Will Obama's Chance to be 21st Century FDR be Negated by His Postpartisanship?
Republicans would like you to believe that the US is a conservative country despite bursts of progressivism after conservatism has failed and screwed regular Americans. History, unfortunately, keeps repeating this pattern.
However, it is in those progressive burstx, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first term and Lyndon Baines Johnson ascension to the presidency after Kennedy's death, that saw the creation of progressive programs like the New Deal's Social Security and the Great Society's Medicare and Voting Rights Act.
While Americans poll progressively on programs like single payer, universal health care, the economic catastrophe, etc., unless the next Democratic president strikes while the iron is hot and pushes through programs for the common good, the elected officials on Capitol Hill, especially minority Republicans and their Blue Dog Democratic colleagues, will put on the brakes and obstruct the demads of the people.
Rick Perlstein writes about this at Campaign for America's Future in the context of a Barack Obama presidency. He agrees, as I have written often, that elected Democrats must emulate FDR and his economic justice, regulatory programs, for example.
"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.
"Let Franklin Roosevelt be our guide. We take for granted now one of his signature political innovations: the idea of an executive "legislative agenda," a specific set of White House proposals, by which the success or failure of a presidency can be judged. FDR's was the first and most spectacular. He understood that the New Deal would pass quickly or it would not pass at all. And so, politically, he yoked Congress' willingness to pass his program without obstruction to Congress' willingness to address the national emergency tout court.
"One of those exhausted bright young men, [who came to Washington during the Roosevelt years] of course, was bright-eyed Lyndon B. Johnson of the Texas Hill Country. The 1930s Washington culture in which LBJ thrived was not merely a function of the New Dealers' scramble to redeem a national emergency. It was a function of the fact that they understood the reality of America as "the frozen republic," as Daniel Lazare has called it. By the time Johnson got his accidental opportunity to occupy his hero FDR's chair, progressives understood implicitly that the unique constitutional system, conceived to protect the minority interests of slaveholders, gives the upper hand to obstructers. This, and not the supposed necessity of trimming ideological sails to placate some notional conservative majority, guided their strategizing.
"We should focus.....on Johnson's remarkable number of broad-based accomplishments in those first 22 months. We now take for granted the notion that the elderly have a right to medical care, that the government should provide aid for education, that immigration policy should not discriminate on the basis of race, and that the government should concern itself with clean air. It would be unimaginable to see them reversed—in part because of the constitutional inertia that made them so difficult to achieve in the first place. They are the kind of things Republicans now pretend they were in favor of all along. This is the way social change works. It is the responsibility of the next progressive president to crash through a similar set of reforms for the next generation to take for granted."
The first two years following Barack Obama's inauguration will tell us if Obama is the 21st century FDR or whether his myopic, misplaced and mistaken postpartisanship naivete will allow Republicans to obstruct programs and policies for the common good and, unlike FDR and LBJ who understood and seized the historic moment for the benefit of all Americans, Obama may miss this golden opportunity.
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