TheMillerCircle.org

Immediately after the election, right wing pundits and corporate shill editorial pages, like those of the Wall Street Journal,  were filled with advice for Obama to be cautious during the first months of his presidency. In doing so, they often used the first few months of Clinton’s first term, or JFK’s Bay of Pigs disaster, to warn about rushing things too quickly and over reaching. Their claims go like this: it was Clinton’s health care transformation plan that was pushed too quickly and his policy on gays in the military that made the rest of his presidency an uphill climb and brought the Republicans into power in 1993. But, I always took a different view of Clinton’s first few years in office. His willingness to side with Alan Greenspan who pushed for reductions in interest rates by balancing the budget, led him to cut back on programs for the poor and his support for NAFTA did not help his image with blue collar workers. He also promised to reduce America’s role as the leading arms merchant of the world, but scuttled that promise for fear of losing jobs. In addition, Clinton was a big supporter of the free market economy that has ushered in our economic calamity.  So, I have always felt that Clinton’s problem was not being too conservative, but not being liberal and forceful enough. As Alan Greenspan said of Clinton, “he was a pretty good Republican.”

Ever since the Downing Street memo, the country has been lurching closer to a more liberal and progressive view about how to deal with our pressing national problems. The complete incompetency of the GWB administration in dealing with matters that only the Federal Government can manage, such as Katrina, have helped the public to see how the Republican mantra of saving individual liberties by destroying big government, has produced a government that is dysfunctional in practically every important arena of Federal function. Ariana Huffington has been emphasizing for months how the country has become more liberal in their attitudes towards government–they want government to work and they see many issues in which there is a roll for expanded, not contracted, Federal government functions. They see too how quickly the free marketeers lined up at the public trough when their system of hyperinvestment through massive debt failed them. It is equally clear that what Bush has done in response to the fiscal crisis is privatize profit while socializing risk.  Polls now consistently show that, for the major problems confronting the nation, such as the economy, the war, health care, the general direction our country is moving, our foreign policy decisions and a wide spectrum of environmental issues, Americans align themselves with a far more liberal viewpoint than at any other time since Lyndon Johnso was elected President in 1964.  The worst crisis since the depression has people finally asking what would FDR do? The old ploy of using the word “socialism” as a red-baiting scare tactic didn’t work for McCain and its failure signals the new attitudes, especially among younger voters, those who didn’t live through the communist scare tactics of the post-war era.

An election day poll by the Center for American Progress “asked whether Republicans had lost because they were too conservative or not conservative enough. By a twenty point margin, voters chose “too conservative”, including independents who agreed by a 21 point margin. Seven out of ten said they wanted the Republicans to work with Obama and “help him achieve his plans,” while fewer than a quarter of respondents thought the GOP should try to keep him from implementing a progressive agenda.” Time and again national polls reveal the nation in a more liberal-receptive mood than at any other time since the depression, when FDR established the command economy that lasted until the advent of Reaganism. So, as the Republicans carry on their own debate about whether they should be obstructionists or participants in a giant constituent move to the left, their fate, which may include the future of many Democratic senators in the South (the one remaining bastion of Reagan Republicans and Democrats), may hang in the balance of what course they take in the first few months of Obama’s Presidency.

Rather than using Clinton has an example, take that of FDR. In his first 100 days of taking office in 1933, he passed a dizzying array of legislation, including the National Recovery Act (NRA).  But in his first week, he established a new open relationship with a suspicious press, fielding open questions, and he began the first of his “fireside chats” with the nation through the use of radio, where he talked on many subjects, including the problem with the banks. During that first week, Will Rogers exclaimed “the President took a complicated subject like banking and made everybody understand it, even the bankers.” After Roosevelt’s first week in office (which began in March in those days), Walter LIppmann, an initial skeptic of Roosevelt’s enthusiastic attitude about the future, said “at the beginning of March, the country was in such a state of confused desperation that it would have followed almost any leader anywhere he chose to go… In one week, the nation, which had lost confidence in everything and everybody, has regained confidence in the government and itself.” Opposition leader Hamilton Fish proudly announced that the new regime was “an American dictatorship based on the consent of the governed without any violation of individual liberty or human rights.” Today, I believe that the country is poised to accept a dramatic new role for the Federal government, just as it was in 1933. In important ways of course, this has already happened. Two years into Roosevelt’s first term, during the mid-term elections, Roosevelt’s Democratic Party gained further in Congress, with Democrats controlling the Senate with 72 seats! Realignment was cemented in stone. I would urge Obama to look at Roosevelt, not Clinton or Kennedy as the role model for his first 100 days. The country needs a series of dramatic uplifting moves to help them escape from what they see as an endless ocean of problems, as they wait for the other shoe to drop, as it is dropping now by jumping from Wall Street to Main Street. Americans have lost their optimism about the future, making it possible for Obama to send a message of hope through his urgency of action.

Obama is preparing to move massively on many different fronts to unravel what the raveler has done to this country in the last eight years. At the moment, he sees fixing health care as an issue joined at the hip with our troubled economy. He looks at energy the same way. What we don’t know yet is whether he will deepen our involvement in Afghanistan as he has promised, without reflecting on how much the war in that country has changed in the last few years, particularly now that Pashtun tribal regions of Pakistan have been brought into the conflict. We still think and talk like we are fighting the “Taliban,” but who is the Taliban other than a group of more extremist Pashtun tribal members? Pashtuns are the largest single tribal group in the world, numbering more than 42 million. I think that Afghanistan has become another war that we cannot win, in part because we have done too much damage with our bombing policies, with very little to show for our efforts, except for the fact that we turned Afghanistan into a narco-state. It also seems that we continually confuse wedding parties with terrorist meetings.  I think the best way out of Afghanistan is for Hamid Karzai to negotiate with the Taliban, or those we once called the “freedom fighters” when  we purposely duped the Russians into invading that country.
But, while Afghanistan will be a huge, uncertain problem for Obama, his immediate actions to do things like shutting down Guantanamo, transferring the prisoners there into our civilian judicial system, will be greeted by most Americans as the only rational option available to us, serving our interests of common decency and, oh yes, acting consistantly with our own laws. That’s right, another hoped for outcome will be a new respect for the laws of the land and the limits of Presidential power. The Patriot Act and the excesses of the Homeland Security State are other examples in which our freedom to hold a simple political convention seems seriously jeopardized by homeland security. A reconciliation with Russia, to actively initiate serious disarmament talks over nuclear weapons. Reducing our mutually destructive nuclear arsenals will go a long way towards defusing the single most threatening and horrific terrorist act–that of blowing up an American city with a nuclear bomb. If that happens, it will probably be one of ours, just like the sophisticated anthrax used in the mailing attacks after 9/11, the source of which was almost surely from a U.S. military laboratory.  Obama could begin to conquer much of the world’s hostility problems by announcing the end of the “War on Terror” which is shaping up to be a lot like the Half-century “war with communism.” The military has alreadly labeled this “the long war.” We shouldn’t let them get away with the label or the plan supporting it.

I am also certain that a plan to have America lead in the greening of the planet, partly implemented by converting our huge military weapons manufacturing facilities into green planet technologies, will be greeted by our own citizens and most of the rest of the world with a sigh of relief and some hope that something might actually get done. These ideas are easy to come by, but very difficult to implement. We have the makings of a great president, but we also have the capacity to tie him down with unproductive quarreling and obfuscation. He will need good ideological armor that we can help provide.

Getting good things done quickly might come very easily for Obama during his first 6 months in office. But a step that invites Americans to stop living the false narrative of their country’s history, the one that began at the close of WW II, when the Pentagon was supposed to be torn down,  but was instead reinforced to become the epicenter of our global policy of American hegemony–the precursor to the neocons: undoing that America may not be possible, at least not in the short run.  But, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Yet, the only way we are going to get there is if the constituents of the office holder force him/her to begin taking steps for the “long fireside chat.” I could write the first few lines of such a chat–”my fellow Americans, tonight I want to begin discussing with you how we have errored in our past policies by painting the rest of the world with broad red brush strokes that prevented us from seeing what the world was really like…. as it turns out, most communists were really nationalists… and I want to begin naming them for you one by one.”