sort of an Alice-in-Wonderland world. If he wants to lash out and blame "the professional left" for this, that's fine. But it doesn't tell us anything about anything except him--and how he blameshifts for his own failure on his own terms, the terms of a would-be "transformative reformer" out to battle special interests and return sovereignty to the people--something he obviously has not done.
Indeed, this supreme act of hippy-punching--barely more than two weeks after his supreme make-nice video message to Netroots Nation--seems like nothing so much as a declaration of Obama's own intransigence and unwillingness to face reality. He may be much more sophisticated, in language at least, but he's just as much close-minded to unwanted input as Bush & Cheney were, and Gibbs' hippy-punching was intended to triple underscore that in neon red magic marker, even as he overly denied it.
The very fact that Gibbs is outraged by Bush/Obama comparisons shows how significant they are. A stuck pig squeals. Like Bush before him, Obama would rather fail spectacularly on a global scale than admit his failures so far and take fundamental corrective action.
Of course it's not just progressives that Obama is disappointing, but it's convenient to pretend it is so. However, the unemployment rate, the mortgage foreclosure rate, and the state-and-local government layoff-and-shutdown rate are all far too high for that to be true. And it's not just "the professional left" that's being ignored. It's just about everyone outside of K-Street, including veterans.
It's certainly not fair to criticize Obama for not being a Lefty. He wasn't ever a Lefty. He didn't promise to be a Lefty. And there's no reason to expect that he would ever become a Lefty.
But Lefties (like me) who criticize Obama are not criticizing him for failing our Lefty test. Our criticism is that Obama is failing the Obama test: that he is not delivering the presidency that he promised.
When Candidate Obama took on Hilary Clinton, he was quite clear about what he thought about the way Washington works. And he was quite clear about why he was running for President. As he said:
[U]nless we're willing to challenge the broken system in Washington, and stop letting lobbyists use their clout to get their way, nothing else is going to change. And the reason I'm running for president is to challenge that system.
Read it again: "The reason I am running for president is to challenge that system."
....
Obama's strategy as president has not been to "change the way Washington works." Rather, he has pushed reforms in the same old way, with the same old games.
Lessig does a masterful job of pounding this simple point home. But I'd be deeply remiss not to further connect Lessig's point with one made by Chris as culminating point of his post-2004 elction analysis ("Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition"): The key to building an enduring progressive coalition is to unite self-identified liberals with self-identified reformers, whose primary concerns lie with opening up government and making it more accountable. And this is Obama's greatest failure: a failure to deliver on the actual substance of non-partisan openness and good government.
The Obama administration will prove that they have a plan to do something about the housing crisis by holding a housing conference next week, in DC. The event, called the "Conference on the Future of Housing Finance," has been organized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Treasury Department. Panelists include... well, a bunch of economists, finance industry representatives, bank officials, think tankers, and an academic or two. Not included: Any actual consumer advocates or community group representatives.
We've got PIMCO, Wells Fargo, the goddamn American Enterprise Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, Moody's, and Bank of America. But:
"Apparently being a community organizer qualifies you to be president, but it's not good enough to be part of HUD and Treasury's think tank on housing," said [National Community Reinvestment Coalition] chief executive John Taylor, whose group works with hundreds of community organizations to promote access to financial services for low- and middle-income people.
The fact that the Obama administration is assembling a bunch of credentialed but cloistered experts to solve the housing crisis without input from people actually on the ground with those affected by the housing crisis is, sadly, not that surprising.
Why is not surprising? Because the HUD Secretary has qualifications barely more impressive than Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Well, not really. He's got a master's in architecture, and he worked for HUD in the Clinton administration, so he actually has some relevant experience. But just like Arne, he's presided over a big-city neo-liberal public/private disaster under New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "Which should've immediately disqualified him," Pareene noted, going on to explain:
The Bloomberg administration has a wretched and largely ignored history of promising affordable housing and never delivering. (Not to mention the worst failure of the Bloomberg era: homelessness. It was at historically high levels even before the great financial crisis and no serious attempts at ameliorating it ever developed.)
The Bloomberg housing plan was to give land to private developers, for pennies, in exchange for the promise to build affordable housing for middle and low-income families, and then just not do anything, at all, when the developers simply ignored their promises and built nothing but luxury units. This happened on the Williamsburg waterfront, and it's happening right now near my neighborhood at the Atlantic Yards. Those developments are the norm, not exceptions. Shaun Williams never should've been appointed to run housing policy for the entire nation.
The link there goes to a Daily News article from a year ago Friday:
The Bloomberg administration never checked to see if developers who got discounted city land in exchange for building affordable housing kept their end of the deal, the Daily News has learned.
The Cornerstone Program was supposed to transfer vacant city-owned land to private developers who promised to build 2,191 homes there, with 1,510 units designated for low-or middle-income New Yorkers.
Yet the Department of Housing Preservation and Development has not followed up to see whether developers complied with those terms, an audit obtained by The News found.
