By Kevin Baker
Published on harpers.org
President Barack Obama’s speech to the 2012
Democratic Convention was one of the best he has given, and one of the
best in recent history. It was an almost word-perfect defense of the
liberal idea and American exceptionalism. I just wish he’d meant half of
it.
The grudging early praise for the speech from the commentariat has
been picayune, even silly. President Obama’s speech was not only
brilliantly conceived and written, and delivered with impeccable timing,
it accomplished something, which is a very rare thing indeed for a
speech to do.
What the president’s address—what the whole evening of
Democratic speeches—did was to utterly diminish the Republican ticket,
not to mention the perpetually furious and paranoid party behind it.
Deftly pivoting to foreign policy, hitherto all but unmentioned in
Charlotte, one Democratic speaker after another cast Mitt Romney and
Paul Ryan as the parochial, pandering neophytes that they are. The
Republican ticket is “new” to foreign policy, as Obama said, perfectly
skewering two men on a single word. They are “the most inexperienced
foreign policy twosome to run for president and vice president in
decades,” as Sen. John Kerry bludgeoned them in the speech of his life.
“Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years
ago,” he continued—and a thousand bumper stickers were held aloft around
the hall, spelling it out for anyone who might have found Kerry’s words
overly nuanced: BIN LADEN IS DEAD! GM IS ALIVE!
What my co-blogger Jack so aptly calls the “pearl-clutchers”
among the talking heads tsked and gurgled over such indecorous
language. Other criticisms included the complaint that Obama did not
give us sufficient details about exactly what he would do to move the
country forward and how he would do it. But a convention capper is not a
State of the Union address, nor a message to Congress. It is not
Charles Evans Hughes addressing the philatelic society. Politics is a
diverse and improvisational business, and the skilled politician keeps
at hand an old-time surgeon’s tray of instruments. Here is a scalpel,
there a meat cleaver, and there a mallet or a saw. Obama brandished all
the tools on the tray in dissecting the Republicans and their
candidates.
They had it coming. When you put out that many lies, and
filthy, dangerous lies at that, you are begging for someone to take you
apart. Obama does not run around the world apologizing for America. We
should not be looking to drum up two, five, six, eight new wars (I lost
track halfway through John McCain’s speech). Breaking teacher unions
is not “the civil rights issue of today” (sorry, Condi). Simply
eliminating (unnamed) regulations and slashing taxes (yet again) on the
very wealthiest will not by itself trigger sustained economic growth,
much less a decent society. Some 99 percent of the world’s scientists
are not involved in a colossal, costly hoax against the American people
and the world. Women’s bodies do not kill the sperm cells of rapists.
Dismissing Republicans with a few stinging quips was the
most gracious way the Democrats could have found to send them to their
rooms. Obama demonstrated beyond doubt that he was the adult in this
race. But he didn’t do it only by shooing the children from the room.
He went on to lay out a reasoned, eloquent defense of not just his more
progressive initiatives thus far, but the entire liberal tradition of
engaging with the world. It was, in fact, a remarkably liberal speech,
remarkably well-reasoned. It only made one wish that he could have come
into office at a time of right-wing disarray, with an impassioned
grassroots movement at his back and large congressional majorities to
support him.
Oh, wait. That already happened, and Obama squandered each
of these advantages, sometimes quite deliberately. The saddest lesson
of the past four years is that this president doesn’t believe much of
what he says to galvanize his base. All the evidence is that, in a
second term, President Obama will preoccupy himself almost exclusively
with striking a “grand bargain” on the budget deficit, so dear to
commentators’ hearts. Considering the opposition, any such compromise
will likely be an unmitigated disaster for the liberal cause and the
country. Such a deal is the only major thing that is likely to
happen—indeed, that is possible—given “four more years.” That,
and a few more quiet trade deals that will offshore still more American
industrial jobs—such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) being
negotiated in Virginia even now—or perhaps some terrible foreign policy
overreach on Obama’s part, such as, God forbid, an invasion of Iran.
The Democrats I talked to by the bushel down in Charlotte,
delegates and nondelegates alike, are almost universally unaware of this
agenda. They are in for a rude awakening. Talks on some sort of
grandiose ten-year budget deal will likely start even before the next
inauguration, forced by the arbitrary congressional “debt ceiling.” In
light of what Republicans in the House and Senate are likely to
demand—and what the president is likely to give them—my greatest hope
for the next four years is stalemate and deadlock; for Barack Obama to
leave for his presidential library-raising as another Bill Clinton
figure, an inadequate and often nebulous protector of the commonweal,
but one who sure as hell beat the alternative.
There is, though, another alternative—one the stray
community-organizer gene in Obama pointed us toward. As the writer—and
truly astute political commentator—Bruce Shapiro pointed out in an
email, “Obama solved the dilemma of disappointment in his presidency by
framing citizen action—rather than some change in policy or
leadership—as the key to a better second term.”
Both Shapiro and the president are right. We are the change we have been seeking. Only our mass
action will spur this essentially conservative president to action
and—more vitally—create the sort of country and political environment
where enthusiasm, good will, and hard work are never again wasted on
such an unresponsive figure, however good a game he talks.
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