Nothing is more important to liberals than avoiding responsiblity for the failures of liberalism, and the debacle that is the Obama administration thus requires extraordinary efforts at blameshifting and scapegoating. Fortunately for liberals, there is Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, a new book that tells them what they want to hear.
You can read Dave Weigel’s “Where It All Went Wrong” and David Graham’s “9 Juicy Bits from Ron Suskind’s Book” and see how Confidence Men permits liberals to admit that Obama is a stuttering clusterf–k of a miserable failure without having to admit that liberalism has failed.
The key scene in the book, according to both Weigel and Graham, is when Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) denounces the president’s economic team, shouting at Obama: “You’ve picked the wrong people. I don’t understand how you could do this. You’ve picked the wrong people!”
What did Dorgan mean by this? Graham cites a passage where one attendee at meetings of the president’s National Economic Council tells Suskind: “Each morning at the economic briefing it was like we were debating Krugman.”
That is to say, the left wing and the far-left wing of Obama’s economic team were divided,. the more radical among them agreeing with Paul Krugman that the 2009 “stimulus” was too small. There was apparently no one in the Obama White House who expressed any skepticism toward the Keynesian theory behind the $800 billion stimulus. It was, instead, a debate between Larry Summers and his moderate Keynesian allies, on the one hand, and the Krugman-influenced advocates of a more aggresive Keynesianism.
Summers won this struggle, at least in the short term, and thus emerges as one of the villains of Suskind’s book, so that liberals reading Confidence Men may therefore believe that Obama’s failure vindicates Krugman and other far-left critics of the administration’s economic policy.
What we are likely to get from the liberals, then, is an explanatory narrative much like the one that prevailed circa 2003-05, when repeated Democratic electoral and legislative defeats were explained as resulting from timidity on the part of Democrats.
“We need to fight, fight, fight!” was the cry of the DKos crowd during the mid-Bush years, and this Fightin’ Liberal mentality is apt to dominate conversations on the Left during the 2012 campaign season. We have already seen the administration/re-election campaing rolling out this combative posture, first in Obama’s Sept. 8 jobs speech — “Pass this bill right away!” — and then in Monday’s budget speech — “pay their fair share!”
As silly as this Fightin’ Liberal act seems to conservatives, who see it for the hokey political show-biz stunt it is, Obama’s partisan bully-boy act is just the sort of populist gesturing that we might expect from Democrats who think they’ve failed because they weren’t liberal enough. And that’s the only explanation of Obama’s failure that liberals can accept.
Many conservative commentators have enjoyed the unflattering portrait that Suskind’s book provides of the Obama administration as a place where there are “no adults in charge,” and where the president himself is clearly unready for the managerial tasks of the office. But while this view vindicates conservatives who warned in 2008 that Obama’s background did not prepare him for the presidency — he had no previous executive experience — it nonetheless isolates Obama the man as the source of the failure, rather than the liberal philosophy that controlled Obama’s administration.
Just as liberals never blamed liberalism for the failures of Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter, so also will liberals insist that Obama’s political failures be attributed to something other than his liberal policies.
The Dream is dead — long live The Dream!
