Otto’s rede.
John Judis is worried that Obama doesn’t realize just how bad things are. Me, I think he has some idea. (The signs are all about us.) —I think Obama’s fetishizing Otto Von Bismarck: “Politics is the art of the possible.” And, yes, I know:
Mark Schmitt has some typically wise things to say about momentum and naïvetie:
Bush’s mistake [in attempting to privatize Social Security after the 2004 election] was an unsurprising one. It is rooted in the naïve idea that presidents get a mandate from their election in the same way a gyroscope gets its spin. The bigger the victory, the bigger the mandate, and as time passes, the mandate diminishes. Bush didn’t have a big victory in 2004, but it was at least a solid, uncontested affirmation, and he decided that with a little extra spin and some abuse of power, he could get more out of it.
For all the romance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days, history suggests that presidents do not get a mandate as a mechanical function of their electoral margin, but in fact they build it over time. They earn it not by winning but by governing. They assemble coalitions and use them again and again, and build institutions and make them work. While many good policies and necessary emergency measures were passed in the first 100 days of the New Deal, the innovations that lasted—those that defined politics until Reagan—came later, after FDR had consolidated power, forced the Supreme Court to accept a new set of assumptions about government’s role in the economy, and won the 1934 mid-term election.
Yes but well you see, as Rick Perlstein points out—
Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation’s status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity — which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.
The Oval Office’s most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy’s martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points — our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests — to make change possible any other way.
Taking the long view, building on the nines, this is without a doubt important, and FDR did win big after those 100 days. But one of the ways he built institutions to allow him to govern lastingly was by nailing some damn thing to the wall and saying there, see? We’ve done that. What’s next?
I don’t know. My hopes were never that high. But I’m starting to worry that in his chilled and admirable pragmatism Obama’s fallen far far short of what we need, far further than I’d feared. “The art of the possible,” after all, isn’t the art of what is possible.
It’s the art of making things possible.
Did you just reference an obscure song by my obscure band? Wow. I have actually never had that experience before. (I wouldn’t assume so except that Google doesn’t have a single hit for that phrase as a phrase.)
Heck, Paul—I riffed a whole political philosophy or at least some catchphrases out of that song. (It’s in the link.)
(Also I quoted “What He’d Just Said” in the most recent City of Roses. I figure I can easily get y’all some airplay in that Portland.)
So you did!! Amazing. Benson will be pleased to know somebody actually thought about our stuff.
I confess I am rather behind on C.O.R. I just noticed it has a feed, which should help.