Balkinization: George W. Obama and Barack Hussein Bush: Some Notes on the Presidential Politics of Emergency

George W. Obama and Barack Hussein Bush: Some Notes on the Presidential Politics of Emergency

You may have noticed that Barack Obama, like George W. Bush before him, is taking advantage of the opportunities presented by emergency. Or, more correctly, he is taking advantage of the President's first mover advantage to define the situation before him as an emergency and to assert that bold, decisive action is necessary to avert the particular sort of crisis that he claims the nation now faces.

In Bush's case, the 9/11 attacks allowed Bush to define the situation as a question of war and himself as a war president, thus purporting activate all of the powers that a president enjoys in time of war. Hence the War on Terror, a war with no defined battlefield and no defined enemy. Since these were lacking the President could define the war as taking place literally everywhere, including within the United States. And since the enemy was a shadowy network of loosely connected terrorist organizations, the President could assert that almost any country and any (foreign) organization was connected to Al Qaeda. Thus armed, the President's choice of tactics (conducted largely in secret, including secret domestic surveillance, detention without habeas corpus, torture) and his choice of targets (Iraq) reflected his structuring of the situation, and thus of his own powers: It was a war against the United States that our country would fight led by a Commander-in-Chief over affairs both foreign and domestic.

Steve Griffin has made an excellent analysis of President Bush's creation of reality in these two posts and this recent article. It is worth noting is that Bush's successor, Barack Obama has pursued a remarkably similar framing strategy, albeit with a few salient differences.

Obama portrays the situation before us as the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. He does not hesitate to explain that the situation is frightening and should be so. The more severe the crisis, the greater the need for bold, decisive action, and the greater the need for the country to rally around its leader, to whom the public looks to resolve the crisis. To do this, the leader needs the support of all to surmount the very serious problems that the country faces. This not a time for selfishness, narrowmindedness, or obstruction. Everyone must work together. The President, in turn, must set the agenda. He must lead. He must present a plan; Congress must work out the details and ratify it without delay or obstruction.

The first stage of the plan, however, is only the beginning; the country must do far more to stem the crisis. The greater the crisis, the more severe the emergency, the more the president must do, the more plans he must make, and the more times he must return to Congress, which must in turn continue to ratify his plans. If the Congress does not cooperate, the President will go over their heads to the American people, explaining that Congress does not understand the seriousness of the dangers we face and the crisis in which we are enmeshed. Quick, bold, decisive action is necessary. Leaders must lead, others must follow.

Does this sound familiar? It should. It is Bush's strategy of September 2001.

Both Bush and Obama have made use of the President's power to define emergency and crisis in ways that shape others imaginations, and in ways that legitimate the steps they assert must be taken. Bush insisted that he needed vast powers to detain, interrogate and make war; he pointed to Iraq and insisted that it was a continuation of the war against Al Qaeda. Obama insists that he must have an enormous stimulus to jump start the economy, he must take control of major banking institutions to stave off financial meltdown, and he must propose a remarkably ambitious new budget with new programs for infrastructure development, health care, education, energy conservation and environmental protection to sustain economic capacity and global competitiveness in the future. Given the crisis we face, the only way forward, Obama is saying, is to reject Reaganism and embark on a Second New Deal focused on guarantees of health care for all Americans, financial regulation and/or government control of financial institutions, environmental protection, energy independence, and infrastructure investment. That is to say, just as Bush identified his crisis to justify the policies he pursued, so Obama has defined his crisis to justify his proposed solutions.

Are there truly no differences, then, between what the two men are doing? Of course there are, and I will return to them shortly. Moreover, I should point out that your view about the legitimacy of a particular use of the Presidential politics of emergency depends on which of the two men you support and your view about whether they have accurately described the nature and the scope of the situation before the country. For if they have, of course, their solution, tailored to that description, makes correspondingly more sense, and so does following their leadership. If there really is an emergency along the lines described by the President, then of course, it is very different than if there is no emergency, or it is not as severe as the President says it is, or if the nature of the problem is different than the President describes, for then the solutions are the wrong solutions, and will lead the country in the wrong direction. So if Bush gauged the situation more or less correctly and Obama incorrectly, or the other way around, then that is a very big difference indeed. But addressing that question is not the point of this particular post.

Here, I do not focus on who is right or who is wrong in their assessments of the situation the country faces. Instead, I want to focus on what the two men share-- the similar way in which the modern President-- whether Bush or Obama-- uses the formulation and articulation of crisis and emergency in order to take control of the political agenda, shape the nation's political imagination, and make resistance seem, at least in the short run, parochial, narrow minded and even futile.

If conservative Republicans today feel as if nobody is listening to them, if they feel that others think them petty, out of touch, and just a little bit loony, they should consider how liberal Democrats felt in the strange days following the 9/11 attacks, when George W. Bush, aided and abetted by a Republican Congress and a supine (and sometimes actively cheerleading) media, seemed to sweep away all opposition and conquer everything in his sights, (except, apparently, Osama Bin Laden). From September 2001 to about May 2003, criticism of the President, when it was not drowned out by a chorus of avid supporters, was largely ineffective and perhaps even a little unpatriotic. 9/11, it was repeatedly said, changed everything. It was time to rethink old verities and understand the new political realities and the new needs of a nation facing an existential crisis and an almost unfathomable emergency.

People may have forgotten how powerful social norms against dissent were in those days immediately following 9/11 because the spell was broken shortly after the initial successes of the Iraq invasion. In hindsight, the turning point was Bush's famous moment of hubris, dressing up like a pilot and appearing at a carefully staged event before a sign proudly proclaiming "Mission Accomplished." Before this, everything seemed to go right for the President. Afterwards, less and less did.

The secret and the danger of Presidential government by emergency is the need to convert the sense of felt crisis into a lasting advantage for the President and his party. Franklin Roosevelt succeeded at this, in part because he was famously adaptable and protean and in part because he was handed not one but two crises following on top of each other-- the Great Depression and World War II. Out of these two came the great success of American liberalism in defining political realities and opportunities-- until the advent of Ronald Reagan, who successfully converted dissatisfaction with the economy into a sustainable political movement.

Bush, like Roosevelt, was handed an amazing political opportunity, an opportunity that even Reagan did not have-- an event that could easily be interpreted-- and was interpreted-- as creating an existential crisis. The problem for Bush was that he was not able to sustain the sense of crisis very long or to convert it into a lasting political advantage for himself and his party. This was, in part, due to bad luck, but also in part due to his incompetence (and those of his lieutenants), his lack of flexibility, and, ironically-- given his repeated assertions that times had changed-- his inability to understand the times and adjust to them.

This last point is worth emphasizing: Even if the President has a first mover advantage to redefine the political situation to his advantage, he cannot do so indefinitely. At some point he has to adjust to the responses to his actions, and to realities that he has not anticipated. Bush and his advisors did not do so successfully. If they had, they might well have achieved a new political majority that would last for decades. Because they did not, they created an opportunity for Barack Obama to create such a majority.

Obama has now been handed an opportunity like Reagan's, but actually greater than Reagan's due to Bush's incompetence, and Bush's failure and the failure of his party to understand and properly react to events.

President Obama will, for the time being, invoke crisis and emergency as the justification for what he does. He will attempt to define the situation to make dissent appear feckless, selfish, out of touch with reality or irrelevant. Like Bush, and like other leaders before him, he might be tempted to buy himself a little more time to solve his stated problems by exaggerating the scope of the crisis and replacing one crisis with another, but he cannot do this indefinitely. That would require consistently making the situation appear worse than it already is, continually raising the stakes of his politics-- and that is a very dangerous game. Instead, his task is the solve the problem he poses in a way that makes the nation grateful to him and his party and durably changes the structure and assumptions of politics. This is what Lincoln did and Roosevelt did, and to lesser extent, what Reagan did. It is what Bush tried to do but ultimately failed to do. He changed some assumptions of politics, to be sure, but not always in the ways he had hoped. Bush used the politics of emergency badly, Obama must learn from his example.

What is the difference, at least so far, between Obama's use of the presidential politics of emergency and Bush's? If we put aside the enormous question of who is really understanding the situation clearly and who is misguided, there are two salient differences. One has to do with tactics, the other with the resources of political support.

First, Bush relied on secrecy, lack of oversight and accountability, and on doing end runs around existing government institutions to get what he wanted. He had a propaganda arm in the mass media, but he and his advisors were carefully to avoid very much transparency in what they were doing; instead, they repeatedly insisted that we should trust the Executive in time of crisis. In part as a reaction to Bush, and in part because the crisis is domestic and not one of foreign policy, Obama is making a fetish of transparency in his budget, and he is establishing various accountability mechanisms. It is difficulty to know how much transparency and accountability there will actually turn out to be, because the budget is vast and the amount of money (and the power to spend it) is mind boggling. So it may be a show, especially if important details, although formally made transparent, are difficult to examine and analyze in the sheer weight of things made public. Put another way, transparency can sometimes be as good as secrecy.

Second, Obama begins with much greater support in Congress. Bush never had Republican majorities as great as the Democratic majorities Obama now enjoys. In addition, Obama seems to have a more well developed machine of support in civil society. Bush had the right wing media (including the right wing blogosphere) and right wing think tanks, as well as the support of conservative churches and significant parts of the business community-- support which, it is worth noting, he gradually lost due to his incompetence. Obama begins with support among traditionally Democratic constituencies, liberal media, unions, and the academy, but far more important, he has created a powerful campaign machine using new media that is still in place, and will likely be harnessed to rally supporters to pressure government officials to follow the President. Like other presidents before him, Obama has the opportunity to employ a revolution in media to create a new base of support in civil society. How well he manages and sustains that base of support is yet to be determined.

Both Bush and Obama have relied on the politics of emergency at the beginning of their respective presidencies. It is an interesting and troubling question whether this politics will increasingly be part of the modus operandi of American presidents in the future.

Posted 2:35 PM by JB [link]