Black and White – NOFX
I’m really starting to get annoyed with John Dickerson. He’s the political writer for Slate, and usually has smart things to say. He’s also an excellent writer. And the Slate Political Gabfesthas been one of my favorite podcasts for a long time. So I like his work, but I’m growing increasingly frustrating with his work these days. He’s becoming the king of false equivalencies and stories premised on the idea that the world is strictly binary, where one either wholeheartedly works against an idea, or they absolutely support it.
First, there’s nothing in the world he loves more to do than say “Obama ran on change, but he’s an example of how he’s doing politics as usual. Gotcha!” While the general idea of such stories is perfectly legitimate – it’s worth paying attention to those (lots of) places where Obama isn’t different – Dickerson treats it like there are only two imaginable worlds. One where there’s CHANGE. And another where there’s POLITICS AS USUAL. And approximately half his stories deal with this question, often entirely without the nuance most people would attach to the concept.
To explain: most people didn’t vote for some ephemeral concept of “change.” They attached particular ideas to the floating signifier of the campaign slogan. Change isn’t a yes/no question for them, determined in little spit-fights over framing and the day-to-day pushbacks. It takes the form of wanting health care reform, or significant action on climate, or an end to the war in Iraq, or a pullback on expansive executive power, or gays serving openly in the military, or middle class tax cuts, or a hundred other real things. And to the extent that they care about the meta-question of “how is politics being conducted?” Rahn Emanuel is 100% correct as it relates to bipartisanship: “We just have to try. … We don’t have to succeed.” As I wrote about extensively back in November, the change Obama represents when it comes to partisanship is about demonstrating a willingness to talk and listen in good-faith to people who also want to do so.
Which brings me back to Dickerson. I follow him on Google Reader, and this morning he commented briefly on this editorial from David Plouffe, pushing the Limbaugh story, saying: “I suppose you can rail against Republicans for practicing politics-as-usual using disingenuous politics-as-usual arguments but someone might notice.”
It’s not disingenuous. It’s just not. It only appears that way if you interpret hard-nosed efforts to split the Republican Party as “disingenuous” rather than as simply political.
And I think that’s the crucial difference. You can do “politics” and not have it be “politics as usual.” Dickerson seems incapable of understanding that. The “as usual” addendum refers to a specific set of practices. Pointing out that Republicans seem bizarrely beholden to a guy who holds views that are incredibly unpopular with the general public does not qualify.
Here’s another recent example of his black and white perception on the world making for poor analysis:
He said in his address to Congress last week that hard times would require sacrifice from everyone, and that he was going to insist on rigorous budget discipline. This week, however, he’s granting an exception for a $410 billion pork-filled spending bill, which he’s going to sign with little opposition.
Accusing Obama of failing to follow through on his call for “doing hard things” is another of Dickerson’s favorite tropes. “Hard things” in this context always ends up being the things that Dickerson believes are so obviously good that the only possible explanation for not doing them is cowardice or political manuevering.
However, even in this article, he points out the following facts: “Undoing the bill’s many pet projects would create a bloodbath, angering both Republicans and Democrats over what is, relative to his other requests, a small amount of savings ($16 billion if you remove the earmarks from the bill).”
He goes on to say that this proves Obama simply isn’t willing to waste his political capital on this fight. For Dickerson, this seems to be a case of him working in doublespeak.
The nub of the problem is found later in the article, when Dickerson writes: “it’s hard for a president who uses the language of moral absolutes to embrace relativity.” Here’s the thing. Obama explicitly DOESN’T speak in moral absolutes. That’s his whole thing! That’s the point of his “change” – it’s about the refusal to treat anything as an absolute value, against which all other considerations must be sacrificed.
Politics as usual is when people become so committed to a concept that they ignore workability in favor of ranting and raving. It’s when they toss aside considerations about what their actions might do because they believe that the value they hold is so pure that it simply cannot be compromised. And yet, somehow, that’s precisely what Dickerson seems to expect from Obama. In this instance, he seems to be arguing:
Obama’s saying we should do hard things. But he’s not willing to tear apart the entire budget writing process for the sake of a few billion dollars. Hypocrite!
That’s what makes the obsession over earmarks so stupid in the first place. Yes, it would be nice if they didn’t exist. But they do serve an actual purpose. And blowing up the whole budget, re-starting from scratch over the sake of $16 billion dollars would be certifiably insane in a moment when we have FAR bigger fish to fry.
Remember that this isn’t Obama’s budget for next year. It’s the leftover budget from last year, which authorizes spending for the current year, and which was the subject of literally months and months of haggling, negotiation, and fighting to get it to the point where it’s ready to be voted on.
Finally, this issue of spending, there’s another way that Dickerson’s insistence on reading things in a black and white fashion produces a ridiculous conclusion. Premise 1: Obama admits that long-term deficits are important. Premise 2: The spending bill spends money, sometimes on things that Dickerson thinks are silly. Premise 3: Hypocrisy!
He even uses an analogy of a diet, saying: “Imagine if your diet worked this way: Before you start on your 28-day purge, you may consume the remaining food in your pantry.” But here’s the thing. We’re NOT GOING ON A DIET FROM SPENDING.
The entire point is that our current situation is far more at risk of deflationary spirals than it is of inflation. We currently need the government to spend money, and lots of it to fill in the missing demand. The need for fiscal restraint is ONLY a long-term consideration. The risk there is that we might ramp up demand but do so in a fashion that will be unsustainable for the long term because it will drive inflationary pressure, and will continue to be built on the back of NEEDING to finance our whole economy through debt.
That’s why Obama is talking about things like the savings from ending the war in Iraq, or the massive savings that will come over the long term from reforming the health care system to cut costs and ease the concern over the growth of entitlement spending. These are actions that free up HUGE amounts of money and do so in a way that communicates the long-term credibility and health of the US economy.
Put simply: government spending right now is, on balance, good. Obviously it would be better to spend it on efficient projects, but Dickerson provides no evidence that the “pork” in the bill won’t have a stimulative effect. Moreover, his apparent demand that Obama kill this bill in favor of a “pork-free” one would have the very tangible effect of delaying all the good spending in the bill by a long time.
The point to all this is that while there is a lot of utility in identifying the places where Obama is following through on his promises, there’s no point at all in fetishizing change to such an extent that you engage in the sort of false equivalencies that Dickerson has been peddling lately. Particularly when there’s a lot of real issues that Obama actually promised to change (like health care, energy, torture), as opposed to the changes that the DC establishment types wish he was working on. Want to write a story about how he’s continuing some of the troubling Bush practices on executive power? Great. But don’t sell your own personal interests as the change that somehow Obama is now responsible for.