Obama at the crossroads : politics, markets, and the battle for America's future

209 Pages·2012·1.119 MB·English

by  Lawrence R. Jacobs, Desmond King

Obama at the Crossroads
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OBAMA AT THE
CROSSROADS
Politics, Markets, and the Battle
for America’s Future
Edited by
LAWRENCE R. JACOBS

AND
DESMOND KING

1
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Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Obama at the crossroads : politics, markets, and the battle for America’s future / edited by
Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond S. King.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-984536-1 (hbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-984538-5 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. United States—Politics and government—2009– 2. Obama, Barack—Political and social views.
3. United States—Economic policy—2009– 4. United States—Social policy—1993– 5. Financial crises—United
States—History—21st century. 6. Health care reform—United States—History—21st century.
7. Race—Political aspects—United States—History—21st century. 8. United States—Foreign relations—2009–
9. Political leadership—United States—History—21st century. 10. Progressivism (United States politics)—
History—21st century. I. Jacobs, Lawrence R. II. King, Desmond S.
E907.O215 2012
973.932092—dc23 2011032009
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Table of Contents
A cknowledgments vii
Contributors ix
PART I : Obama at the Crossroads
1 . Varieties of Obamaism: Structure, Agency and the Obama
Presidency—Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond King 3
PART II : Th e Legislative Crossroads
2 . Institutional Empowerment and Strangulation: Bureaucratic
Politics and Financial Reform in the Obama
Administration—Daniel Carpenter 33
3 . Reconstituting the Submerged State: Th e Challenges of Social
Policy Reform in the Obama Era—Suzanne MettLer 71
PART III : Structural Crossroads: Political Economy and Racial Orders
4 . Situating Obama’s Response to the Crisis: Finance, Regulation,
and the American State—Leo Panitch 117
5 . Barack Obama’s Election and America’s
Racial Orders—Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King 153
vi Table of Contents
PART IV : Obama’s Critical Juncture
6 . American Renewal and the Politics of the New
Middle America—E. J. Dionne Jr. 169
7 . Barack Obama and the Angry Left : Th e Fight for
Progressive Realism—Lawrence R. Jacobs 181
Index 195
Acknowledgments
T HIS VOLUME ORIGINATED as the second conference at Nuffi eld College,
Oxford, devoted to bringing a political economy approach to understanding
American politics. Even before the 2008 fi nancial crises that saw long-time
Wall Street banks like Lehman Brothers fail and unemployment soar, it was
apparent that the American economy and political system were stretching
sustainability, pervaded with contradictions and tensions. Making sense of
these cross-pressures within the miasma of deepening partisan polarization
and sharp electoral shift s requires a broader perspective than the typical
approach to scholarly analysis of American politics—one that is common in
Europe and in the study of comparative politics. Filling this gap is the purpose
of the Nuffi eld series.
Th e fi rst Nuffi eld conference in May 2008 focused on America’s unsus-
tainable state, bringing together a group of American and European scholars
to identify and explain the growing instability of the intermeshed systems
of U.S. politics and economics. Th e conference produced Th e Unsustainable
American State in 2009 (Oxford University Press).
Th e present volume originated from the second Nuffi eld conference on
American political economy, which occurred in March 2010 and focused on
the Obama presidency. Where much analysis of the Obama presidency has
been preoccupied with his personality (dithering and lacking conviction)
or with important narrow questions related to changing party strategy and
rules within Congress, O bama at the Crossroads off ers a sustained analysis of
Obama within America’s political economic system.
Th e Nuffi eld series has been generously supported by the Mellon Trust Fund
of Nuffi eld College, and we wish to thank this source for enabling valuable and
unique intellectual collaborations and the resulting published volumes. Th e
Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford generously hosted
a public lecture by E. J. Dionne Jr. as part of the conference, for which we thank
viii Acknowledgments
its director, Dr. Nigel Bowles. We also acknowledge support from the Hubert
H. Humphrey School and Department of Political Science at the University
of Minnesota and the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies.
Th e Oxford conference on Obama benefi ted greatly from a range of par-
ticipants who acted as discussants and respondents to paper sessions. We are
immensely grateful to these colleagues and wish to thank them for their valu-
able contributions: Joel Aberbach, Nancy Bermeo, Nadia Hilliard, Godfrey
Hodgson, Christopher Hood, Jeff rey Isaac, Kimberley Johnson, Robin D.G.
Kelley, Robert Kuttner, Patrick Le Gales, Robert Lieberman, James Purnell,
Gwendolyn Sasse, Adam Sheingate, Marc Stears, Sven Steinmo, Helen
Th ompson, and Laurence Whitehead.
We have been fortunate that OUP’s senior social science editor in New
York, Dave McBride, has supported this intellectual endeavor, making deci-
sive diff erences to this and the previous volume. We are very grateful to Dave
for his intellectual support and editorial guidance, and to Niko Pfund, Pres-
ident of OUP New York, for his encouragement of the project. Alexandra
Dauler and Caelyn Cobb, Dave’s colleagues at OUP, have done an excellent
job in putting the manuscript into production and print.
Contributors
Daniel Carpenter is Freed Professor of American Government and Direc-
tor of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. His
publications include Th e Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Net-
works and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies 1862–1928 (2001) which
won APSA’s Kammerer Prize and IPSA’s Charles Levine Prize, and R eputa-
tion and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the
FDA (2010), which recently received a rare four-star rating from the British
Medical Journal .
E. J. Dionne Jr. is an infl uential columnist on the Washington Post , having
previously worked for the N ew York Times , and a commentator on American
politics. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. He is Univer-
sity Professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at Brookings In-
stitution. His publications include Why Americans Hate Politics (1991) and
Th ey Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era
(1996). His numerous awards include the APSA’s Carey McWilliams Award
in 1996.
Lawrence R. Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political
Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance
in the Hubert H. Humphrey School and Department of Political Science at
the University of Minnesota. Dr. Jacobs co-edits the Chicago Series in Ameri-
can Politics for the University of Chicago Press. His recent publications in-
clude H ealth Care Reform and American Politics (with Th eda Skocpol, 2010);
Class War? What Americans Really Th ink about Economic Inequality (with
Ben Page, 2009); T alking Together: Public Deliberation in America and the
Search for Community (with Fay Lomax Cook and Michael Delli Carpini,
2009), and Th e Unsustainable American State (co-edited with Desmond
King, 2009).