OBAMA REPLACES CONGRESS WITH PLUTOCRATS / THE FINANCIAL TIMES

January 31, 2014 5:18 pm

Obama replaces Congress with plutocrats

By Christopher Caldwell

The president enjoys the support of the elites – and tools more powerful than executive orders

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The more Barack Obama says, the less Americans seem to know him. Half of those who watched the president’s State of the Union address to Congress this week saw him meekly confessing his defeat at the hands of obstructionist Republican legislators, consoling himself with his modest authority to bypass Congress by issuing orders to the bureaucracy. The other half saw him truculently threatening to do by fiat what he cannot do by democratic means. Both views are right. In a speech that ran over an hour, he had time to do a bit of both.

The president’s periodic reports to Congress are a constitutional obligation, but only one in 10 Americans (that is, 33m people) tuned in. They accord less and less importance to such ceremony, and so does Mr Obama, to judge from his oratory. He began with a series of anecdotes more appropriate to children’s television (“Today in America, a teacher spent extra time . . . An entrepreneur flipped on the lights . . . A farmer prepared for the spring . . .”). He added some semi-grammatical platitudes. (“Opportunity is who we are.”) And he threw in a few tautologies. (He has deputised vice-president Joe Biden to ensure that jobs-training programmes are for training people for jobs.)

Mr Obama is the victim of a bias among politicians and pundits. They deplore as “gridlock” any pause in the passage of society-transforming laws. They should not. Upending institutions is the most exciting part of being a politician but not always the most constructive. Upholding the habits, traditions and rules people live by is important, too.

Mr Obama shares the prevailing bias: he promises to make this a “year of action” even if he has to ignore Congress. He announced that contractors doing work for the federal government must pay minimum hourly wages of $10.10, ordered the Treasury to set up a working people’s retirement plan, and then hit the road to campaign for those measures.

He risks deepening the partisan divisions that make legislation hard to pass in the first place. When New Yorker editor David Remnick joined Mr Obama on a November fundraising trip to billionaire backers in Los Angeles and Seattle, the president was sensitive about these divisions. He wanted conservatives to understand that his preference for nationwide (rather than state-by-state) approaches to health programmes is not necessarily “because I am this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states’ rights”.

Conservative Texas senator Ted Cruz begs to differ. He sees a “pattern of lawlessness”. Announcements that Mr Obama would not enforce or defend certain laws – deportation laws for immigrants’ children in legal limbo, for instance, the anti-gay marriage Defense of Marriage Act, parts of his health reform – have been a hallmark of his administration. “When a president can pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore,” Mr Cruz wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “he is no longer a president.”

Whether one calls this energy or autocracy, the public dislikes it. When a president has 60 per cent of the country behind him, contempt for Congress is called “leadership”. When he has the majority against him, it is called something worse. The public did not like it when George W Bush intensified the war in Iraq after his repudiation in the 2006 elections, and did not like it when Mr Obama pushed though his healthcare plan after his repudiation in a Massachusetts by-election in 2010.

A Washington Post poll shows Mr Obama losing popularity in the centre of the electorate. Gallup shows him to be the most ideologically polarising president ever; his popularity is at 46 per cent, well behind Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan at the same stage in their presidencies and roughly even with Mr Bush.

But Mr Obama has an advantage Mr Bush lacked – he is beloved of the country’s rising elites. This gives him tools more powerful than executive orders. The most important words in his speech passed almost unnoticed. They came in his announcement that, since Congress was not allocating money for pre-kindergarten education, he would “pull together a coalition of elected officials, business leaders, and philanthropists” to do it. He added: “With the support of the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] and companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sprint and Verizon, we’ve got a down payment to start connecting more than 15,000 schools and 20m students over the next two years, without adding a dime to the deficit.”

This is an ominous development. It is inviting politically connected entrepreneurs and corporations to assume a formal role in government, by virtue of nothing except their money. For now it is an alternative to gridlock. In a longer perspective it is a harbinger of plutocracy.


The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014.