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Thomas Frank, are you ready for this?
June 20, 2008
I thought Obama’s new general-election ad was interesting. To make it more conservative, he would have had to attack gay marriage and call for nuclear waste to be stored in Yosemite. He stands for “values straight from the Kansas heartland where I grew up…” My theory is that he might be courting independents.
And this trailer from Fortune for a soon-to-be-published interview with Obama (”Nafta not so bad after all”) would seem to support that theory.
The general campaign is on, independent voters are up for grabs, and Barack Obama is toning down his populist rhetoric - at least when it comes to free trade.
In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine’s upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn’t want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.
“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.
Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? “Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,” he answered.
All this and Jason Furman too. I thought that a fine appointment, by the way, but never dreamed how significant until I read Naomi Klein.
Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”
Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart’s most prominent defenders, anointing the company a “progressive success story.” On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged, “I won’t shop there.” For Furman, however, it’s Wal-Mart’s critics who are the real threat: the “efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits” are creating “collateral damage” that is “way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing ‘Kum-Ba-Ya’ in the interests of progressive harmony.”
Obama’s love of markets and his desire for “change” are not inherently incompatible. “The market has gotten out of balance,” he says, and it most certainly has. Many trace this profound imbalance back to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counterrevolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago economics department. And here there are more problems, because Obama–who taught law at the University of Chicago for a decade–is thoroughly embedded in the mind-set known as the Chicago School.
Ms Klein rightly draws attention to the irony–I mean, the irony–of Obama’s lurch to the right:
The irony is that there is absolutely no reason for this backsliding. The movement launched by Friedman, introduced by Ronald Reagan and entrenched under Clinton, faces a profound legitimacy crisis around the world. Nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Chicago itself. In mid-May, when university president Robert Zimmer announced the creation of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute, an economic research center devoted to continuing and augmenting the Friedman legacy, a controversy erupted. More than 100 faculty members signed a letter of protest. “The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive,” the letter states. “Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world’s population.”
When Friedman died in 2006, such bold critiques of his legacy were largely absent. The adoring memorials spoke only of grand achievement, with one of the more prominent appreciations appearing in the New York Times–written by Austan Goolsbee. Yet now, just two years later, Friedman’s name is seen as a liability even at his own alma mater. So why has Obama chosen this moment, when all illusions of a consensus have dropped away, to go Chicago retro?
Why indeed? Why oh why? More than 100 faculty members have signed a letter of protest! The rest of Ms Klein’s richly nuanced analysis is here.
Kansas values, Chicago retro. Whatever next?
Two questions:
1) Is it any fairer to identify Obama with Friedman’s extremist right wing economic views because both men were connected with the same Chicago school than it was to attribute Wright’s extremist left wing social opinions to Obama because they were involved in the same Chicago church?
2) Does the fact that Obama (like most Americans in both parties) believes in the fundamental principles of capitalism mean that he must necessarily agree wih Friedman’s laissez-faire ideology any more than Obama’s opposition to racial discrimination means that he agrees with Wright’s anti-white rhetoric?
Instead of engaging in guilt by association on either the right or the left, it would be better to focus on Obama’s actual views. Having said this, however, I would not be surprised to see his views move toward the center on trade and many other issues as the campaign progresses, or even during his administration if he is elected.
It is not at all unlikely that an Obama administration might be a good deal closer to the “centrist” Clinton administration than many Obama supporters might expect. Since Roosevelt, has there been any Democrat who has been elected and governed from any place other than the center? And even Roosevelt incorporated some of Hoover’s policies in shaping the New Deal.
Moreover, even a centrist administration would still be a big change from the radical right wing authoritarian, big business-controlled, anti-regulation one that we have now, based as it is on secrecy, spying, denial of habeas corpus and, above all, torture. For this reason, many liberals should be more concerned about Obama’s failure to oppose the latest Democratic cave-in to the Bush administration on surveillance than about any move toward the center on Obama’s part relating to trade.
Posted by: algasema | June 21st, 2008 at 1:35 pm | Report this commentIt certainly would be suprising if Obama ever discovered capitalism. As he has never worked for a capitalist enterprise in his life, as far a I can read, I don’t see that he has even a minimal understanding of the benefits of trade to the consumer.
Obama’s “return to the center” is a homespun tale by David Axelrod without a thread of connection to Milton Freidman or the realities of the market. If nothing else, look at his miserable voting record on the Colombia trade agreement, sugar tariffs, Bridge to Nowhere etc, rather than the tall stories that Axelrod concocts.
JBP
Posted by: John Powers | June 21st, 2008 at 4:36 pm | Report this commentTwo more questions:
3) While Naomi Klein suggests (in an article that arguably contains a good deal more distortion than nuance) that Barack Obama may be an unreconstructed Friedmanite, John Powers denies that Obama has any knowledge of or connection to capitalism at all. Would it be unreasonable to assume that the truth lies somwhere between these two extreme caricatures?
4) Is it really fair or accurate to describe what appears to be a move to the center by Obama on trade as a “lurch to the right”?
I may be missing something, but I do not see much comment to the effect that John McCain is “lurching to the right” (or to the left), every time that he changes his positions on taxes, immigration, mortgage relief for homeowners, government regulation, rights of Guantanamo detainees, or whatever other issue he chooses in order to pander to one or another group of voters at any given time.
Posted by: algasema | June 22nd, 2008 at 12:24 am | Report this comment[…] audience should read, therefore, this blog piece by Clive Crook also in the FT on what Crook sees as a move by Obama to the right, especially on NAFTA and free […]
Posted by: Is Obama shifting right and favouring free trade? « The Inquiring Mind | June 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 pm | Report this commentOne of nature’s most fascinating phenomena is that once every four years, like clockwork, North American liberals start sounding like conservatives. I only hope and pray that a majority of Ametrican voters aren’t guillable enough to fall for this clown’s act.
Posted by: Danram | June 23rd, 2008 at 4:26 pm | Report this commentBy whom is Obama’s suggestion that he might reflect and decide not to break international law defined as a “lurch to the right”?
Posted by: John | June 23rd, 2008 at 9:35 pm | Report this comment[…] Obama moving to the right? Clive Crook in his FT blog said of this Obama ad:- I thought Obama’s new general-election ad was interesting. To make it more […]
Posted by: Is Obama moving to the right? « The Inquiring Mind | July 7th, 2008 at 11:42 am | Report this comment