Jared Bernstein: Missing in Action
Have you seen this man?
PETER FRASE
The talk of blog-land this week is Ryan Lizza’s long New Yorker profile of Obama administration economist-guru Larry Summers. It’s an interesting and useful piece, although I think it’s far too forgiving of Summers and the Obama administration for all the reasons Dean Baker provides here. I would only add that it’s shameful to write a discussion of Summers’ years at Harvard without mentioning the Andrei Shleifer affair, an episode of raw gangsterism in which Summers connived to protect a man who had enriched himself by immiserating the Russian people and wrecking their country.
However, what I want to focus on in the Lizza piece is the curious case of one Jared Bernstein. Formerly an economist at the very progressive Economic Policy Institute, Bernstein is now the chief economic adviser to Vice President Biden. More importantly, he is the only high-ranking economist in the Obama White House whom one could plausibly describe as “on the left.” And in the photo that accompanies the Lizza profile, he appears alongside Summers, Tim Geithner, Christina Romer and Peter Orszag, a group that is described in a caption as “the advisers who meet with the President daily to discuss the economy”.
In the actual article, however, he only appears three times in passing. The first is in December 2008, when the Obama economic team meets in Chicago to discuss their response to the economic crisis. Although we are given an extensive description of the contributions from Romer, Orszag and others in this conversation, we do not hear what, if anything, Bernstein had to say. More significantly, Lizza reports that at the end of the meeting, “Summers, Romer, Geithner, Orszag, Emanuel, and Jason Furman huddled in the corner to lock down” the amount of the stimulus package. Bernstein, apparently, was politely dismissed before this little summit.
Bernstein reappears in a discussion of Summers’ alleged conversion from gung-ho deregulator to chastened Keynesian, averring that “I was reading Larry’s articles in the Financial Times over the past couple of years, and thought, Wow, it’s all too rare that you see the thinking of such a prominent economist move like that.” But here he’s being brought in as an outside commentator whose job is to burnish Summers’ lefty cred (and give Lizza an excuse to repeat the often-told fact that Bernstein used to be some kind of hippie musician). The fact that he works in the White House is essentially irrelevant. His only other appearance in the piece is at the end, where Lizza reports that there is “a half-hour meeting each morning, in which Obama is briefed by the top members of his economic team: Summers, Geithner, Romer, Orszag, and Bernstein.” From Obama’s policies and Lizza’s reporting, it’s not hard to conclude that one of these five is pulling significantly less weight with the President than the other four.
I bring up all of this not just because I like Jared Bernstein and wish he had more influence than Larry Summers, but to raise a larger point about the relationship between the Obama administration and the left. Thus far, it seems to me that in every case where a solid progressive has entered the administration, they would have been better off staying outside. Bernstein, I suspect, would be more effective if he could do what Dean Baker and Robert Reich are doing: criticize the administration’s economic policy from the left. Instead, he’s in a position where he can’t honestly speak his mind because of his official post, and yet he still seems to have minimal impact on policy-making. A similar case, I think, can be made about Van Jones, whose Glenn Beck-inspired defenestration from the White House may turn out to be a blessing if it frees him up to be a consistent and outspoken progressive about environmental justice issues. And the list goes on: Hilda Solis, for example, seems to have vanished without a trace.
There’s long been a debate among leftists in this country about the relative merits of “inside” and “outside” strategies for moving the government and the Democratic Party to the left. I believe, as do many in DSA, that a successful strategy has to incorporate both. But the case of Jared Bernstein is, I think, a cautionary tale: being “inside” a Democratic administration means nothing if you don’t have a voice there. In that case, it amounts to nothing more than a co-opting of progressive voices by a fundamentally conservative political project.
Good piece, Peter. I didn’t think Bernstein’s appointment was ever going to be much more than a bit of bone throwing to liberals, and that certainly seems to be the case. You’re entirely right to say that this kind of case “amounts to nothing more than a co-opting of progressive voices by a fundamentally conservative political project,” but I think that this analysis can be taken even further. Since there’s no real U.S. left to speak to pressure the Dems, the inside/outside strategy is probably something that we need to just give up on.
That’s too sweeping of a pronouncement, Chris. On the national scene, maybe. But there are plenty of state and local examples that prove otherwise. The Working Families Party in New York, while far from perfect, is a remarkably effective inside/outside example of electoral organizing and pushing a pro-worker reform agenda.
Yeah, the but the WFP can exist here in NY mostly because fusion voting is legal in our state. That’s not true in most other states. They’re kind of an exception that proves the rule as far as I can tell.
The WFP has tried to expand (maybe successfully) to a few other states and they’ve done quite a bit of good in New York working to repel the Rockefeller Drug Laws and espousing a pretty solid social democratic platform .
I still think that the primary goal of the left should be attempting to see whether its possible to form a pole of opposition outside the Democratic Party (institutionally, obviously key politicized actors are in the Democratic tent). I’m not proposing the politics of microsects of course or 3rd party electoral ventures. If the alternative is microsects or the “inside-outside” approach I’ll take the latter in a heart beat.
I liked Chris’ piece from last month “Prison of the Possible” http://theactivist.org/blog/the-prison-of-the-possible
A lot of stuff the WFP has done has been really great, and I am very glad that it exists here and can exercise some real influence in NY politics. But I agree with Bhaskar that leftists should probably be focusing mostly on movement building (and intellectual/ideological work!) outside of parties, Democratic or otherwise, so that the work of all those groups out there adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
One more thing….
I’ll disagree with Chris when he saids there “is no real U.S. left”. I know what he means, but we have plenty of organizations making an impact. The CiW, JWJ, local union organizers, activists of all stripes, progressive journalists and intellectuals, etc. We just have no real *organized* left. It is a lot easier to imagine a reconfigured and expanded left than one rising from nothingness into being.
Who in the world is the Jason Furman mentioned as being in the meeting when Bernstein was not?
“In that case, it amounts to nothing more than a co-opting of progressive voices by a fundamentally conservative political project.”
This is a great piece, Peter, but I take issue with that statement. It would be more accurate to call it a centrist or center-left project, not a conservative one. Saying otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
And I have been thinking the same thing about Hilda Solis. I have always wanted to believe that, deep down, Obama still has the heart of a community organizer and is more to the left than he has shown at the beginning of his administration. But his cabinet picks, along with his agenda, have shown him to be far too conciliatory. I mean, Ron Kirk as trade rep? There are probably more conservatives and moderates that were offered cabinet posts than bonafide progressives.
I don’t think it’s unfair to characterize the Obama admin as fundamentally conservative at all. There’s evidence for this in both its policy approach and underlying ideology. Basically, Obama is a Burkean. He’s not against change, indeed he calls for it when he deems it appropriate, but wants it to happen slowly and in a conciliatory fashion. There’s tinkering with certain aspects of the system, but ultimately with the goal of conserving it. So yeah, in a fundamental sense I think Peter’s right.
Chris makes a good case for Obama-as-conservative. But I’d add that I don’t really see the point of pretending that terms like “liberal” and “conservative” have some precisely defined meaning. Sure, I could have called Obama “center-left”, with some plausibility, given the current state of American politics. On the other hand, by the standards of Western Europe or even the United States of a few decades ago, he’d definitely be considered a conservative. To me, it’s a rhetorical choice–defining Obama as “center-left” implies that the center-point of legitimate opinion is somewhere to his right. What we want to do, obviously, is push the debate in such a way that the center gets redefined leftward.