Democracy | Educate

The political transformation of Barack Obama

by Jim VandeHei, Politico, February 9th 2012 -

There are two indisputable facts about politics.

The first is that every modern president in the fourth year of his presidency resorts to the cheap political stunts, broken promises and truth-fudging it takes to win reelection in what has been and will be a 50-50 nation. The reason is simple: Politics is not clean-living; it’s survival.

The second is that Barack Obama, for all his talk of moving beyond conventional political tricks, is doing just that, which wouldn’t be so glaring had it not been for his incessant call for a newer, cleaner and more transparent paradigm for American politics.

So much for the high road: Victory is more important than purity.

It’s debatable whether Obama is more crudely political than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. But what’s transpired over the past several weeks isn’t debatable: He’s made a series of calculated, overtly political gestures that are far more transactional than transformational.

Here’s just a sample:

Sucking up to Wall Street — again

The president better hope those Occupy Wall Street voters don’t read Bloomberg News. Hans Nichols, who covers Obama for Bloomberg, has a richly reported piece that Obama’s most important advisers are privately pleading with the same Wall Street titans they vilify to help fund their reelection campaign.

Jim Messina, one of the president’s top political advisers, met privately with financial services industry executives — big banks, money managers — and promised them Obama will not demonize Wall Street as his reelection efforts unfold. Not demonize Wall Street? Hasn’t that been a consistent theme of the Obama presidency?

Messina provided big donors with a private briefing at the members-only Core Club in Manhattan, a nice perk for the rich and powerful.

Let’s not be naive. All politicians hit up the people who have money for money. But in the middle of a political campaign that pits the rich against the rest of America, the optics are not great for the White House.

This is classic dual messaging: For the 99 percent, Obama is playing up his attacks on Wall Street, especially the Dodd-Frank bill.

For the 1 percenters, there’s a different message, as Ron Suskind reported in his book on Obama’s economic team. “I’m not out there to go after you,” the president reportedly told Wall Street titans, not long after allowing Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to quietly kill a plan to stop bonuses for bailed-out bankers. “I’m protecting you. But if I’m going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation.”

A super flip-flop

Obama needs the millionaires in the financial services industry to buy his go-easy-on-you-guys spin because they can cut limitless checks to super PACs.

Super PACSs are the newest way for rich people to influence elections. Obama was vehemently opposed to them, calling them a “threat to our democracy.” That vehemence was heartfelt and consistent — until Monday night, when it wasn’t.

To understand how big a flip-flop this actually represents, rewind the tape to 2007, when Obama discussed his opposition to outside groups taking and spending unlimited funds in campaigns. “You can’t say yesterday you don’t believe in them and today, you are having three-quarters of a million dollars being spent for you. You can’t just talk the talk. The easiest thing in the world is to talk about change during election time. Everybody talks about change during election time. You have got to look at how they will act when it’s not convenient, when it’s hard. And the one thing I’m proud of is my track record is strong on this and I’ve walked the walk.”

He’s not only not walking the walk — he has green-lighted White House officials to walk right into super PAC fundraisers and speak, while others hit donors up for as much money as they can cough up or even charge for admission. The explanation is simple to anyone who was a kid or has one now: Hey, everyone’s doing it. This is risky business. White House officials will be appealing to donors for super PACs that are legally prohibited from coordinating in any share or form with the president’s reelection efforts. Again, everyone’s doing it. So, to hear Obama’s aides tell it, the president is all-in, too, by necessity.

A little secret about Washington: Everyone loves this decision. Democrats get more money, strategists and pollsters and ad-makers get bigger checks; Republicans will use this to call Obama a hypocrite and to scare donors into giving them more money, which in turns means more money for their strategists, pollsters and ad-makers; and the media make more money as all of this is funneled into TV and Web ads. Incestuous, isn’t it?

There is some danger for Obama of a public backlash. But everyone in Washington — with the exception of the good souls at the Center for American Politics and Citizenship, Sunlight Foundation and a few other do-gooders — lives by the creed that no one wins or loses elections on campaign fundraising as a political issue. Just ask John McCain — who is wholeheartedly backing Mitt Romney, the candidate whose record-breaking super PAC fundraising is trashing the legacy of the overturned McCain-Feingold law.

Feingold isn’t nearly as forgiving of Obama: “It is a dumb approach. … It will lead to scandal, and there are going to be a lot of people having corrupt conversations about huge amounts of money,” the Wisconsin Democrat told The Huffington Post after Obama flopped.

“Part of his political identity is someone who’s not of Washington,” said a Democratic strategist who supports Obama. “So the consequences for his brand, if actions look political or craven, are exponentially worse than they would be for most politicians.”

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