The ‘black agenda’ and its discontents

Rev. Jeremiah Wright resurfaced last week in the pages of The Washington Post. In an interview with the controversial minister published Thursday, Wright spoke of how his life had changed since the 2008 presidential campaign, when the fire of his homiletic past and his proximity to President Obama before he became president was an issue — a kind of “what did he preach and when did he preach it” style of character assassination by association that went on far too long.

“It is unrealistic to think that one person can change the mess that this country has gotten into, but to pick on him is like picking on one of my kids,” Wright told The Post. “I have been knowing him for 20 years. I have not stopped loving him because of what the press did, and to see him beat up on because of things he is not responsible for is painful.”

This statement from the 2010 model Jeremiah Wright, defending Obama, seeks to calm some of the troubled racial waters of the campaign — waters stirred up as much by intragenerational black American politics in general as by any specific utterance by Rev. Wright from the pulpit of the Trinity United Church of Christ.

Wright’s statement was his Kum Ba Yah coda on his part in the intraracial conflict between Obama, vanguard of a new style of black leadership at the levers of power, and those of Wright’s generation for whom the old identity-dependent tools and strategies for fighting America’s racial ills have been mostly working just fine.

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Others from that generation have been heard from again.

In recent weeks, members of the Congressional Black Caucus have stepped up challenges to President Obama’s domestic agenda, exasperated at what they see as a lack of attention paid to issues specifically related to African Americans navigating the shoals of a ruinous recession.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan told Politico that the White House is “not listening” to black lawmakers.

“I don’t think we expected anything to change overnight because we had an African-American in the White House, but the fact still remains that we’ve got a constituency that is suffering,” Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, told The New York Times. “I think he could do more, and he will do more.”

And off Capitol Hill, Michael Eric Dyson, author, lecturer, Georgetown University sociologist and an Obama supporter, is feeling let down: “All these teachable moments, but the professor refuses to come to the class,” he told The New York Times on Feb. 8.

It all came to a head, in a way, on the Feb. 23 edition of Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio call-in show, where Sharpton and guest co-host Charles Ogletree, author and Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, spoke with a caller: Tavis Smiley, author, lecturer and presumptive general of the new-media-literate black empowerment movement. Their contentious exchange hinged to a large degree of how much responsibility Obama has for advancing what they characterized as a “black agenda.” Smiley, a longtime critic of Obama as a candidate and as president, wants that attention paid.



On a recent broadcast of the Tom Joyner Morning Show, seeking to justify such special treatment for black people, Smiley threw out one of those questions that was meant to stifle all debate coming afterwards: “Isn’t the African American agenda the human agenda?”

Kris Broughton, writing at Politic365, wasn’t having any:

“Tavis Smiley’s rhetorical question during his monologue last week on [Tom Joyner] is a sentence that reads the same backwards and forwards. Smiley would do well to heed his own advice, and learn to recognize that the White House efforts to back initiatives aimed at African Americans won’t always come with peel-and-stick “black agenda” labels.”

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The debate over the president’s fidelity to the black cause is the latest proof of a split in black American politics, a politics of two minds and approaches right now: One side calls for allegiance to the textbook civil-rights agenda, and to the strategy of identity-focused solutions to national problems. The other side seeks to incorporate the so-called black agenda into the wider necessaries of the nation’s business.

The old guard’s thinking necessarily provokes the question of what challenges now confronting black and minority Americans don’t confront everyone in the country. Among the most oppressing of them — jobs, home foreclosures, health-care reform — it’s not a matter of these issues hitting blacks separate from everyone else; it’s a matter of degree.

But the idea that a black agenda exists and should exist feeds into a hierarchical consideration, the idea of who should best define and articulate that agenda. That’s led to a kind of loyalty-oath reasoning that’s gone on for generations in black America, an us-versus-them attitude that’s troubling.

The non-starter-over in chief

If you had any doubt that President Obama means to, uh, stay the course in his pursuit of health care reform this year, you can rest a little easier. Today in an address from the East Room of the White House, flanked by doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals, the president threw the gauntlet upside the heads of the gradualists on Capitol Hill, the tabula rasa crowd who insist on starting the health-care reform process all over again on the proverbial Clean Sheet of Paper.

Obama’s message couldn’t be simpler: No do-overs. Two weeks, give or take. “Let’s get it done.”

“The insurance companies aren’t starting over. They’re continuing to raise premiums and deny coverage as we speak.

“For us to start over now could simply lead to delay that could last for another decade, or even more,. The American people and the U.S. economy just can’t wait that long.”

“I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform. We have debated this issue thoroughly, not just for a year, but for decades. Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children’s Health Insurance Program [S-CHIP], COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and both Bush tax cuts – all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.”



In a speech that exhibited a pitch-perfect balance of rhetorical loft and rhetorical heft, the president indicated he’s had enough of the congressional kabuki do-si-do bullshit that has characterized this debate in the halls of Congress for the past 13 months (to say nothing of the prolonged debate among street activists, netroots organizers, and the blogosphere in general).

And just as important, Obama gave the speech the necessary sense of mission, of purpose. It might be fair to say health-care reform could be to Obama what the Interstate highway system was to Eisenhower, what the moon shot was to JFK: an opportunity to apply national principles to the pressing and immediate task at hand.

“In the end, that’s what this debate is about: It’s about what kind of country we want to be. It’s about the millions of lives that would be touched — and in some cases, saved—by making private health insurance more secure and more affordable.”

“What’s at stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem.”

“The American people want to know if it’s still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future,” Mr. Obama said. “They are waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead. And as long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership. I don’t know how this plays politically, but I know it’s right.”

“And so I ask Congress to finish its work, and I look forward to signing this reform into law. Thank you. Let’s get it done.”



The Republican response was swift and utterly predictable. House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said “well, it’s pretty clear that the Obama administration and my colleagues in Congress are going to continue on their march to shove this government-run health care plan down the throats of the American people,” Boehner said, using the word “shove,” one of the GOP’s hot verbs of the moment (others invoked recently by the Republican leadership include “ram” and “jam”).

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, condemning Democratic attempts to “push through” health care, said, “This is a bill that is too expensive to afford. It is something that will restrict access to health care, and it will cause us to continue to lose jobs in this country.”

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So much of the health care debate has centered on its estimated out-of-pocket cost; the president’s plan has been estimated at $900 billion over 10 years. Hardly chump change by any estimation.

But look at it another way:

According to a Harvard Medical School analysis released on Sept. 17, almost 45,000 Americans die every year as a result of having inadequate medical care and/or no health insurance. Extrapolating from that estimate, then: if those 45,000 Americans’ lives could be saved, what would be the cumulative annual effect on the economy?

It’s fair to assume that not all of those 45,000 Americans are of or past retirement age, or facing end-of-life issues like terminal diseases that would prevent them from making an extended contribution to the work force. Many, maybe even most of them, could be expected to return to some productive work once their health issues were resolved.

For the sake of a workable scenario, let’s assume that 70 percent of those 45,000 Americans — 31,500 of them — had been ordinary working people.

According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States 2010, wage earners of all races and both genders earn an average of $27,059 a year. Multiplied across the 31,500 people saved from early death in our hypothetical, that puts $852.3 million into their pockets, which, ultimately, means putting most of that money into the national economy.

Add to that the vast financial benefit that arises because hundreds of thousands of other Americans aren't forced into bankruptcy by ruinous medical bills — Americans who are able to route that money into various sectors of the wider economy, such as construction, small businesses and consumer products. The benefit would be billions more.

And there’s the other unknown unknown: just how big a financial impact their incomes would have on other businesses whose income depends on their income ... and on and on, the ripple effect of American capitalism at work.

Admittedly, such gains would be a drop in the bucket compared to the conservatively estimated $90 billion a year the Obama plan is expected to cost, to insure another 31 million Americans. But surely, there’s an obvious financial benefit to bringin’ em’ back alive. Any money is good money when the alternative is no money. A live contributor to the American workforce beats a dead statistic any day.

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We don’t know if anything like that entered the president’s consideration, and since it’s just a back-of-the napkin conjecture, maybe it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the fact that in May 2002, the Institute of Medicine estimated that 18,314 Americans died every year because they lacked health insurance coverage.

In less than eight years, that number’s more than doubled.

"The report documents the immense consequence of having 40 million uninsured people out there," said Ray Werntz, a consumer health expert with the Employee Benefit Research Institute, to USA Today in 2002. "We need to elevate the problem in the national conscience."

The president’s throwdown to Congress does just that. Finally.

It’s still to be seen if Congress can meet his admittedly ambitious two-week deadline. Congress is as unwieldy an institution as there ever was, and the Republicans on Capitol Hill and their cheerleaders in talk radio and the punditburo will do everything they can to slow down a process that’s already taken too long.

But more and more, there’s a sense that we’re near the endgame, maybe closer to this goal line than ever before. And when you’re on the 10-yard line, or even the 20, you damn well don’t start the game over.

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Image credits: Obama: Pete Souza/The White House. Operating room: Detail of photo by Piotr Bodzek, MD, republished under GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2 or later.

The Blair House Project

“I hope that this isn’t political theater,” President Obama said near the beginning of an event as eagerly awaited in Washington as a new James Levine production of “La Traviata” would be in Rome. For more than six hours on Thursday at the Blair House, across the street from the White House, the president met with Republican and Democratic senators and congressmen, for an unprecedented health-care summit meeting, televised for your convenience.

Despite Obama’s appeal, the Republicans (some initially reluctant to show up at all) appeared with talking points, soundbites and props, the stuff of theater at the ready. But by the end of the day, two things were obvious:

(1) The glum faces of Oklahoma Rep. Tom Coburn and Arizona Sen. John McCain strongly indicated that the Republicans had spent their last ammunition and are coming around to the high probability that the process of reconciliation — a straight Democratic party-line majority vote in the Senate — is the next formidable card to be played by the White House to advance the health-care agenda.

(2) The closing statements by President Obama, effectively holding the promise (or the threat) of reconciliation as a distinct possibility may be the best chance for the Obama White House to salvage a beleaguered health-care bill, and maybe the best chance to rescue an increasingly damaged reputation with the Democratic base.

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The Obama sang-froid was much in evidence, the president’s trademark cool displayed for much of the session. He hinted at where he was going at different times, telegraphing punches he knew the Republicans couldn’t dodge. And President Obama exercised his talent for rhetorical logjam removal: “I think the American people aren’t always that interested in the procedures inside the Senate on how we move this forward,” he said at one point.



The Republican pushback was predictable and hurt by generalities and imprecision. McCain, Obama’s old antagonist on the campaign trail, went at the president in some hazy, ad hominem attack for Obama’s alleged retreat on a campaign promise to put health care negotiations on C-Span. "We're not campaigning anymore," Obama said. "The election is over."

McCain grinned that grin laced with malice, and said that he was “reminded of that every day.” Who do you blame for that, pal?

And while McCain referred to the Senate bill’s 2,400 pages, House Minority Leader John Boehner said “this 2,700-page bill will bankrupt our country.” Historians and molecular physicists would be advised to check, but this may be the first time in the history of America — and the history of physical matter — that a legislative document actually changed in its actual size while lawmakers were in the act of debating its future.

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And leave it to the Republicans to play real small ball. “Mr. President,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said at one point, “can I just interject one quick point here? Just in terms of trying to keep everything fair, which I know you want to do, to this point, the Republicans have had 24 minutes, the Democrats, 52 minutes. Let's try to have as much balance as we can.”

But that penny-ante, high-school-debate crap was, to invoke lawyerspeak, hardly dispositive. The disparity of speaking minutes may have as much to do with the fact that in the room at Blair House were Republicans who’d made up their minds before they got there that the whole thing was a waste of time, some of whom were no doubt prepared to act accordingly.



Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican Congressman and lately an ardent critic of the Obama health care agenda, proved as much when he went on the air before the summit was even finished. “What I think the American people have seen is almost a professor with a petulant group of students,” he said on MSNBC.

Boehner proved as much when he spoke to AOL News before the summit even started and made the case for scrapping the current bill.

And when the Republicans did speak, it was in the soundbites-and-talking-points style that’s characterized GOP identity for years, with one word or phrase used repeatedly to show just how on-message they were. The Democrats were prone to such rhetorical repetitions, too. But reading the transcript it’s clear the Democratic repeats were elaborations and nuance on strategy, more deeply layered and detailed than the Republicans’ strategic 3x5-card monte.

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The phrase “start over,” or its variants, was used at least half a dozen times by the GOP on Thursday. The Republican embrace of health-care incrementalism surfaced with frequent use of the phrase “step by step.”

There were Republican calls for a “clean sheet of paper,” another Republican favorite (although Illinois Rep. Peter Roskam, apparently having a childhood moment, proposed that the White House “take the Etch-a-Sketch” and begin again [“let’s do incremental things where there's common ground”] — maybe the first time health-care legislation has been so trivialized).

“It was synchronized stalling,” Chris Matthews said on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “What a flaming embarrassment!”



The Republican tendency to embrace talking points extended to rote, nationalist praise. “This bill is a dangerous experiment with the best healthcare system in the world,” Boehner said.

Rep. John Barrasso of Wyoming said it, too: “I do believe we have the best health care system in the world.”

But the definition of something, anything, as The World’s Best necessarily establishes a universe wider than the few. You can’t have the World’s Best anything if the world — or in this case, the American people — has no real opportunity to experience what you’re talking about.

The world isn’t the primary pool of customers for that health-care system, the American people are. And if the World’s Best health-care system bankrupts the people who need it most, if the World’s Best health-care system is financially accessible to a subset of a subset of a subset of that nation’s population ... how good can it possibly be?

Bearding the elephants

The chameleon we call American politics moulted on Friday afternoon, changed for the better, right along with at least the short-term fortunes of the Obama administration. Reeling from both the perception that it was off track in pursuit of its domestic agenda and the reality of numerous opinion polls pointing deep south, the Obama White House, and the Democrats generally, have been in a kind of torpor, a seeming numb helplessness to the Republican forces arrayed against them. Despite being the majority party.

So much of the opposition to Obama initiatives had been deployed by the conservative press and well out of earshot of the president himself. They talk about him like a dog when he’s not around. Which is what made what happened on Friday so flat-out historic.

At the invitation of the Republicans, President Obama attended a Republican House lawmakers’ retreat in Baltimore with the intent of answering questions from the group on his policy proposals, and the legislative and procedural logjams the Republicans have erected from almost the start of his administration.

The Republicans, no doubt emotionally buoyed by the big Scott Brown win in Massachusetts, doubled down on chutzpah: They agreed to televise the event. “The Republicans agreed to let TV cameras inside, resulting in an extended, point-by-point interchange that was almost unprecedented in U.S. politics, except perhaps during presidential debates,” the Associated Press said.

“At times it seemed more like Britain's ‘question time’ -- when lawmakers in the House of Commons trade barbs with the prime minister -- than a meeting between a U.S. president and members of Congress,” AP reported.

But the feast of president under magnifying glass the Republicans were expecting turned out to be something else again. With a deft rhetorical approach by turns lawyerly and fraternal, tough and charitable, President Obama essentially called Bullshit on the Republican politics of obstructionism, and bearded the elephants in their lair.

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Obama had good reason to feel buoyed himself. He’d just come off his first State of the Union address, one that combined real solid doable proposals ($30 billion to small businesses, for one) with the high rhetorical flourishes we’ve come to expect from the most verbally gifted president we’ve had in a while.

But there was something else. At the State of the Union, Obama chided Republican lawmakers, gently but clearly castigating them for blocking or hobbling all of his most pressing domestic policy objectives. Obama was calling them out on Wednesday. He finished that process on Friday.

In his opening remarks, Obama criticized what he said was a Washington culture driven by opinion polls and nonstop political campaigns.

“I've said this before, but I'm a big believer not just in the value of a loyal opposition, but in its necessity. Having differences of opinion, having a real debate about matters of domestic policy and national security -- and that's not something that's only good for our country, it's absolutely essential.

“... The only thing I don't want -- and here I am listening to the American people, and I think they don't want either -- is for Washington to continue being so Washington-like. I know folks, when we're in town there, spend a lot of time reading the polls and looking at focus groups and interpreting which party has the upper hand in November and in 2012 and so on and so on and so on. That's their obsession.

“And I'm not a pundit. I'm just a President, so take it for what it's worth. But I don't believe that the American people want us to focus on our job security. They want us to focus on their job security.”

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Obama then backed the Republicans into a corner on one of their signature platforms — tax cuts — by essentially repeating what he’d said in the State of the Union.

Under his plan, “[e]mployers would get a tax credit of up to $5,000 for every employee they add in 2010. They'd get a tax break for increases in wages, as well. So, if you raise wages for employees making under $100,000, we'd refund part of your payroll tax for every dollar you increase those wages faster than inflation. It's a simple concept. It's easy to understand. It would cut taxes for more than 1 million small businesses.”

“So I hope you join me. Let's get this done.”

Then came the first confrontational haymaker. “[T]he idea of a bipartisan fiscal commission to confront the deficits in the long term died in the Senate the other day,” the president said. “So I'm going to establish such a commission by executive order …”

It wasn’t necessarily a big thing, but it sent a signal: this president wasn’t afraid of using the end-run around the loyal opposition, much the same way his predecessor did when it suited his agenda. Only legally.

And then a warning, the words bearing a touch of the olive branch, their meaning like a chain-mailed glove to the head:

“I'm ready and eager to work with anyone who is willing to proceed in a spirit of goodwill,” Obama said. “But understand, if we can't break free from partisan gridlock, if we can't move past a politics of ‘no,’ if resistance supplants constructive debate, I still have to meet my responsibilities as President. I've got to act for the greater good -- because that, too, is a commitment that I have made.”

One year on: Obama’s anniversary challenges

Much of the focus on President Obama’s one-year anniversary in the White House, on Wednesday, centered on retrospective views timed to the day he took office on Jan. 20, 2009. It’s a ritual of the calendar and the media: the customary polls assessing his performance in office; the ritual scorecards of “promises kept” and “promises broken”; the pat “report cards”; the hierophants in the punditburo about Obama’s future prospects and those of the Democrats in this election year.

The real events that both mark his first year in office and offer a forecast to the three years remaining didn’t dovetail with the anniversary. One occurred the day before, the other one a few days later. Both of these Richter-scale events underscore the unpredictable nature of our politics. Both could be bellwethers for Democratic prospects in 2010, Obama’s presidential prospects in 2012, and other campaigns into the indefinite future.

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The first happened on Tuesday, when Scott Brown, a little-known Massachusetts Republican state senator, defeated his Democratic challenger, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, to deliver unto the Republicans the seat in the United States Senate occupied for 47 years by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, moral conscience of the Senate.

Besides being a response to Coakley as a candidate — one who by all assessments ran a feckless, half-hearted campaign — the Brown win was seen as a message to the White House that the GOP could penetrate an historically reliable Democratic stronghold.

Brown tapped into public anger about the bank bailouts, proposed changes in U.S. health care, and a generalized fear about the size of the federal government and its role in everyday American lives. With a populist campaign that featured Brown sprinting from town to town driving a truck and wearing blue jeans and a barn coat instead of a suit and tie, Brown successfully adopted the grassroots outsider meme that Obama himself used to great effect in the 2008 presidential run (right down to a slight variation of the font Obama used in his campaign logos and branding all of 2008).

The result is a likely challenge to the Obama health-care agenda that’s hanging on by a thread in Congress, and a certain revival of Republican swagger and confidence in that party’s prospects for 2010 and beyond.

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The second and more serious pushback against the Obama agenda happened on Thursday. In a decision that threatens to permanently transform the ground game of American politics, the United States Supreme Court, 5-4, ruled that corporations, like individual American citizens, could make unlimited contributions to political campaigns in order to influence politicians.

In its decision, the Court purported to hew to the free-speech principles enshrined in the First Amendment. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority: “The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.”

Justices Roberts and Alito wrote, in a concurrence: “The First Amendment protects more than just the individual on a soapbox and the lonely pamphleteer.”

The decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, effectively overturned 103 years of settled law, and was a direct indicator that the court meant to put citizens and corporations on equal existential footing.

It sent the signal that the battle between Wall Street and Main Street — between the interests of deep-pocketed corporation and those of everyday people — has been fully joined by the most toweringly dangerous, thunderously insensitive Supreme Court ruling since Dred Scott.

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Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissenters, framed the stakes of the decision: “In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. ...

“The Court’s blinkered and aphoristic approach to the First Amendment may well promote corporate power at the cost of the individual and collective self-expression the Amendment was meant to serve. It will undoubtedly cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress, and the States to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process. Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.“