Glenn Greenwald: The weak, helpess, impotent Presidency

Karmadillo

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Mon Jun-21-10 06:29 PM
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Glenn Greenwald: The weak, helpess, impotent Presidency

This seems pretty constructive. It addresses the ways in which the Obama administration has used the substantial powers of the presidency in some instances and how it has failed to do so in others. A good article for those wanting to understand what tools the Obama administration could employ in the pursuit of liberal goals.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

Monday, Jun 21, 2010 17:22 ET
The weak, helpess, impotent Presidency
By Glenn Greenwald

As I noted earlier today, there is a newly minted Obama apologist meme that has been created and is being disseminated by Obama-defending pundits far and wide: namely, liberals are blaming Obama for too much because the Presidency is actually quite a weak and powerless office, and he's powerless to do most of what liberals advocate. This claim was articulated by Jonathan Bernstein in response to my post documenting how Barack Obama -- by supporting Blanche Lincoln rather than remaining neutral or supporting her primary challenger -- likely swung the election in her favor. I argued that the central role Obama played in Lincoln's race illustrates that Presidents possess substantial means for influencing members of Congress. In describing my argument as "ignorant nonsense that betrays a deep lack of understanding of how the government of the United States works," Bernstein did not bother to address, let alone refute, that extremely formidable presidential leverage that Obama just used to help Lincoln win in Arkansas.

Instead, he broadly asserted that "the idea of an 'Impotent, Helpless President' . . . basic American politics," that "the presidency is a very weak office," and that Obama has no real leverage to influence Democratic members of Congress to support legislation he wants. Since then, a whole slew of Obama defenders have cited Bernstein's "Impotent Helpless Presidency" excuse to argue that progressives expect too much of Obama and that their criticisms of him are unfair, irrational and unwarranted. Today, Jonathan Chait complains that I have only derided and mocked but not responded in detail to this argument. That's basically true, as I find the argument self-refuting, but permit me to change that by responding in detail now.

Initially, this issue originally arose in the context of the health care debate, when progressive critics were complaining that the Obama White House was doing nothing to ensure passage of the public option. In response, Obama defenders insisted that the fault lay not with Obama, but with Democratic members of Congress over whom Obama had no leverage. All year long, they told their readers not to blame Obama for the lack of a public option because there was just nothing the helpless, powerless leader could do. Except now it is conclusively clear that Obama never wanted the public option from the start -- Russ Feingold said as much, and The New York Times revealed that Obama secretly negotiated away the public option in deals with industry representatives very early on in the process. Thus, critics who were complaining that Obama was publicly claiming to want to the public option while ensuring it would not be enacted were correct, while those who kept telling their readers that the fault lay with Democratic members of Congress -- not Obama -- were engaged in pure apologia.

More broadly, after 8 years of Bush/Cheney, the very idea that the Presidency is a weak and largely powerless office is laughable on its face. It's Barack Obama -- not the U.S. Congress -- that is detaining innocent people without trials, targeting U.S. citizens for due-process-free assassinations, secretly ordering covert wars via Special Forces, ordering a "surge" in the nine-year-old war in Afghanistan, and launching cruise missile strikes with cluster bombs in Yemen. The more honest commentators who are invoking this "weak presidency" defense on behalf of Obama -- such as Matt Ygleisas, Ezra Klein, and Scott Lemieux -- acknowledge its basic inapplicability to Terrorism and foreign policy, which accounts for a substantial part of the liberal critique of the Obama presidency. And, for that matter, many of the positive steps Obama has taken -- changes in drug policy, an improvement in tone with the Muslim world, release of the OLC torture memos -- were also actions taken unilaterally using the power of the Presidency.

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