It is by now a commonplace that the Obamanauts were unprepared for the obstruction of the Republican Party. Abrams’s oral history takes us significantly beyond that assumption, however, by demonstrating that from Day One—before Day One, in fact—they knew that the Republicans had no intention of playing Obama’s game of reasoned dialogue and bipartisan compromise. Jim Messina was Obama’s Deputy Chief of Staff before Mastromonaco; he also ran Obama’s reelection campaign. Not long after Obama was elected in 2008, Messina sat down with a key Republican staffer on the Hill to discuss Obama’s stimulus plans. The staffer, whom Messina once dated, tells him, “Jim, we’re not going to compromise with you on anything. We’re going to fight Obama on everything.” He plaintively replies, “That’s not what we did for Bush.” She says, “We don’t care. We’re just going to fight.”
So it goes, from the stimulus package to the healthcare bill to Dodd–Frank to the debt ceiling to Merrick Garland. Each time, the Obamanauts waste precious time and resources trying to placate the Republicans with concessions of policy or appointment. Each time, the Republicans do exactly what that staffer promised they’d do. Each time, the Obamanauts seem surprised, even hurt. Each time, they kick themselves: not only did they not win the cooperation of the Republicans; they got no credit for trying. Lesson learned. And then they do it all over again.
Liberals tear their hair out when they read accounts like these. How did these people not see how they were adding to the Republican arsenal of intransigence? Why did they turn eight years of hope and change into Groundhog Day? But that assessment—that the Obamanuts made an error of judgment—fails to reckon with three elements of Obama’s public philosophy that render his refusal to confront the Republicans not a failure of tactics or strategy but a faithful reflection of his commitments.
The failure begins with a misunderstanding of Obama’s radical-sounding rhetoric. To his most hopeful followers, Obama’s unique gift was being able to turn soaring statements of principle into simple truths of politics, marrying a national inheritance of social movements from below to a plainspoken pragmatism from above. There was something to that view, but it never reckoned with the fact that Obama’s radicalism was, from the very beginning, bound up with a narrow notion of what politics was about. His was a vision less of power than of process, the culmination of twenty years of political theory journals where democracy was deliberation and deliberation was democracy. Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan won election by promising to crush a systemic social malignancy: the slaveocracy, economic royalists, a parasitic class of liberal elites. Unlike these transformative presidents of left and right, Obama disavowed any structural transformations of society or the economy. Even when it came to race, as Obama’s most electrifying speech (on Jeremiah Wright) made clear, his vision of change was almost completely divorced from the social bases of power. His goal was to help both sides understand each other, to make our conversations better. Obama was hardly naive, as his critics often claim. His perception of the task followed directly from his realpolitik, from his well-honed sense that the limited hand he had to play rested upon at least a notional commitment to playing by the rules.