Friday, January 27, 2012

Former Mayor Kevin Hagan White dies at 82

By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff

(I knew Kevin White in a casual way from 1972 until around 1990, he was funny, brilliant, and always polite. DAF)

Kevin Hagan White, a political figure who helped transform Boston into a world-class city during 16 often turbulent years as mayor, died at 7 tonight in his Beacon Hill home, his family said in a statement. He was 82 and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease about a decade ago.

Mr. White was surrounded by his family, including his wife of 55 years, Kathryn.

“Obviously, it’s a very, very sad day,” the statement said.

A larger-than-life presence of his era, Mr. White had deep roots in the parochial old political culture of the city, but lightning instincts and a roving intellect that propelled him to national stature. Amid society-altering upheavals of the era -- the civil rights movement, Vietnam War, and Watergate -- he adapted and survived, at times reinventing himself.

From 1968 to 1984, Mr. White was chief executive of a fast-changing metropolis, which had emerged from decades of economic stagnation and insularity with an explosion of growth and construction downtown. But social change tore at the city’s fabric. Racial tension and violence during court-ordered school desegregation in the mid-1970s stained Boston’s image, perhaps indelibly.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino lauded Mr. White.

“Kevin was mayor for 16 years. He helped make the city what it is today,” said Menino tonight.

Menino pointed to the “vitality, the enthusiasm” of the administration Mr. White built while he was mayor.

“He was a giant among mayors,” Menino said. “I lost a good friend. I offered my condolences to Kathryn and the entire family. It’s a sad day for the city. But Kevin left an indelible mark that will never, ever, be replaced.”

Former Mayor Raymond L. Flynn said, “It’s no secret that Kevin and I were rivals for many years. But underneath that sometimes heated rivalry, rooted in different priorities, was a mutual respect. Kevin and I shared a deep love for this complex, fascinating city of Boston.”

Accolades poured in from others around the city.

City Council President Stephen J. Murphy said it is a “tremendout loss.”

“He was a dear friend and he was a great leader for the city,” Murphy said.

Former City Councilor Lawrence S. DiCara, who worked with White at City Hall from 1972 to 1981, said, “It’s a sad day for Boston.”

Thinking of the 10-foot-tall bronze statue of White outside City Hall, DiCara added: “As far as I’m concerned, he deserves a statue that is bigger than life.”

A gifted, instinctual, and mercurial politician, Mr. White had national ambitions that were thwarted at each turn. Two years after losing an ill-advised campaign for governor in 1970, he was George S. McGovern’s vice presidential choice for about two hours before being passed over. The tumult of the school busing crisis snuffed out his plans for a presidential candidacy in 1976.

Under Mr. White, Boston was a laboratory for urban policy experiments early in his administration. Later years in office were more stagnant, however, the result of chronic fiscal problems, a preoccupation with machine politics, and, ultimately, a wide-ranging federal corruption investigation that ensnared several dozen city employees and businessmen. Although he was never charged, the probe was a factor in the decision by a weary Mr. White not to seek a record fifth term.

Perhaps his greatest legacy was the young, idealistic talent Mr. White attracted to City Hall, which became an incubator for dozens of successful careers in politics, government, and business.

After the mayoralty, Mr. White maintained a low public profile, teaching at Boston University until his retirement around the time of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

The son and grandson of Boston City Council presidents, Mr. White grew up in Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury, the oldest of four children of Joseph C. and Patricia (Hagan) White.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College, and after graduating from Boston College Law School, split time between private law practice and a prosecutor’s job in the office of Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett H. Byrne.

In a 1954 marriage of political clans, he wed Kathryn Galvin, one of seven daughters of William J. “Mother” Galvin, a former Boston City Council president from Charlestown.

Mr. White’s interest in pursuing a political career had developed by the time he was in high school. “He was captivated by my father’s career,” recalled Terrence H. White, his younger brother, and manager of Kevin’s early campaigns. “My father was a very charismatic guy, gregarious to the nth degree. Politics permeated the household.”

Kevin White made his mark mastering politics in the modern era of television, but his start was the product of old-fashioned, backroom political horse-trading.

In 1960, Mr. White ran for the Democratic nomination for the open position of secretary of state. To win the party’s nomination at what was then a binding convention, Mr. White’s father and father-in-law called in old markers, including a big chit from then-state Senate president John E. Powers, whom the elder White had backed in Powers’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign the previous year.

After two ballots, Kevin White was surging toward victory shortly before midnight at the party’s marathon convention in the old Boston Arena. At that point, Powers, chairing the convention, refused to recognize one of Mr. White’s opponents who was seeking to adjourn the convention to the following day in an effort to forestall the White momentum and regroup delegates, many of whom had left the hall. Fights broke out on the convention floor and police restored order. Mr. White prevailed on the third ballot to become the party’s nominee in November.

During the campaign, Mr. White was such a little-known figure that John F. Kennedy, the favorite-son US senator who was running for president, once introduced him at a rally as “Calvin Witt,” author J. Anthony Lukas wrote in “Common Ground,” his account of school desegregation in Boston, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Mr. White beat a rising Republican star, Edward W. Brooke, and went on to win re-election.

Restless to advance, Mr. White in 1967 joined nine others seeking to succeed John F. Collins, who was stepping down as mayor after eight years of stolid efficiency that launched urban renewal projects, providing the template for future growth. In the preliminary, Mr. White qualified for the two-candidate runoff by finishing second behind Louise Day Hicks, the school committeewoman who had emerged as leader of the resistance to integrating the city’s schools.

Breaking tradition, The Boston Globe issued its first candidate endorsement in 72 years by backing Mr. White, who defeated Hicks by 12,552 votes out of nearly 193,000 cast. That signalled the newspaper’s intense new interest in local politics under Thomas Winship, who had become editor two years earlier.

Mr. White drew bright young political talent, eager to use government as an instrument of social change. Then he delegated authority.

“He would give you discretion,” said US Representative Barney Frank, who took a three-year break from a doctoral program at Harvard to work for Mr. White’s first campaign and as a key aide in his early administration. “He was really a breakthrough guy, the city’s first modern mayor, with a foot in the old school, but also the first to have a significant number of blacks and women in positions of real authority.”

Mr. White also began a process of what Boston College historian Thomas O’Connor described as “selling the notion of ‘The New Boston,’ not just to the city and the neighborhoods, but he literally sold it to the world.”

Mr. White quickly began to draw national notice.

In April 1968, as cities were exploding in rage after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. White persuaded WGBH-TV to broadcast a James Brown concert live from the Boston Garden as a way to keep people in their homes. He also secured $60,000 to pay Brown for the loss of ticket revenue. Onstage that night, the Godfather of Soul called the mayor “a swingin’ cat.’’ Unlike many other major cities, Boston remained relatively calm.

In 1970, Mr. White challenged acting Governor Francis W. Sargent, an affable liberal Republican. Mr. White beat three others to win the Democratic nomination, but in the final, Sargent thumped him by about a quarter of a million votes. During the campaign, Mr. White suffered such a serious ulcer that he required surgery to remove more than half his stomach.

Seeking re-election as mayor a year after the gubernatorial fiasco, Mr. White won with nearly 62 percent of the vote.

In 1972, Mr. White came tantalizingly close to the national breakthrough he craved. While the Democratic National Convention in Miami prepared to nominate McGovern for president, Mr. White remained at his retreat at Monument Beach in Bourne. For about two hours, he was Mr. McGovern’s running mate, until Senator Kennedy, who was protective of his primacy in Massachusetts, and others in the Bay State delegation raised objections. Mr. McGovern sheepishly withdrew the offer in a telephone conversation. By the time McGovern had suffered his crushing defeat at the hands of Richard M. Nixon in November, the mayor was moving to clean up corruption in the Boston Police Department, rocked that year when a raid on the home of a bookmaker turned up an alleged payoff list with the names of 58 police officers.

To modernize the force, Mr. White brought in a reformer, Robert J. diGrazia, police superintendent in St. Louis County, Mo.

As he geared up to run for a third term, however, Mr. White faced a much more serious problem, a crisis that consumed him and marked the beginning of the end of political ambition beyond City Hall. On June 21, 1974, US District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. issued his order to desegrate the city’s schools, starting that fall.

For the rest of his life, Mr. White cast himself a victim of the order. The school department technically fell under the purview of an independent, popularly elected school committee which, for years, sanctioned a separate, unequal, and segregated public education system.

After Mr. White left office in 1984, George K. Regan, his longest-serving spokesman, recalled the fallout.

“He was getting his head kicked in from both sides,” Mr. Regan wrote in the Globe. “He received no credit for his efforts, no matter how hard he tried. It was the most frustrating time of his life. Sometimes when he returned to City Hall late at night, there were tears in his eyes.”

The 1975 re-election campaign against Timilty was the backdraft of the political tinder box created by busing. Compounding Mr. White’s problem were news reports of corrupt fund-raising on his behalf.

With the race tightening, two events conspired, by most accounts, to help Mr. White. First, the Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds dominated the news as they vied in a riveting seven-game, 12-day World Series that was extended three days by rain.

In addition, diGrazia, with his straight-arrow image, was thrust by the White campaign into the race several days before the election. DiGrazia claimed Timilty intended to replace him to please corrupt commanders diGrazia had forced out of the department. Timilty never recovered from the smear.

With that help, Mr. White eked out a slim victory.

In 1979, Mr. White again defeated Mr. Timilty. The race marked the penultimate chapter of one of Boston’s long-running feuds. The archrivals eventually made peace, at Mr. White’s initiation, ending what Timilty in 2005 called “about 20 years of disliking each other intensely.”

Within months of taking the mayoral oath for a third time, Mr. White began the process of becoming a boss in the mold of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Eager to avert another serious challenge, Mr. White ordered the creation of a fine-tuned political organization, with coordinators in the city’s 22 wards and captains in every precinct, then numbering 252. Most were city employees. The upshot, critics said, was the politicization of city services.

By 1978, when Mr. White led the fight for a statewide statewide tax classification referendum to benefit small-property owners, the machine was running full bore. Top operatives at City Hall won pay raises for their political work. In 1981, the White machine was an issue when “The Kevin Seven,” an informal slate of City Council candidates, ran. Only one was elected.

Mr. White’s governance, meanwhile, was producing stylish landmarks that became a more tangible part of his legacy. In 1976, Faneuil Hall Marketplace opened. Suddenly, an eyesore of open stalls and warehouses became a “festival marketplace,” much copied in other US cities. Decades later, it remains a centerpiece of urban vitality.

There were other successes -- and failures -- but in 1983 as he prepared to leave office, Mr. White stood over a scale model of downtown and proudly kept score for a reporter: 38 new office buildings since 1968, 50 more renovated, and 17 hotels built or planned. The triumphs included Copley Place and the reclamation of the Charlestown Navy Yard and waterfront, from the North End to Rowes Wharf.

A year into his final term, another element of the White legacy began to emerge: corruption at City Hall. Suffolk County and federal prosecutors were already assembling cases against a few mid-level officials when news exploded in March 1981 that city employees were being asked to donate to a birthday party celebration honoring the mayor’s wife. These were not political donations, but gifts, $122,000 in all before Mr. White, engulfed in a furor of outrage and preliminary official inquiries, cancelled the event.

That July, President Ronald Reagan appointed a little-known Republican lawyer, William F. Weld, as US attorney. Expanding an existing probe, Weld and an elite team of prosecutors launched a dragnet-like investigation into seemingly every aspect of Mr. White’s administration and the mayor’s personal finances.

The results -- a barrage of indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions -- became Weld’s chief credential when he won the first of two terms as governor in 1990. His investigation produced charges of fraudulent disability pensions, bribery, extortion, and perjury that brought down several dozen businessmen and city employees, including a number of key operatives in Mr. White’s political machine.

Mr. White and those close to him maintained he was clean.

As the federal investigation crested, a large and talented field of candidates assembled to challenge the vulnerable incumbent. A year before the election, the Globe, dependably supportive of his past candidacies, advised him not to run again.

Mr. White remained coy about his intentions.

In spring 1983, as the deadline for filing nomination papers approached, the media frenzy was especially intense. Reporters staked out his office and home on the flat of Beacon Hill, and headed to New York City where the mayor, with his chief advisers and media handlers, was videotaping his announcement.

On the morning of May 26, the Boston Herald broke out its largest type for a front-page headline, “White Will Run.” The newspaper’s star columnist, Peter Lucas, who, by prearrangement, interviewed Mr. White by telephone the previous night, wrote the famously wrong three-paragraph story without specifically identifying as his source the mayor he had needled in recent years, and who later admitted he misled him.

That night, Mr. White announced he would not seek another term. “There will be no ‘Last Hurrah’ for this city,” he declared in a five-minute paid political announcement broadcast on three Boston television stations and nine radio stations.

In addition to his wife and brother, Mr. White leaves two sons, Christopher of North Carolina, and Mark; three daughters, Caitlin G. White Strawbridge of Belmont, Elizabeth of Hingham, and Patricia; and seven grandchildren.

Brian C. Mooney can be reached at brian.mooney@globe.com

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Bankers versus Capitalism

by Irwin Stelzer

The Weekly Standard January 2012

America's more or less free-market capitalism is not under threat from Marxist-Leninism: That system's demonstrated failures have consigned it to the ash-heap of history. Nor is it under threat from China's system of managed economy plus political repression: We can't even abide police breaking up a disease-infested occupy-something-or-other encampment. It is not even under threat from socialism, the hysterical charges of some anti-Obama extremists notwithstanding.

No, it faces a far more subtle enemy—the gradual loss of acceptance of the idea that markets more efficiently allocate resources than governments, of the parallel idea that properly but not excessively regulated markets produce unparalleled levels of material wellbeing (something Marx conceded), and, finally, of the conviction that material prosperity is fairly shared among all who participate in its creation, with enough left over to care for those too ill, old, or otherwise impaired to participate in productive activity. When the broad consensus erodes that capitalism as practiced in America is better at creating and distributing wealth than any other system, the way is open for fundamental legislative and regulatory changes that strip the system of its flexibility and innovative drive.

Which is what makes the behavior of the leaders of our financial sector so inexplicable. Start with a few widely agreed facts. The financial sector does not have a recent history of which it can be proud. Investment banks bet their own money that the mortgage bubble would burst while at the same time advising their clients to buy mortgage-backed securities. Managers of our largest banks took on risks they did not understand, safe in the knowledge that they were too big to fail—that the government would have no choice but to bail them out in order to avoid a cataclysm, or at least a deep recession.

Compensation was decoupled from performance, with failed executives tottering off onto their country clubs' golf courses after pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses and being awarded the use of company jets and office facilities.

Some idea of the mindset of the leaders of the financial community can be gleaned from their response to criticism. Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, claimed to be doing "God's work," a linking of God and Mammon that might have come as a surprise to the Lord. Charles "Chuck" Prince III, soon to be defrocked as CEO of Citigroup and sent packing with multimillions in payoffs, pensions, and perks after a reported $64 billion decline in the value of the bank over which he presided, explained the intellectually demanding risk analysis techniques he applied in his work: "When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing." So were the passengers on the Titanic when it hit that iceberg.

Meanwhile, income inequality increased. We are not sure of all the reasons for this development, but we do know that it is in part because globalization brought millions of dollar-a-day workers into the international economy to compete with American workers; in part because the premium for skills and training was rising as the political class ceded control of the American education system to dirigiste teachers' unions that prevented needed adaptations to the new world; and in part because money talks in the rooms in which the tax code is twisted to the advantage of special interests. Worse, mobility fell, creating an atmosphere ripe for an embattled president to declare class war rather than take on entrenched interests, i.e., unions fighting to prevent entry into trades and to preserve extortionate pensions; bankers willing to pour millions into Obama's campaign coffers in return for prestigious photo-ops and appointments to meaningless committees; billionaires pressing him to increase taxes on families with relatively modest incomes while their capital gains and deal-generated profits receive gentler treatment at the hands of the tax collector.

None of these ills seems curable in the face of entrenched opposition by members of the financial and business communities, and other interest groups. The Democrats quite predictably defend the trade unions that fund them, and what they see as the disadvantaged, never mind that that group now includes wealthy older people who would be offended if their Social Security and medical benefits were reduced a trifle by means testing. The Republicans see no reason why the very, very wealthy should have their tax burden increased a bit, their corporate clients should lose their special tax benefits, or the lucky winners of the gene lottery should pay higher taxes on their inheritances. The result of this crony capitalism—each party with its own cronies—is a lack of radicalism, a you-don't-gore-my-ox-and-I-won't-touch-your-sacred-cow system.

Enough whining. As Lenin asked, "What is to be done?" Voter action at the polls is clearly indicated, although the appalling lack of choice—a Democrat wedded to the economics of the past, and either a clearly nutty or a cautious, establishment Republican technocrat—suggests that the radical change the moment calls for will not come from the political class, at least until the young Turks in the Republican party mature while, we hope, remaining, well, young Turks. So what is to be done is what can be done—remove some of the most glaring defects in the capitalist system, starting with the financial sector. That will take conservative support for change—support not only from the conservative punditry, but from the business community.

Recall: The titans of finance are not well positioned to display a lack of sympathy for those suffering from the consequences of their errors. They still hold their jobs only because the taxpayers bailed them out, with the Fed providing $1.2 trillion of public money on top of other bailout funds, the alternative—watching the financial system melt down—being too gruesome to contemplate. No good saying that without Wall Street there would be no Main Street. The facts are that Main Street is littered with shuttered shops, while appallingly managed banks have survived, and that the foreclosure rate in Greenwich, Connecticut, the preferred home of hedge fund managers and those financial executives who prefer sweeping lawns to the sweeping penthouse views favored by some of their colleagues, is far below the national average.

Yet, pick up your daily paper for the sort of anecdotes that sometimes trump data. Bank of America hires a debt collection agency that a Florida judge finds illegally harasses widows to pay the credit-card debts of their deceased husbands. Here is part of the report in the Wall Street Journal:

Bank of America and other major U.S. lenders hand over accounts of the deceased to firms specializing in death-debt collection. The collection firms then zero in on family members who they think might agree to pay some of what the dead person owed even though they have no legal obligation to do so .??.??. duping relatives into thinking they have to pay the debts of the deceased.

One anecdote should not be the basis of policy. But such an anecdote backed by numerous tales of homeowners who failed in their attempts to negotiate easier terms so as to avoid foreclosure tells something about the insensitivity of leading bankers to the threat posed to the capitalist system by the difficulties faced by millions of Americans. These bankers might do well to cast an eye over the magazine rack of their local newsstand, where Consumer Reports's cover blares, "Fight Back Against Your Bank." We're not talking the Nation or the New Republic here, but the stuff which middle-class America reads.

Sure, it is easy to say people should never have bought homes they cannot afford. But many of these people could indeed afford those homes in the opinion of the banks that lent them the money, before securitizing their mortgages into bundles that the rating agencies saw as virtually riskless—triple-A rated—and passing them off to investors. Many were simply the victims of a financial calamity they did not produce, others of globalization and inept trade policy that allowed China's currency manipulators to destroy their jobs, still others of government programs that lured them into buying homes that would prove beyond their means, especially when the low, starter-interest rates willingly offered by the banks ratcheted up.

The odd part of the banks' preference for foreclosure over mortgage restructuring is that they end up with houses they cannot manage and lawns they cannot mow, properties that become rundown with dire consequences for entire blocks and neighborhoods, and that end up being sold for a fraction of their value. True, foreclosure does avoid moral hazard, an advantage not to be ignored. But that advantage has to be weighed against the costs of a wave of foreclosures. I wonder if those bankers, with the wisdom of hindsight, would have preferred a bit of moral hazard to the failure of Lehman Brothers. Most important is the failure of the bankers to ask themselves what sort of policy towards foreclosures is consistent with the long-term acceptability and survival of American capitalism. And the failure of Republican politicians to ask themselves just why they support banks' opposition to allowing bankruptcy judges to include mortgage obligations when they restructure the debts of those seeking bankruptcy protection, as many Democrats propose. Executives of American Airlines are applauded by the financial community for their shrewd use of the bankruptcy laws to get out from under their contractual obligations. Homeowners who do the same thing are considered immoral.

Most surprising are the objections of leaders of the banking community to quite sensible reforms, their willingness to sacrifice long-term support for the market system to the desire for short-term profits. It is true, for example, that higher capital requirements for banks, requirements that "don't go nearly far enough" according to John Cochrane, finance professor at the University of Chicago, will reduce their profits. That is so—but only because requiring banks to hold more capital reduces the risk of failure or the need for bailouts, risks that have until now been borne by taxpayers.

Also difficult to understand is their failure to comprehend that some practices, such as imposing retroactive increases in interest rates on bank credit cards, are deeply objectionable to consumers, even if technically justifiable. And their failure to realize that large bonuses at a time when 25 million Americans can't find any or enough work are an excess they might want to forgo in the interests of maintaining support for the system that has been kind to them—including bailing them out when they hit the rocks. One investment bank warned its highflyers not to be seen in Porsche showrooms, so it's not as if these bonus recipients are unaware that something potentially unpleasant is brewing out there in the world beyond their office towers.

Bankers are not alone in their failure to understand that something must be done to prevent the opposition to many features of the current system from creating an atmosphere that will support "reforms" so draconian that the resulting system will retain few of the virtues of the existing one. The corpocracy at times seems equally obtuse, as when its leaders call for repeal of the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley law that make it easier for shareholders to rid themselves of underperforming directors, and require that directors be truly independent, rather than chums of the CEO, especially when serving on compensation committees. The breaking of the link between performance and reward that results from friends-of-the-CEO boards of directors does as much to undermine capitalism's claim to legitimacy as financiers' obtuseness about their responsibility to act as if they are members of a society that extends beyond executive dining rooms and country clubs.

I am not one who sees in the Occupiers the wave of the future. They are not the real worry to those of us who fear for the future of market capitalism in America. It is the failure of the major beneficiaries of the capitalist system to understand that openness to reform, combined with a bit of restraint when carving up the huge pie that capitalism is capable of producing, is the best way to head off those people who would alter market capitalism beyond recognition by imposing punitive taxes, onerous regulations, investment-distorting subsidies, along with a bloated government. Those folks are dangerous enough to America's future prosperity without being handed the gift of obtuse opposition to needed change.

Email Irwin Stelzer

Friday, January 20, 2012

Barack Obama's presidency, three years on – is it time to give up hope?

He promised radical change, a new kind of politics. Many one-time believers now say he has no stomach for a fight

Barack Obama with his wife, Michelle, at the White House in December 2011. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

Three years ago to the day, Barack Hussein Obama stood before a crowd shivering in the frigid January air and took the oath of office that made him the 44th president of the United States. By some estimates, there were two million people thronging the National Mall in Washington that day, a human carpet stretching to the steps of the Capitol, to witness a moment many – perhaps most – never believed they would see: the inauguration of America's first black president. When Aretha Franklin, in a splendid hat, sang My Country, 'tis of Thee, the air filled with hope that this would be a moment of healing – of the immediate, bruising past of the Bush years, but also of the long history of racial division in America. Hopes, in other words, that were almost impossibly high.
And these vaulted ambitions did not only apply to the vexed matter of race. Time magazine's cover featured a photo-montaged image merging Obama and Franklin Roosevelt, hailing "the New New Deal". There was a breathless expectation that Obama was poised to solve an economic crisis with a programme of investment and government activism that would not only put Americans back to work but rebuild the country, preparing it for a cleaner, greener future. And of course Obama would put aside the reckless, swaggering foreign policy of his predecessor, would reach out to the Muslim world and would doubtless replace discord with harmony across the globe. It was not just those who were there on that bright January morning who got caught up in the excitement of all this promise. Less than nine months later, the Nobel committee gave Obama its peace prize.
Now all that seems a long time ago. Conservative Americans, especially those who live in the Foxosphere, never believed the hype anyway. But since then, many of the one-time true believers, Democrats and liberals, have lost their faith in Obama. They believe his presidency has been a terrible, historic letdown; that he has not delivered on his promises; that instead of bringing radical change, he has provided more of the same; that he has been a weak, querulous presence in the White House, unwilling to make enemies, unwilling even to define himself or make clear what he stands for.
The specific charge sheet against Obama could run for several pages and then several more. On the economy, the president is blamed for a lack of ambition, for passing a stimulus package of $787bn that, say the critics, should have been nearly twice the size. Obama erred, too, by allowing Democrats in Congress to write the stimulus bill, packing it with pet schemes and pork that would do little to get the economy moving. In an attempt to win Republican support – which never came – he also weighed down the bill with too many tax cuts. The result was action that was simply incomplete, leaving unemployment hovering around the 9% mark for most of Obama's presidency.
Former admirers say he was too weak on the banks, failing to declare war on those who had caused the 2008 crash. The clues were there in his senior appointments. While some liberals had fantasised about a dream ticket of Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and former labour secretary Robert Reich, Obama filled his two key economic posts with Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, both schooled by Robert Rubin, former co-chair of Goldman Sachs. Obama did legislate on financial reform, but the bill did not go far enough, with no restoration of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall act, which had previously separated casino and retail banking. Nor was there any action to cap the pay of top executives, even in companies majority-owned by the US government. It's not that Obama fought and lost on these issues. In most cases, he did not even fight.
His signature achievement, the passage of healthcare reform, also dismayed as many liberals as it delighted, chiefly because Obama surrendered on the so-called public option which, while not exactly establishing an American NHS, would have at least offered a government-run insurance programme as an alternative to the private sector. That made Obama's bill no more radical than one proposed decades earlier by Richard Nixon, or the one passed by a certain Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts.
In his inaugural address Obama spoke often and poetically on climate change. He vowed to "harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories". But there has been no action and not even any serious advocacy. Aware that Republicans do not even believe there is an energy problem, he has shied away from offering a solution.
Those of us watching from afar have felt versions of this disappointment. Plenty of Guardian readers would have cheered when Obama used his first day in office to sign an order for the closure of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay – and chose to make his first presidential phone call to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. But, thwarted by a Republican refusal to allow any ex-Guantánamo detainees to set foot on US soil, Obama has been unable to make good on that day one order: Camp X-Ray remains open. As for Israel-Palestine, on which he had promised to work from his first day in office, the US role has been ineffective or even, by some lights, counter-productive.
"He has allowed himself to be an American president poked in the eye by Bibi," says one former European foreign minister who worked on the Middle East peace process, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. Many diplomats and others agree that Obama's insistence on a freeze on Israeli settlement building, however well-intentioned, proved to be a tactical error, allowing any chance of progress to become entangled in one single aspect of what is a much larger problem – and that in the staring contest between Obama and Netanyahu, Obama blinked first. What explains these multiple failings? Are they the fault of Obama the man or of the system? On the domestic front, some are forgiving of the president, saying that he has faced impossible odds. Among the obstacles is an intransigent Republican party in Congress that does not hide its desire to deny Obama anything that looks like an achievement, even if such paralysis damages the national interest. "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president," said the Republicans' senate leader, Mitch McConnell.
Add to that a senate rulebook that allows the Republican minority to filibuster and frustrate every Democratic initiative; a Democratic party as divided and factional as the Republicans are united and disciplined; a Fox News echo chamber that daily demonises the president as a Muslim Marxist foreigner eager to impose totalitarianism on the American republic; and corporate money ready to flood the airwaves and put pressure on the congressmen it funds to ensure its interests are protected. Viewed like this, Obama was only ever a mere mortal taking on an invincible machine – and so was always bound to fail.
Others are less charitable. They point first to Obama's tactical errors. He should never have let Congress write the healthcare bill, thereby delaying and diluting it, but should have taken the initiative himself. He should have focused on jobs before healthcare reform anyway. Above all, he tried to accommodate the Republicans for too long. He believed his own rhetoric, which promised an end to Washington partisanship – "he drank his own Kool-Aid," says one observer – when he should have rapidly realised that Republicans did not want to sit around the campfire with him singing Kumbaya. They wanted to destroy him. He should have drawn a clear dividing line between him and them, defining himself as the defender of the national interest and of the hard-pressed, and casting the Republicans as the enemy. He should have channelled the spirit of FDR, who did not hesitate to say of his political adversaries: "I welcome their hatred." Instead, he remained cool, calm and hyper-rational to a fault, often described as too chilly to connect emotionally with the nation he leads.
Which brings us closer to the core critique of Obama. That he avoids a fight, that he folds too early, that in his desire to unite and heal he too often surrenders his own position – to the point where no one is clear what his own position is. He blinked yet again when he faced down congressional Republicans who refused to raise America's debt ceiling last August, even though polls showed the US public backed him. "Every time the Republicans played chicken with him, he caved," laments Nation columnist Eric Alterman, who adds: "This is really painful for me. I loved the guy."
So the liberal disappointment with Obama is real. And yet it may not endure forever. Despite everything, the president has amassed quite a record. The healthcare reform he passed had eluded every president since Teddy Roosevelt; it had been a Democratic goal since Truman. But only Obama did it. The stimulus package has created an estimated 2.4m jobs and prevented the recession turning into a second Depression. While other advanced economies are caught in a downward spiral of deficit fetishism, the US is seeing unemployment come down. And recently, Obama successfully fought for and defended the payroll tax cut, one tax cut that benefits low-income Americans.
Abroad, Obama secured what George W Bush only blustered about: the removal of Osama bin Laden. Under Obama, al-Qaida's capacity and strength have diminished sharply. He made good on his promise to bring troops home from Iraq and is doing the same in Afghanistan (even if he is not so much ending the war there as simply pulling out). Yes, the US played a crucial back-up role in Libya, but there has been no repeat of Bush's warmongering.
It is not a bad record and there is every chance that it will represent merely the first half of a long game. If, as looks likely, Obama is re-elected in November, the FDR precedent might be invoked once again: it was in his second term that Roosevelt notched up some of his greatest achievements. This president, too, may have learned from his mistakes and got the true measure of his enemies. After three long, hard years, there are still grounds for hope.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics

Andrew Sullivan NEWSWEEK

The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he's a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.

by Andrew Sullivan | January 16, 2012 12:00 AM EST

You hear it everywhere. Democrats are disappointed in the president. Independents have soured even more. Republicans have worked themselves up into an apocalyptic fervor. And, yes, this is not exactly unusual.

A president in the last year of his first term will always get attacked mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier members of his base. And when unemployment is at remarkably high levels, and with the national debt setting records, the criticism will—and should be—even fiercer. But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.

A caveat: I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. I did not expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already, thank you very much. And there have been many times when I have disagreed with decisions Obama has made—to drop the Bowles-Simpson debt commission, to ignore the war crimes of the recent past, and to launch a war in Libya without Congress’s sanction, to cite three. But given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

The right’s core case is that Obama has governed as a radical leftist attempting a “fundamental transformation” of the American way of life. Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America and an empty suit who couldn’t run a business, let alone a country.

The Case Against Liberal Despair: Michelle Goldberg issues a reality check to those liberal activists who now despair electoral politics, Obama and the squalid compromises of governing.

Leave aside the internal incoherence—how could such an incompetent be a threat to anyone? None of this is even faintly connected to reality—and the record proves it. On the economy, the facts are these. When Obama took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial system, and unemployment and debt—lagging indicators—were about to soar even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment. Economies take time to shift course.

But Obama did several things at once: he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated a bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.

All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.

You’d think, listening to the Republican debates, that Obama has raised taxes. Again, this is not true. Not only did he agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, affecting 95 percent of taxpayers; he has cut the payroll tax, and recently had to fight to keep it cut against Republican opposition. His spending record is also far better than his predecessor’s. Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama. Again: imagine Bush had been a Democrat and Obama a Republican. You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor—except, of course, that Obama has had to govern under the worst recession since the 1930s, and Bush, after the 2001 downturn, governed in a period of moderate growth. It takes work to increase the debt in times of growth, as Bush did. It takes much more work to constrain the debt in the deep recession Bush bequeathed Obama.

The great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than its critics have claimed. The Congressional Budget Office has projected it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right. It’s to the right of the Clintons’ monstrosity in 1993, and remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal. Its passage did not preempt recovery efforts; it followed them. It needs improvement in many ways, but the administration is open to further reform and has agreed to allow states to experiment in different ways to achieve the same result. It is not, as Romney insists, a one-model, top-down prescription. Like Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative, it sets standards, grants incentives, and then allows individual states to experiment. Embedded in it are also a slew of cost-reduction pilot schemes to slow health-care spending. Yes, it crosses the Rubicon of universal access to private health care. But since federal law mandates that hospitals accept all emergency-room cases requiring treatment anyway, we already obey that socialist principle—but in the most inefficient way possible. Making 44 million current free-riders pay into the system is not fiscally reckless; it is fiscally prudent. It is, dare I say it, conservative.

On foreign policy, the right-wing critiques have been the most unhinged. Romney accuses the president of apologizing for America, and others all but accuse him of treason and appeasement. Instead, Obama reversed Bush’s policy of ignoring Osama bin Laden, immediately setting a course that eventually led to his capture and death. And when the moment for decision came, the president overruled both his secretary of state and vice president in ordering the riskiest—but most ambitious—plan on the table. He even personally ordered the extra helicopters that saved the mission. It was a triumph, not only in killing America’s primary global enemy, but in getting a massive trove of intelligence to undermine al Qaeda even further. If George Bush had taken out bin Laden, wiped out al Qaeda’s leadership, and gathered a treasure trove of real intelligence by a daring raid, he’d be on Mount Rushmore by now. But where Bush talked tough and acted counterproductively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war. Since he took office, al Qaeda’s popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted.

Obama’s foreign policy, like Dwight Eisenhower’s or George H.W. Bush’s, eschews short-term political hits for long-term strategic advantage. It is forged by someone interested in advancing American interests—not asserting an ideology and enforcing it regardless of the consequences by force of arms. By hanging back a little, by “leading from behind” in Libya and elsewhere, Obama has made other countries actively seek America’s help and reappreciate our role. As an antidote to the bad feelings of the Iraq War, it has worked close to perfectly.

But the right isn’t alone in getting Obama wrong. While the left is less unhinged in its critique, it is just as likely to miss the screen for the pixels. From the start, liberals projected onto Obama absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country, where anything requires 60 Senate votes even to stand a chance of making it into law. They have described him as a hapless tool of Wall Street, a continuation of Bush in civil liberties, a cloistered elitist unable to grasp the populist moment that is his historic opportunity. They rail against his attempts to reach a Grand Bargain on entitlement reform. They decry his too-small stimulus, his too-weak financial reform, and his too-cautious approach to gay civil rights. They despair that he reacts to rabid Republican assaults with lofty appeals to unity and compromise.

They miss, it seems to me, two vital things. The first is the simple scale of what has been accomplished on issues liberals say they care about. A depression was averted. The bail-out of the auto industry was—amazingly—successful. Even the bank bailouts have been repaid to a great extent by a recovering banking sector. The Iraq War—the issue that made Obama the nominee—has been ended on time and, vitally, with no troops left behind. Defense is being cut steadily, even as Obama has moved his own party away from a Pelosi-style reflexive defense of all federal entitlements. Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels. Under Obama, a crucial state, New York, made marriage equality for gays an irreversible fact of American life. Gays now openly serve in the military, and the Defense of Marriage Act is dying in the courts, undefended by the Obama Justice Department. Vast government money has been poured into noncarbon energy investments, via the stimulus. Fuel-emission standards have been drastically increased. Torture was ended. Two moderately liberal women replaced men on the Supreme Court. Oh, yes, and the liberal holy grail that eluded Johnson and Carter and Clinton, nearly universal health care, has been set into law. Politifact recently noted that of 508 specific promises, a third had been fulfilled and only two have not had some action taken on them. To have done all this while simultaneously battling an economic hurricane makes Obama about as honest a follow-through artist as anyone can expect from a politician.

What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen. This took time—as did his painstaking change in the rule barring HIV-positive immigrants and tourists—but the slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner in which it was accomplished made the changes more durable. Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.

Or take the issue of the banks. Liberals have derided him as a captive of Wall Street, of being railroaded by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner into a too-passive response to the recklessness of the major U.S. banks. But it’s worth recalling that at the start of 2009, any responsible president’s priority would have been stabilization of the financial system, not the exacting of revenge. Obama was not elected, despite liberal fantasies, to be a left-wing crusader. He was elected as a pragmatic, unifying reformist who would be more responsible than Bush.

And what have we seen? A recurring pattern. To use the terms Obama first employed in his inaugural address: the president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the problem; then, finally, he moves to his preferred position of moderate liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an ideologue or a divider. This kind of strategy takes time. And it means there are long stretches when Obama seems incapable of defending himself, or willing to let others to define him, or simply weak. I remember those stretches during the campaign against Hillary Clinton. I also remember whose strategy won out in the end.

This is where the left is truly deluded. By misunderstanding Obama’s strategy and temperament and persistence, by grandstanding on one issue after another, by projecting unrealistic fantasies onto a candidate who never pledged a liberal revolution, they have failed to notice that from the very beginning, Obama was playing a long game. He did this with his own party over health-care reform. He has done it with the Republicans over the debt. He has done it with the Israeli government over stopping the settlements on the West Bank—and with the Iranian regime, by not playing into their hands during the Green Revolution, even as they gunned innocents down in the streets. Nothing in his first term—including the complicated multiyear rollout of universal health care—can be understood if you do not realize that Obama was always planning for eight years, not four. And if he is reelected, he will have won a battle more important than 2008: for it will be a mandate for an eight-year shift away from the excesses of inequality, overreach abroad, and reckless deficit spending of the last three decades. It will recapitalize him to entrench what he has done already and make it irreversible.

Yes, Obama has waged a war based on a reading of executive power that many civil libertarians, including myself, oppose. And he has signed into law the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial (even as he pledged never to invoke this tyrannical power himself). But he has done the most important thing of all: excising the cancer of torture from military detention and military justice. If he is not reelected, that cancer may well return. Indeed, many on the right appear eager for it to return.

Sure, Obama cannot regain the extraordinary promise of 2008. We’ve already elected the nation’s first black president and replaced a tongue-tied dauphin with a man of peerless eloquence. And he has certainly failed to end Washington’s brutal ideological polarization, as he pledged to do. But most Americans in polls rightly see him as less culpable for this impasse than the GOP. Obama has steadfastly refrained from waging the culture war, while the right has accused him of a “war against religion.” He has offered to cut entitlements (and has already cut Medicare), while the Republicans have refused to raise a single dollar of net revenue from anyone. Even the most austerity-driven government in Europe, the British Tories, are to the left of that. And it is this Republican intransigence—from the 2009 declaration by Rush Limbaugh that he wants Obama “to fail” to the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s admission that his primary objective is denying Obama a second term—that has been truly responsible for the deadlock. And the only way out of that deadlock is an electoral rout of the GOP, since the language of victory and defeat seems to be the only thing it understands.

If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.