Perlstein, Sorensen, and Blumenthal on the Way Forward

I haven't done much blogging here this week and last, partly because I'm still cogitating upon what the hell really happened to conservatism on November 4, and partly because I've been doing much of that cogitating aloud, on the road, in speeches and panel discussions that obliging souls booked me for long ago on the presumption that I would have something wise and useful to say about "Nixonland" and this year's election. I'm not sure I do; the wake of the campaign finds me very much in "scholarly reflection" mode, reluctant to make grand pundit-like pronouncements on what may or may not happen in the future (as I explain here).

But a gig's a gig, and, facing an expectant crowd at a recent panel at NYU's Center for Law and Security, I hope I managed something to warble something coherent nonetheless. Here's an edited (as in, they edited out the guy who show up at every panel to ask why the participants are covering up the malign, conspiratorial role played in all this by the Council and Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission) transcript; and, below that, a photograph from the event courtesy of the imcomparable Lindsay Beyerstein.

Many of the themes you'll recognize as outright larceny from recent work by my colleagues seen here at OurFuture.org:

Open Forum: November 11, 2008

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY: A LOOK FORWARD

Sidney Blumenthal – Fellow, Center on Law and Security; former senior advisor to President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton; author most recently of The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party

Rick Perlstein – Senior Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future; author most recently of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Ted Sorensen – former special counsel and advisor to President John F. Kennedy; of counsel, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; author most recently of Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History

Prof. Stephen Holmes, Moderator – Faculty Co-Director, Center on Law and Security; Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

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Sidney Blumenthal: Presidential transitions can be momentous, or not. The entire South seceded from the union during Lincoln’s transition. The Great Depression deepened between FDR’s election and his taking office. The transition period is when we see the character and the complexion of an administration through its appointments, which we have not yet seen for President Obama.
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We also have a new Congress. The Democrats have gained much but the history of simultaneous Democratic presidents and Congresses has been tragic. Franklin Roosevelt lost control of the legislative branch in 1938, when the Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party allied with the Republicans. Progressive social policy was blocked from then until Lyndon Johnson, including President Kennedy’s great initiatives in education and other areas. Harry Truman lost Congress to the Republicans in 1946. Jimmy Carter was torn apart by the fractiousness and fragmentation of a Democratic Congress. The same is true of President Clinton’s first two years in office. The Democrats, having been in power in Congress for 40 years, acted as though they would be there forever and there would no consequences to their actions. They destroyed their credibility, leading to the election of a radical Republican Congress in 1994.

This new Congress is a little different. It does not have much of a conservative wing to it for the first time. Nonetheless, President Obama is going to have to devote a good deal of attention to holding Congress together. It has its own needs and members of Congress have their own interests even if they share the same partisan identification as the president.

Regardless of the problems that may emerge, we are now at the beginning, and it is refreshing. An old order has died; a new one is struggling to be born. William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” After this election, I think we can say that at least some of the past is dead. It is a pleasure to be at the beginning again.

Rick Perlstein: My book Nixonland covers the years from 1965 to 1972. It does not really address Watergate. The book that I am working on now covers the period from 1973 to 1980. The idea of reckoning is going to be one of its primary themes. How does a nation reckon with trauma? We had the traumas of losing in Vietnam, of stagflation, and of Watergate. I will be interviewing all kinds of people, from all walks of life, and asking them what it was like to watch the veneer of American decency stripped away on television day after day during the Watergate hearings.

As part of my research, I recently read Kathryn Olmstead’s book Challenging the Secret Government. It is about an event that occurred immediately after Watergate. In December 1974, the great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh discovered that the CIA was spying on American antiwar groups. He broke the story in The New York Times. It was a sensation. The Ford administration, which had promised that our long national nightmare would be over, was suddenly thrown into damage-control mode. It instituted a commission ran by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to try to simultaneously air these scandals and put a lid on them. That didn’t work, because Congress impaneled a House committee led by Otis Pike and a Senatorial Committee led by Frank Church to investigate the secret government’s conduct.
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How does this relate to Barack Obama and the adventure we may face in the next four years? Here is how the journalists who exposed the information were thanked: A train of enraged editorialists, including in The New York Times and The Washington Post, reacted by attacking the messenger. Seymour Hersh lost the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Daniel Schorr lost his job at CBS and almost went to jail. Our long national nightmare, which had turned out to involve not only Nixon but the whole architecture of the secret government, was supposed to be over, and here the journalists were rubbing our faces in it.

Americans, especially the elite and the mandarins who tend to control the boundaries of polite opinion, have a deep discomfort with conflict and change. We have now had two consecutive elections that the Democrats have won overwhelmingly. The American people voted for the president-elect despite the Republicans screaming that he was running on a platform of socialism. Many of us would agree that Obama has a strong mandate for change. The media and the independents have responded by saying that he shouldn’t be fooled, that this is really a center-right country and his is a center-right mandate.

The idea that we need a reckoning and a break with the past is something we can expect to find resisted at every turn. Much will depend on the character and courage of the people who accede to the White House and congressional and executive offices. They should not to be intimidated into thinking that it was a mandate to do not much at all.
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Prof. Stephen Holmes: Is Barack Obama a post-partisan candidate or is he a progressive? Is he someone who is simply going to fix the broken government or does he have an agenda?

Rick Perlstein: In a recent interview, I was asked to respond to the fact that few people describe themselves as “liberal.” My response was that I don’t care if people call themselves liberals, conservatives, or ham sandwiches. The fact is that Americans are backing progressive policy positions. The Pew polls that have been tracking our positions on spending priorities since the 1980s indicate that this has been true for some time.

In his 1964 speech for Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan said that “there is no such thing as left or right,” and “that there is only an up or down.” He rarely called himself conservative or appealed to conservatives as such, but he was obviously conservative, and his policy preferences were right-wing. He made conservative principles sound like common sense. I would argue that Barack Obama has taken the same approach since at least 2004, when he first came to my attention. He spoke all the time about the things that government could do for people, the importance of government in people’s lives, the idea of a commonwealth, the idea that we can’t just do it on our own, and the idea that conservatism is a failed philosophy (although he never used those words). There is something exquisitely Reagan-like about his ability to speak in a popular language, but anchored in basic social-democratic principles. His promise is in his ability to recover the notion of a commonwealth and a government for the people, by the people, and of the people in a language that transcends an argot that people are no longer comfortable with.

Ted Sorensen: I am not a ham sandwich. I am a liberal and I think that Barack Obama is a liberal. When he talks about our domestic goals being fulfilled – including health care, education, equal opportunity for all races, and the separation of church and state – they are all liberal goals that he is referring to. The fact is that we have not made much progress on all of the things that have been waiting to be done, including repairing the safety net beneath those at the bottom of the ladder. That safety net did not get much help from the Clinton administration, despite President Clinton’s marvelous communication skills and the fact that he had eight years in office, for the first two of which he had a Democratic Congress.

I have very high hopes for Obama as president, especially in terms of foreign policy, an area in which both Democratic and Republican presidents in recent years have backed away from a truly multilateral emphasis on diplomacy rather than military solutions. The fact that Obama makes it sound like common sense is a pretty good strategy. John F. Kennedy used that strategy to get himself nominated and then to sell the American people on some pretty far-reaching moves.

Sidney Blumenthal: In defense of President Clinton’s record, we remember the 1990s. Barack Obama campaigned on them towards the end, and in his speeches mentioned the 22 million new jobs created, the rise in family income in real wages, and the 25% reduction in poverty.

I believe that Obama’s prospects in terms of partisanship are better than they were for Bill Clinton. Obama did not win over Republicans in the election, although he may have won over some. The Republicans were disillusioned and did not show up. We have also seen the Republican Party collapse in important parts of the country, especially the Northeast. After this election, for the first time since the founding of the Republican Party, there is not a single Republican member of the House of Representatives from the Northeast. That is a historic move.

The House Republican Conference will be the party’s center of gravity in the early period of the Obama administration. They are far to the right and radical. They repudiated the financial bailout package. They had decided to throw John McCain overboard. They preferred defeat and destroying their nominee to victory because they wanted to become a rump group. They understood they were a minority and believed they could replicate their experience in 1993 and 1994 when they then became a majority by wrecking a Democratic presidency.

That is unlikely to happen this time. They are a greater minority than before, they will define their party as right-wing, and there is not a similar factor in the Senate, in which Bob Dole wanted to be president.
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Jay Furman (from the audience): President Clinton became a centrist by moving towards a budget surplus. That is where he brought the Democratic Party. Strikingly absent from the current discussion are the economic circumstances that Obama is inheriting and the constraints they put on him. Short-term approaches can be consistent with liberal policy because they require deficit spending, which may lead to many social programs, but that is only short-term.

Rick Perlstein: Creating a surplus during the current economic situation would be wildly irresponsible. It would be neo-Hooverism. What we need now is a strong dose of deficit spending. One of the strong policy markers the Obama team has presented so far has been Rahm Emanuel saying on national television that we are not just going to have a stimulus package but an investment package. He did not back away from things like the promise to fund technology that will produce green jobs. He did not back away from healthcare. Moderators during the presidential debates pressed the candidates on which programs they would cut. That is what Herbert Hoover did, which is why Franklin Roosevelt inherited an economy in which thousands of banks had just failed.

Ted Sorensen: Bringing in institutions to regulate speculation and other ills of the free market was an essential part of what Roosevelt did. That is once-again popular and recognized as necessary. I believe that Obama will do that. It is essentially liberalism, and has been opposed by the Republicans ever since Roosevelt and largely backed away from most of the Democratic presidents since.
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John Brademas (from the audience): I was the majority whip for the last four years that I served in the House of Representatives. Every other Tuesday, I joined the speaker, the Senate and House majority leaders, the other whips, and Senate President Pro Tem Hubert Humphrey for breakfast at the White House with President Carter and Vice President Mondale. We were all Democrats. We talked politics and policy. We will now have a Democratic president, increased Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, a president and vice president who came from the Senate, and a White House chief of staff who came from the House. What prospects do you see for strong cooperation between the Obama White House and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate? Do you think renewing those meetings would be a good idea?

Ted Sorensen: I also participated in those weekly meetings and I think they are a very good idea. I think there will be cooperation between the executive and legislative branches, at least in the first years of Obama’s presidency. I also think that many of the less-liberal Democrats and some Republicans will be reluctant to challenge a president who has Obama’s ability to appeal to the country and get the people on his side. I think it is going to be good.

Sidney Blumenthal: It is a crucial question. Rahm Emanuel will try to coordinate it. The Democrats feel an imperative to coordinate and be disciplined, having seen what happened in 1994. On the other hand, members of the House and Senate, especially committee chairs, like to exercise their prerogatives and at certain times remind presidents that they come from a co-equal branch of government. We will find out what the issues are and what happens, but I think we will see some efforts at coordination and also some strong assertions of congressional power. They are the power in this new Democratic era as well as the president.