433 COMPARED TO WHAT! Obama’s plan saves four trillion bucks. Four trillion compared to what? WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2011

Are we in it for the long haul: Andrew Leonard is asking good questions about our ongoing political mess. To read his piece at Salon, you know what to do: Just click here.

But first, a quick bit of background:

New York magazine has published an interesting profile of Paul Krugman, the liberal world’s most valuable journalist. Working from that profile, Leonard moves to a basic political question: Could Obama have passed a bigger stimulus package if he had asked for more? This is a proxy for a wider set of questions about the way Obama tends to do politics.

Leonard is skeptical about the idea that Obama could have gotten more. For ourselves, we have no Ouija board, so we aren’t sure what would have happened. But we think this passage raises an important set of questions:

LEONARD (4/26/11): But who is really being naive here? Krugman's position is that Obama starts too far to the right and leaves himself little negotiation room—that he reduces the politics of the possible.But you have to wonder whether Obama would have gotten any significant legislation accomplished if he had come out of the gate pushing for a much bigger stimulus, single-payer healthcare, and the nationalization of Citigroup.

Which scenario is more likely—the current Republican party buckling to Obama's progressive vigor, or centrist Democrat senators fleeing for the hills, denying the White House 60 votes on any of its agenda items? I know where I'd lay my money down.

Leave aside the question of who is “being naïve here.” In our view, Leonard is asking a very good question. This leads to an important point about American political history over the past thirty years.

Might Obama have made out better if he tried for a bigger stimulus package—if he proposed single-payer? (He didn’t run on single-payer, of course. No major Democrat ever has.) For ourselves, we have no way of knowing—but this question doesn’t seem to enter the minds of many fiery liberals. At the start of her recent Outlook piece, liberal activist Sally Kohn was whining hard about Obama. In our view, her whining wasn’t gigantically smart:

KOHN (4/17/11): The list of liberal laments about President Obama keeps getting longer: He extended the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. Health-care reform didn't include a public option. In the frantic final hours of the budget negotiations, instead of calling the GOP's bluff, he agreed to historic cuts in progressive programs. And Wednesday, in response to conservatives' focus on the deficit, Obama said that we have to "put everything on the table."

What is the problem here? Is it a lack of leadership from the White House, a failure to out-mobilize the tea party or not enough long-term investment from liberal donors?

Kohn listed four laments about Obama—and three possible problems. Other possible problems didn’t seem to enter her head. She didn’t mention the need for sixty votes in the senate—a situation which left Obama relying on senators Nelson and Lieberman in the health care debate. And she didn’t mention something else:

The groaning lack of progressive politics over the last thirty years. The groaning lack of progressive frameworks and understandings within our political culture.

People like Kohn seem to think that a president can arrive in DC and magically transform American politics—magically change the way a sprawling electorate understands public issues. We’re sorry, but it just isn’t like that! In the New York piece, Krugman says this about Obama: "It's not a values difference. I think Obama was and is committed to the welfare state.” We don’t know if that’s true about Obama. On the other hand, we’re fairly sure that the term “welfare state” is a major political killer within the American context.

Why does our side still use it?

For the past thirty years, the conservative and corporate worlds have massively out-worked the left—to the extent that there is a left in this country. (In many cases, “the left” has been purchased. This is part of the conservative/corporate plan.) They have aggressively spread conservative frameworks; on our side, we’ve massively slept. But many of our most fiery liberals don’t seem to see this long-range problem. Yesterday, we were hugely struck by the highlighted Digby comment:

DIGBY (4/26/11): Greg Sargent makes the point, which I think is correct, that the Democrats are trying to thread the needle between the public's conviction that the deficit is an immediate existential crisis and the fact that they don't want their programs cut. But I can't help but point out that the public's perception is the result of Democratic Party political malpractice in that they allowed Pete Peterson to go unanswered for the past two years—indeed, they actively helped him.

For ourselves, we’ve never understood why Digby is so obsessed with Peterson. (And with his teen-aged grandson. We’re always amazed when they drag in the kids.) We can think of many people we would demonize first. But good God! Who are we kidding here? Nothing Peterson said in the past two years has affected the public’s perception at all!

In large part, the public’s perceptions have built up over the past three or four decades—a period in which there was no action whatsoever from anyone “on the left.” (At the top of the press corps, Krugman is the most notable exception, by far.)

True story: We have had our keisters kicked over the past forty years. Few progressives have been active at all. Others have simply been purchased. (They’ve been neutered, in Grover Norquist’s comical, accurate rendering.) We have often been played for fools by official “liberals”—by various famous people whom we still dumbly revere.

People like Kohn think short-term yelling will work. But we face a much longer haul.

Three cheers for Robin Wells: In New York, Benjamin Wallace-Wells helps explain the genesis of a well-written book:

WALLACE-WELLS (4/24/11): Back in 2006, when he was writing The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman found himself searching for a way to describe his own political Eden, his vision of America before the Fall. He knew the moment that he wanted to describe: the fifties and early sixties, when prosperity was not only broad but broadly shared. Wells, looking over a draft, thought his account was too numerical, too cold. She suggested that he describe his own childhood, in the middle-class suburb of Merrick, Long Island. And so Krugman began writing with an almost choking nostalgia, the sort of feeling that he usually despises: “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional moment in our nation’s history …”

That book is extremely clearly written; it’s extremely approachable. If we had two brain cells to bang together, we would use its presentations in outreach to others.
But we liberals tend to avoid such conduct. Outreach to “those people?” Yuck!