Obama’s Tea Party

For one long week—perhaps President Obama’s longest since taking office—it was all about the banks. On Jan. 21, a New York Times headline read, “Obama to Propose Limits on Big Banks,” while the Motley Fool, a website dedicated to financial issues, blurted, “Bank Regulation: Sometimes Populism is Justified.” But shortly thereafter, with all of the buzz surrounding Obama’s State of the Union address and the renewed concern about unemployment levels, the banks fell off the agenda and haven’t been heard about since.

Holdups in the Senate have made it unlikely that any significant banking legislation will pass, but that is a moot point, Obama’s plan to curb risky investing by commercial banks is nothing more than a cynical attempt to gain populist support at a time when his domestic agenda is flagging. But if the failure of the banking bill presents Obama with an opportunity to initiate a new phase of his presidency, he needs to abandon more than just his financial policy: the entire populist strategy that it represented has to go as well.

Populism has been on everybody’s minds lately, probably because a populist group was responsible for many of Obama’s troubles in the wake of the Massachusetts senate race that catapulted Republican Scott Brown to Washington.  The Tea Party movement, organized last spring around a shared disapproval of reckless spending in Washington, DC, was crucial for mobilizing support for Brown during the race. Over the past several months, the movement has grown so popular that, according to a recent New Yorker article, it would attract more support than the Republican Party if it were to become a registered political affiliation.

Yet the same article also highlights some of the pitfalls of populism in its portrayal of the Tea Partiers as a cross between a social activist group and a Glenn Beck-worshipping cult. Not only is the Tea Party’s homophobic and racist rhetoric offensive (a Tea Party protest in Washington last September included signs saying “The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!”), but their tactics are self-defeating.

Like all populist movements, the Tea Partiers base their ideology around a divide between political elites and “ordinary” citizens victimized by Washington’s insider culture. But in order to spread their ideology, the populists must ensure that politicians sharing their views reach political office—in other words, ensure that these politicians participate in the very culture the populists claim to reject. Consequently, the ideology of the Tea Party directly limits its chances for success. The Tea Partiers either have to sacrifice their populist beliefs or their influence, the former leading to their incorporation within mainstream politics and the latter leading to their total disappearance from it. This explains the tendency of some Tea Partiers to distance themselves from Scott Brown after his victory; during his first broadcast after the election, Glenn Beck, an advocate for the Tea Party movement, criticized Brown and said his time in office “could end with a dead intern. I’m just saying.”

This conundrum also explains the failure of Obama’s own populist pleas. Populism is less a coherent set of beliefs than an anti-ideology, defining itself entirely by its opposition to political elites; once it takes part in this system of elites through electoral success, its failure to articulate a set of ideals results in its demise. Sensing the populist anger that resulted in Scott Brown’s victory, Obama tried to tap into it, but his efforts necessarily failed; as an elected official, he was a participant in the Washington culture that the Tea Partiers despised, and the rest of Americans took his dramatic proclamations with the grain of salt most populism deserves. In other words, his plans and his populist rhetoric appealed to no one, least of all the Senate now blocking the proposed bank legislation.

During his State of the Union, Obama’s vow to veto any Congressional acts that didn’t measure up to his standards of “real reform” represented his descent into the populist trap; rather than articulating a clear ideology or outlining what “real reform” looks like, he simply promised to reject proposals offered by others. Obama’s plan to limit commercial bank activity represented an even more extensive use of populist rhetoric, and its populist nature is now revealed by the fact that it has barely been mentioned in the weeks since the subject was first broached. In the desperate moments following the Massachusetts Senate race, Obama sought an “elite” group to blame, and Wall Street bankers provided a perfect, easy target. His failure to outline a clear plan explains the holdup now preventing banking reform, and his focus on blaming the banks rather than reforming them represents the keystone failure of the populist ideology.

Obama needs to acknowledge the populist criticisms directed at him without exploiting the techniques that his critics employ. Doing so is the only way he can move forward, which is, after all, what he promised in his forward-looking, hope-saturated campaign. The American people deserve for Obama to deliver on his promises, and he can start by abandoning the populist rhetoric that he employed during his latest debacle with the banks.

Peter M. Bozzo, a Crimson editorial writer, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.