Obama Rebirthed as TR

Weekend Edition December 9-11, 2011
CounterPunch Diary
Obama Rebirthed as TR
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

When in doubt, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It's in every Democratic president's playbook.  TR was president from 1901 to 1909. He was manly, ranching in North Dakota, exploring the Amazon and nearly expiring on the River of Doubt. He was an imperialist con amore, charging up San Juan Hill, sending the Great White Fleet round the world, proclaiming America's destiny as an enforcer on the world stage. He loved wilderness,  mostly through the sights of a big game hunter's rifle ­ a wilderness  suitably cleansed of Indians. "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians," he wrote in The Winning of the West, "but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

When necessary he could play the populist rabble-rouser's card, flaying the trusts, railing against "the malefactors of great wealth".  But on TR's watch the modern, centralized corporate American state came of age. H.L. Mencken writes of him in Prejudices II that

"Roosevelt, for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words, democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master, had no such faith in his heart of hearts. He didn't believe in democracy. He believed simply in government. His remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a dispersion of authority, but a hard concentration of authority. He was not in favor of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a rigid control from above, a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen… He was for a paternalism of the true Bismarckian pattern, almost of the Napoleonic pattern – a paternalism concerning itself with all things, from the regulation of coal-mining and meat-packing to the regulation of spelling and marital rights… When he tackled the trusts the thing that he had in his mind's eye was not the restoration of competition but the subordination of all private trusts to one great national trust with himself at its head."

Mencken compared TR to the German Kaiser:

"Both dreamed of gigantic navies, with battleships as long as Brooklyn Bridge. Both preached incessantly the duty of the citizen to the state, with the soft-pedal on the duty of the state to the citizen. Both praised the habitually gravid wife. Both believed in the armed pursuit of the lower fauna… Both were intimates of God and announced His desires with authority."

LBJ loved TR for his "toughness." Draft-dodging Bill Clinton invoked TR as his ideal. At least Johnson and Clinton had elements in them  of TR's most admirable trait – gusto, something of which Obama is dismally devoid.

But now Obama has seized on TR as his role model in denouncing those destroying the supposed guarantee of the American Way, strangely defining TR's philosophy as one guaranteeing that every citizen gets a fair bounce on the trampoline, soaring into the safe harbor of "the middle class".   As for imperial destiny, last month Obama did his own reprise on the Great White Fleet, opening a new US marine base in Australia and shaking his fist at China.

Last  Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kansas where TR, attempting a political comeback in 1910, slagged corporate power for the benefit of his audience of 30,000 prairie populists, Obama told a crowd of 1,200: "At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement."

He went on: "There are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that's happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess."

Obama and crew are obviously betting that there won't be too much unseemly sniggering at the sight of a president thus blithely denying the prime feature of his conduct during the worst economic crisis in 70 years, which was to pick an economic team -- Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers as his chief economic adviser ­ determined precisely to "return to the same practices that got us into this mess," to head off any serious economic reform of those institutions and practices that prompted the great crash of 2008.

Obama could have played the populist card back at the start of August amid the Republicans' efforts to force savage cuts in the social safety net. But he blinked. Now, four months later, there's the Occupy Wall Street movement reminding Americans that in practice as opposed to rhetoric Obama has been a doughty protector of the one per cent. OWSers heckled him fiercely in New Hampshire three weeks ago.   But of course Republicans aren't going to be attacking Obama as the pawn of the bankers. They favor the absurd script that designates him as a closet commie, scheming night and day to bring the most bloodthirsty scenarios of Karl Marx to fruition. So from their point of view the Osawatomie speech was gratifying vindication of all their most lurid charges.

Ever the trimmer, Obama was obviously aware that with this lunge into rhetorical populism he was exposing himself to just such charges. So amid his execrations against the Republicans for not supporting the Democrats' effort to extend the two per cent reduction in the payroll tax, he suddenly threw in a homage to deficit reduction, thus doing a mini-reprise on his collapse in August.   The irony is that the continued reduction on the payroll tax Obama is campaigning for means that the Social Security fund is getting two per cent less. Even though the missing two per cent is supposedly meant to be replaced by money from elsewhere in the federal budget, the drop in Social Security revenues from the payroll tax will allow those urging "reform" of Social Security -- ie its eventual destruction -- to claim ever more fiercely that the system is in budgetary crisis.
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