Some Thoughts on the Election

I found the following comments filled with political insight not available elsewhere and thought them worthy of circulation, with the author's permission:

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Some Thoughts on the Election
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Here are some thoughts I've been having about the election and
what happens next. I know this is much too long. I'll be
honored if anyone reads it.
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1. Why did Obama win? Was the war an issue?
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There are lots of reasons why Obama won. As I've written before,
this was a Democratic year. The Bush administration was widely
seen to be a disaster, and I think any Democrat would have won.
But that doesn't stop the talking heads from coming up with all
sorts of "analyses". One that I've found particularly irritating
is the statement -- which I've seen in a number of places -- that
"it turns out that the economy, not the war, was the main issue."
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There were a number of main issues. The economy was certainly
one. And it would have been one even without the financial
meltdown of the last few months.
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But the war was another one. And it's easy to see this: McCain
tried to make an issue out of winning the war. It didn't work;
it was a complete flop. The fact is that the American people had
turned so massively against the war over the last few years that
it wasn't even worth speaking about all that much in this
campaign. But that doesn't meant that it wasn't a major factor
in how people looked at the Bush administration and the
Republican party and the Republican ticket.
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And this in turn is due in significant part to the patient and
protracted work that so many of us around this country have been
doing for years now standing publicly in opposition to the war --
to the lies that were used to justify it, to the shameful acts of
torture and human degradation that were part of it, to the
shredding of the Constitution and civil liberties engaged in by
the administration, and to the destabilizing and
counterproductive effects of the war, which turned Iraq from a
brutal dictatorship into a vast breeding ground for terrorism.
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2. The historical significance of the election.
It's big. It's very big. There are two things that strike me in
particular:
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a) As I see it, this is the first time that this country has come
to grips in a national and unequivocal way with the issue of
racism. Racism has been a blight on our country's history. The
unspeakable atrocity, cruelty and maliciousness of racism has
permeated our political process for centuries. And while there
was nothing magic about this election, and while racism is still
a potent force in many respects, we can now see that the forces
of decency and humanity in this country are more powerful than
many of us had thought. That over the last few generations a
real change has been taking place, even while many of us didn't
see it happening. And that the future is not compelled to repeat
the past.
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b) This election offered people a clear choice between the
politics of hope and the politics of fear. Fear has been pretty
successfully used by the Republicans in the past. But it didn't
work this time. And to me anyway, this feels like a tremendous
liberation.
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The Republican party, which has been running on wedge issues for
a long time now, has seen many of those issues become
progressively less effective. And right now, it has reduced the
Republicans to a party of racism and homophobia, both of which
are fading, and neither of which are really winning issues anymore.
We have a tremendous opportunity. Topics which could not be
discussed are now open for discussion -- I want to write more
about this in a future post. But we should not discount this in
the slightest. There come times in a nation's history when
people are hungry for serious political discussion. This is such
a time. The old fear-mongering has lost its edge. Now is our
time, and we should seize it.
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I hope it won't sound too corny to mention that I wake up every
day now feeling a lot better about things than I have felt in
along, long time.
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3. What can we expect from the Obama administration?
Obama is very intelligent, and has many good instincts. He
really does want to address in a substantive way the economic
hardship that so many people face. He really does want to end
the war. And he's also in many ways pretty conservative. We
have seen recently how he voted for things like retroactive
immunity for warrantless wiretapping and increasing the powers of
the administration to spy on its own citizens -- things that many
of us found abhorrent. Let me just say something here about his
economic advisers, who are not the kind of people I would entrust
our nation's economic policy to.
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The person most often mentioned as the next Secretary of the
Treasury is Larry Summers. Recently a number of women's groups
have urged Obama not to appoint Summers to this position because
of his sexist remarks about how supposedly women were generally
incapable or unsuited for high achievement in science.
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Those remarks were indeed outrageous, and coming as they did from
the then president of Harvard University, they were even more
outrageous. But in fact, they are only the tip of the iceberg.
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In 1991, Summers was the chief economist for the World Bank, and
signed his name to a memo that gave an economic argument to
justify the dumping of toxic wastes by developed countries on
underdeveloped countries. (The argument was the kind of thing
you might expect: since people in underdeveloped countries get
paid less, the cost of someone dying there is less than that
here, say, and so it makes economic sense to export our
pollution.) This memo was made public and caused, as you might
imagine, an uproar. Summers then said it had really been
intended as sarcasm. I've read it. It doesn't sound like a
piece of sarcasm to me. Maybe it was just clumsy. If so, it was
very clumsy indeed, and irresponsibly so.
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Larry Summers and Robert Rubin are the most prominent of Obama's
current set of economic advisers, and they have played prominent
roles in Democratic economic policy for many years now.
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They are both extremely quick and bright. They both share some
views that we would generally agree with -- for instance, they
will occasionally speak about the greatly increased income
inequality in this country as a bad thing. But their record has
not been good at all.
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Robert Rubin started out as a lawyer. He was hired by Goldman
Sachs in 1966 and worked in their risk arbitrage division. He
was so skillful in this that he eventually became a partner in
the firm.
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He left to work in the Clinton White House from 1993-1995. In
1995 he became the Treasury Secretary. Larry Summers was an
undersecretary of the Treasury at the same time. They worked
very closely together, along with Alan Greenspan, then chair of
the Federal Reserve.
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Together, the three of them convinced Clinton to sign the repeal
of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which had put into place many
regulations designed to prevent the kind of financial speculation
that had in part led to the Great Depression. (The act repealing
Glass-Steagall was the (Phil) Gramm-Leach- Bliley act.) They also
convinced Congress to permanently strip the Commodities Futures
Trading Commission of regulatory authority over derivatives. So
while we justifiably call Republicans -- McCain in particular --
to task for their role in destroying regulatory authority over
the financial system, Rubin and Summers also played key roles in
that process.
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Shortly before the Gramm-Leach- Bliley bill was enacted, Rubin
resigned as Treasury Secretary and went to work for Citigroup,
which then used its new powers to create mortgage-backed
securities and other financial instruments that were a major
component of the current economic collapse.
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Rubin was succeeded as Treasury Secretary by Summers.
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After the Clinton administration, Summers became president of
Harvard in 2001. One of his first acts was to pick a fight with
Cornell West, a University Professor and a member of the
African-American studies department's "dream team", whose work
spanned several fields, and who had been hired away from
Princeton. Summers treated West in such an insulting manner that
the African-American studies department was in danger of complete
collapse. As it was, both West and Anthony Appiah (a professor
of philosophy and another member of the "dream team") both left
Harvard for arguably better positions at Princeton, where they
are today, and where West is now a University Professor. When
Summers resigned under pressure, there was a lot of speculation
that West might return, but he evidently decided not to.
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These are the men giving Obama economic advice right now.
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My point is not that Obama's economic policy will be terrible.
But on the other hand, I don't think we should be sitting back
passively waiting to see what happens. We have an obligation to
make our own views known, both to the president-elect and to the
nation at large.
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This is not -- in spite of what some people posting on this list
may fear -- an antagonistic thing to do. Good political leaders
-- and I do think that Obama is a very good political leader --
like to know what people's real concerns are. I heard recently
about a meeting that some people had with Obama sometime in the
last year. He was being pressed on his position on marriage
equality. He said definitively that he could not support it.
Then he said, "But I hope you'll keep pressing me on it." That
to my mind is the mark of an honest and decent person and a
potentially great president.
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Just one other example of what I see as a problematic position:
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both in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National
Convention, and in his half-hour television message just before
the election, Obama said that he cared a lot about public
education, and wanted to improve it by "paying teachers more and
holding them accountable" . I don't know exactly what he means by
this. Maybe he doesn't either. But those words are generally
used as code words for a combination of merit pay and high-stakes
testing. They come from an outlook driven by ideology, not by
the day-in day-out experience of good teachers. I'm not saying
that Obama is a prisoner of that ideology. But I do think he
needs to hear some alternative points of view, and the sooner the
better.
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FDR started out as a basically conservative politician who was
nevertheless willing to listen to people and felt an urgency to
solve the real problems that he saw. The New Deal was
influenced, and in large part made possible, not by top-down
policy-making but by an incredible ferment of political, social,
and labor organizing that made it both necessary and possible for
the government to act in a progressive manner.
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We have an opportunity to engage in that kind of ferment now.
And we should do so.
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--Carl Offner