WASHINGTON --
Barack Obama has garnered praise from center to right -- and has highly
irritated the left -- with the centrism of his major appointments.
Because Obama's own beliefs remain largely opaque, his appointments
have led to the conclusion that he intends to govern from the center.
Obama the centrist? I'm not so sure.
Take
the foreign policy team: Hillary Clinton, James Jones, and Bush
holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as you can get. But the choice was
far less ideological than practical. Obama has no intention of being a
foreign policy president. Unlike, say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not
have aspirations abroad. He simply wants quiet on his eastern and
western fronts so that he can proceed with what he really cares about
-- his domestic agenda.
Similarly his senior economic team, the
brilliant trio of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker:
centrist, experienced and mainstream. But their principal task is to
stabilize the financial system, a highly pragmatic task in which Obama
has no particular ideological stake.
A functioning financial
system is a necessary condition for a successful Obama presidency. As
in foreign policy, Obama wants experts and veterans to manage and
pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal
commitment. Their job is to keep credit flowing and the world at bay so
that Obama can address his real ambition: to effect a domestic
transformation as grand and ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's.
As
Obama revealingly said just last week, "this painful crisis also
provides us with an opportunity to transform our economy to improve the
lives of ordinary people." Transformation is his mission. Crisis
provides the opportunity. The election provides him the power.
The
deepening recession creates the opportunity for federal intervention
and government experimentation on a scale unseen since the New Deal. A
Republican administration has already done the ideological groundwork
with its unprecedented intervention, culminating in the forced partial
nationalization of nine of the largest banks, the kind of stuff that
happens in Peronist Argentina with a gun on the table.
Additionally,
Henry Paulson's invention of the number $700 billion forever altered
our perception of imaginable government expenditure. Another $20
billion for Citigroup? Lunch money.
Moreover, no one in Congress
even pretends that spending should be pay as you go (i.e., new
expenditures balanced by higher taxes or lower spending), as the
Democrats disingenuously promised when they took over Congress last
year. Even some conservative economists are urging stimulus (although
structured far differently from Democratic proposals). And public
opinion, demanding action, will buy any stimulus package of any size.
The result: undreamed amounts of money at Obama's disposal.
To
meet the opportunity, Obama has the political power that comes from a
smashing electoral victory. It not only gave him a personal mandate. It
increased Democratic majorities in both houses, thereby demonstrating
coattails and giving him clout. And by running on nothing much more
than change and (often contradictory) hopes, he has given himself
enormous freedom of action.
Obama was quite serious when he said
he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a
personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public -- and, at his
disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history. (I include
here the extrasolar planets.)
It begins with a near $1 trillion
stimulus package. This is where Obama will show himself ideologically.
It is his one great opportunity to plant the seeds for everything he
cares about: a new green economy, universal health care, a labor
resurgence, government as benevolent private-sector "partner." It is
the community organizer's ultimate dream.
Ironically, when the
economy tanked in mid-September, it was assumed that both presidential
candidates could simply forget about their domestic agendas because
with $700 billion drained by financial system rescues, not a penny
would be left to spend on anything else.
On the contrary. With
the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to
government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no
less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident
president -- who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even
having been sworn in -- to begin a restructuring of the American
economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and
people.
Don't be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn't
get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And
he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.
