Now What, Liberalism?

Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.

The argument of the political commentator Walter Russell Mead that the United States has reached an end-stage death match between liberal constituent groups has received widespread attention, especially in the conservative blogosphere.

Mead, who teaches at Bard College, contends that

The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them.

In many respects, liberalism is a fat target. Dozens of city and state public employee pension plans are on the verge of bankruptcy – or are actually bankrupt – from Rhode Island to California; in 2010, a survey of 126 state and local plans showed assets of $2.7 trillion and liabilities of $3.5 trillion, an $800 billion shortfall. The national debt exceeds $16 trillion.

Mead labels the “institutions, ideas and expectations” of contemporary liberalism the “blue model”:

In the old system, most blue-collar and white-collar workers held stable, lifetime jobs with defined benefit pensions, and a career civil service administered a growing state as living standards for all social classes steadily rose. Gaps between the classes remained fairly consistent in an industrial economy characterized by strong unions in stable, government-brokered arrangements with large corporations—what Galbraith and others referred to as the Iron Triangle. High school graduates were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that provided a comfortable lower middle-class lifestyle; college graduates could expect a better paid and equally secure future. An increasing “social dividend”, meanwhile, accrued in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks, more social and literal mobility, and more diverse forms of affordable entertainment. Call all this, taken together, the blue model.

While American business abandoned the blue model long ago, especially the notion of providing secure employment and defined benefit pensions on retirement, American government, in Mead’s view, has not. Costs “are now exploding according to the immutable logic of demographic and actuarial facts, and it is clear that the government can’t pay them into the future.”

Hmm. I e-mailed Mead to ask what a functional, “post-blue” model of the liberal state might look like, and he wrote back:

Apologies that I don’t have a fully formed alternative social model ready to drop on a grateful nation, but whatever insights I come up with I will be happy to share on the blog. Believe me, I am working on it. Creating the policy framework to capture the full power of modern information processing capability to raise social productivity is a big part of it.

Finding that Mead is far less radical in his thinking than his critique of contemporary liberalism would suggest, I thought I would move on to more quantitatively inclined analysts of social insurance regimes. So I contacted two economists, Richard Freeman of Harvard and David Autor of M.I.T.

Freeman directly addressed critics of big government:

As long as we have big problems — climate change, terrorism and terror states with nukes, threats of pandemics, adjusting to China, India catching up with us, etc. — and have big banks that can destroy economies and big companies which can harm us per cigarettes and pollutants — I do not see what shield we have but government. The solutions to these problems are collective ones, which mean government.

What is troubling is that governments are flawed, influenced by special groups, and so on. But, Freeman wrote

I would rather be ruled by an elected government than the top 1000 billionaires on Forbes’ list — so I don’t think the issue is big government but the way government operates and hope that technology and information and media offer some chance for us to get a better handle over what big government does. Also I am not sure what you can shrink that would not open space for other big entities less limited by law and less sensitive to reaction of people.

Autor is a nationally recognized expert on the federal disability program, Social Security Disability Insurance, which he (and many others) consider to be “malfunctioning.” Autor writes that “it’s inducing a lot of desperate people to choose government dependency over work.” Given this line of analysis, Autor might be expected to be a critic of liberalism. By e-mail, I asked him “Is the disability program a prime example of the dysfunctionality of liberalism, or is it a unique problem not characteristic of the liberal agenda?”

His reply:

It’s neither. It’s an example of a program that was set up to do a lot of good and still does a lot of good, but one that has not changed with the times. Republicans are as complicit in this policy failure as Democrats. Neither has had the stomach to touch the program since the early 1980s, following Carter’s and then Reagan’s disastrous attempts at reforms. Every advanced country needs and has a disability program. But not all of them are on the same unsustainable trajectories as the U.S.’ program. Countries that are far more liberal than the U.S., like the Netherlands, have had the wisdom and courage to reform their disability systems to stem abuses while maintaining needed social insurance.

Autor argues that a reformed disability program should be a part of a structure of safety net programs that would provide a level of security that

arguably makes the public more not less receptive to accepting disruptive changes in market conditions. If the safety net is effective and voters understand that, they can safely support policies that have long-run benefits and short-run costs without putting themselves at personal economic peril.

In one significant respect, Autor agrees with Mead’s sense that government is no longer responding as flexibly and vitally as it needs to:

We’re going to have a social safety net. The question is whether we’re going to have a rigid set of institutions and incentives that have been ossifying since the 1950s, or whether we’re going to belly up to the bar and modernize these systems in light of how the world has changed and what we’ve learned from economics and social policy in the intervening half century.

Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban design at Chapman University, faults the contemporary left from a different angle. Using apocalyptic language similar to Mead’s, Kotkin argues that the Democratic Party and the left are dominated by what he calls “gentry progressives”: largely white, well-educated, culturally liberal urbanites.

In an essay published by Forbes a month after Obama’s decisive re-election, Kotkin wrote:

The now triumphant urban gentry have their townhouses and high-rise lofts, but the service workers who do their dirty work have to log their way by bus or car from the vast American banlieues, either in peripheral parts of the city (think of Brooklyn’s impoverished fringes) or the poorer close-in suburbs. This progressive economy works for the well-placed academics, the trustfunders and hedge funders, but produces little opportunity for a better life for the vast majority.

Kotkin makes the case that the celebrated Obama coalition uniting well-educated, often upscale liberals, with such struggling, often disadvantaged constituencies as single women, racial and ethnic minorities, and the young is fragile at best:

The class issue so cleverly exploited by the president in the election could prove the potential Achilles heel of today’s gentry progressivism. The Obama-Bernanke-Geithner economy has done little to reverse the relative decline of the middle and working class, whose share of national income has fallen to record lows. If you don’t work for venture-backed tech firms, coddled, money-for-nearly-free Wall Street or for the government, your income and standard of living has probably declined since the middle of the last decade.

Entitlement reform, a darling of gentry progressives who share Mead’s fear that “costs are now exploding according to the immutable logic of demographic and actuarial facts,” is perhaps the quintessential case study of the inclination of the progressive elite to disregard the distributive consequences of their reform initiatives. Take the case of those calling for gradual reduction in Social Security benefits – either by raising the retirement age or switching to a “chained” Consumer Price Index (a revised inflation index which cuts government spending by reducing annual cost of living adjustments).

Who would be most affected? Those in the bottom 20 percent of the elderly who depend on Social Security for 84 percent of their annual income, and those in the next quintile dependent on Social Security for 83 percent of their income. At the beginning of 2012, the average Social Security benefit was $1,230 a month, or $14,740 a year.  For 35 percent of elderly white beneficiaries, for 42 percent of Asian-Americans, for 49 percent of blacks, and for 55 percent of Hispanics, Social Security represents 90 percent or more of total income.

In the current debate over financing the cost of income support forolder Americans, the chained C.P.I. proposal has more political support than the progressive alternative of raising the current $113,700 cap on the amount of income subject to the payroll tax. Low-income Social Security beneficiaries are not equipped to absorb cuts in benefits that a switch to a chained consumer price index would entail; on the other hand, according to the centrist Tax Policy Center, raising the cap on income subject to the payroll tax could completely cover Social Security costs into the foreseeable future without reducing benefits.

Obama’s victory and the growing evidence of an emerging majority Democratic coalition pose the danger that the left will take false comfort. The demographic forces currently powering the Democratic Party in no way guarantee a resilient coalition assured of a long-term competitive advantage.

In addition to the glaring class conflicts between the party’s upscale cultural liberals and the larger body of Democratic voters with pressing material needs, there are a host of potential fissures.

In cities from Los Angeles to Chicago to Houston, African-Americans are competing with Hispanics and others for government jobs, good schools, good neighborhoods, political power and basic resources.  Republicans are looking toward these tensions to see how their party can capitalize on them.

Insofar as austerity advocates force Obama and Democrats in the House and Senate to accept budget cuts, similar ethnic and regional conflicts will plague the party, undermining political unity.

The determination of the Obama administration and many of its Congressional allies to raise taxes on the affluent is not, in political terms, cost-free. The Democratic Party has made huge gains – although short of a majority – among upper-income voters, and inasmuch as Democratic tax policies threaten the standard of living of this cohort, upscale left partisans may get cold feet.

The much larger hurdle facing contemporary liberalism is the need to reconfigure the welfare state in ways that maintain popular support while addressing a host of conflicting forces:

The aging of the population is steadily reducing the ratio of workers to retirees, expanding the “dependency ratio,” even as global competition drives governments worldwide to reduce corporate and individual taxes, cutting off the revenues to finance social welfare spending.Other demographic trends, particularly the erosion of supportive extended family networks and the rising numbers of single elderly, serve to increase the demands for benefits from the welfare state.Austerity policies enacted in response to high deficit and debt levels have resulted in increased voter suspicion of the “undeserving” poor and of “free riders” who are perceived as getting more out of government programs than they pay in, weakening support for the welfare state. Similarly, means testing old-age income security initiatives – particularly Social Security –would inevitably undermine universal support.

Liberalism now faces the job of paying for its own success in helping people live longer. The progressive ethos, currently embattled, has a proud history. What is uncertain is whether a durable social consensus can be mobilized in the face of the global economic pressure to reduce taxes and limit the scope of government. The Democratic left faces a daunting, but not necessarily insurmountable, obstacle.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 17, 2013

An earlier version of this column gave the wrong number for the current cap on income subject to the payroll tax. In 2013, the cap is $113,700, not $110,100, which was the limit last year.

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Democrat Ekes Out Senate Win

They expected that George A. Amedore Jr., a state assemblyman whose family has a successful home-building business in the capital region, would have no trouble making the jump to the Legislature’s upper house. Democrats sued to block the creation of the seat, but failed.

Yet on Friday, 73 days after Election Day, Mr. Amedore conceded defeat to a little-known opponent: Cecilia F. Tkaczyk, a Democrat who, in addition to serving as vice president of the local school board, is also the vice president of the Golden Fleece Spinners and Weavers Guild.

Ms. Tkaczyk (pronounced KAT-chik) was ahead by 18 votes — out of more than 126,000 cast — after a batch of contested ballots was counted in Ulster and Albany Counties. (Another uncounted ballot was found in Montgomery County, but it remains unclear whether it will be counted.)

“No one believed our campaign had a chance in a district hand-carved by Republicans,” she said, “and yet the power of good ideas and a strong campaign proved itself.”

Ms. Tkaczyk, from Schenectady County, is a third-generation farmer, and among her hobbies is spinning wool from her flock of Jacob sheep. She, unlike Mr. Amedore, also favors putting in place a system of public financing for state elections; supporters of election reform, including Jonathan Soros, a son of the billionaire financier George Soros, poured money into an independent-expenditure campaign supporting her.

“She ran a great race and was a great candidate,” Jonathan Soros said. “Voters want this reform, and they’re actually willing to vote on it.”

The race was for a seahorse-shaped district that stretches from the Mohawk Valley to the Hudson Valley. Ms. Tkaczyk, by trade a housing policy expert, emerged from Election Day with a narrow lead, but Mr. Amedore overtook her during a court-supervised counting of paper ballots, and a judge declared him the winner in late December.

But an appeals court ruled last week that 99 additional disputed ballots should be tallied, and on Wednesday, the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, declined to hear an appeal, allowing the ballot-counting to proceed.

“It was especially gratifying for the school board member and farmer to defeat the exceedingly wealthy assemblyman for whom the district was tailor-made,” said Dan Cantor, the executive director of the Working Families Party, which backed Ms. Tkaczyk. “David beat Goliath on this one, and that’s always a satisfying feeling for everyone involved.”

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Above the Debt Ceiling, Boehner Might Find a Blue Sky

A valuable principle of negotiation is to “never bargain with someone who does not have the power to say yes,” and Mr. Boehner has demonstrated that he lacks that power. He couldn’t even persuade his caucus to agree on a Plan B counterproposal and had to let Vice President Joseph Biden and Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, steer the deal that avoided, or at least postponed, the so-called fiscal cliff.

I have a suggestion for how Mr. Boehner could have himself invited back to the negotiation party. But first, let’s take stock of where we are.

What has been accomplished, for better or worse, is that the Bush-era tax cuts for families earning less than $450,000 a year have been made permanent — or at least as permanent as anything in the tax code can be. Those earning more than $450,000 face a tax increase. There are further complications, of course, but the important thing is that there was no substantive tax reform, and no decisions about spending. The final bill even preserved the tradition of corporate welfare by extending a subsidy to Nascar.

Over the next few months, Congress faces a new series of deadlines:

The spending cuts mandated by the sequestration will begin on March 1, unless Congress delays them again. Congress needs to pass a “continuing resolution” or government will shut down, as it did in the 1990s during the standoff between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. And, finally, the debt ceiling will need to be raised or the government will no longer be able to pay its bills to Social Security beneficiaries, the military or the owners of government bonds — a group that includes nearly everyone with a retirement account.

I have listed these deadlines in increasing order of their hazard to our economic health. The spending cuts would be tough and arbitrary but gradual. Incurring them for a couple of months would be bad, but not horrible. Closing down the government is more serious. And even if you’d like a smaller government, you probably still want essential services to continue.

OF the three, the debt ceiling is likely to arrive first and is simultaneously the most serious and the most ridiculous. It’s serious because it’s unthinkable that the government would stop paying its bills, and the ramifications if we defaulted on our debt payments would be catastrophic for the nation and the global economy. We don’t even want to think about going there.

But the debt ceiling is also ridiculous, because the law is redundant. It’s a tradition for members of Congress who aren’t in the same political party as the president to make sanctimonious speeches against raising the debt limit, to keep that president from running up big bills. Yet it is Congress, in fact, that determines how much we spend and how much tax revenue we collect. Our representatives and their predecessors passed the bills and authorized the spending that got us to this place. If they want to reduce the deficit, they should cut spending, increase revenue, or both. But what they should not do, under any circumstances, is to look back at the decisions they have already made and conclude that it would be smart to declare the United States bankrupt, thus creating a second global financial crisis.

Which leads to my proposal for restoring Mr. Boehner’s relevance: He should propose that the debt ceiling be raised for at least two years or, even better, propose that it be abolished. He wouldn’t need a majority of his own party to vote for such a bill, of course, because it would have wide support among Democrats. He would just have to propose it and persuade some of his colleagues to support it. That would be enough.

Here is why I think this is a good idea, for him, the Republican Party and the country:

Congress has plenty of incentives to make a deal on spending. Taxes have already been increased and Republicans are eager to even the score. The sequestration-induced spending cuts coming on March 1 should provide more than enough impetus for Congress and the president to agree to something, even if it’s only a plan to undertake serious tax reform and a comprehensive evaluation of all government spending. By removing an option that we should never rationally use, we can immediately accomplish an often-cited Republican goal — reducing global uncertainty — and likely restore our triple-A credit rating. The Bipartisan Policy Center has estimated that the dillydallying about the debt ceiling last time, which ticked up interest rates, will end up costing more than $18.9 billion over 10 years, about the same amount as the recent Medicare “doc fix, ” which blocks cuts to doctor reimbursement rates.

Tea Party conservatives would undoubtedly be outraged by this suggestion, arguing that Republicans need to retain the debt ceiling threat if they are to get the best possible deal from the Senate and the president. But taking this crazy threat away from a group that just might use it is precisely the point.

By undertaking this act of unilateral disarmament, Mr. Boehner and whichever Republicans had the courage to join him would be signaling that they’re willing to engage in the serious discussions the country needs, and to put pressure on Democrats to do likewise. Anyone who has a large bomb and is threatening to push the button doesn’t deserve to be a party to these discussions.

Richard H. Thaler is a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

Richard H. Thaler is a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

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A multihued future

So much for voter suppression. So much for the enthusiasm gap. So much for the idea that smug, self-appointed arbiters of what is genuinely "American" were going to "take back" the country, as if it had somehow been stolen.

On Tuesday, millions of voters sent a resounding message to the take-it-back crowd: You won't. You can't. It's our country, too.

President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party scored what can only be seen as a comprehensive victory. Obama won the popular vote convincingly, and the electoral vote wasn't even close. In a year when it was hard to imagine how Democrats could avoid losing seats in the Senate, they won seats and increased their majority.

Republicans did keep control of the House, but to call this a "status quo" election is absurd. After the 2010 midterm election, Republicans had the initiative and Democrats were reeling. After Tuesday, the dynamics are utterly reversed.

Don't take my word for it. Listen to the conservative bloviators who were so convinced that Mitt Romney would defeat Obama, perhaps in a landslide, and proceed to undo everything the president has accomplished.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh was almost wistful: "I went to bed last night thinking we're outnumbered. … I went to bed last night thinking we've lost the country. I don't know how else you look at this." He then launched into a riff about Obama and Santa Claus that is too incoherent to quote. Apparently, we are all elves.

Sean Hannity, on his radio show, was angry: "Americans, you get the government you deserve. And it pains me to say this, but America now deserves Barack Obama. You deserve what you voted for. … We are a self-governing country, and the voice and the will of 'we the people' have now been heard. America wanted Barack Obama four more years. Now you've got him. Good luck with that."

As is often the case, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly was a bit more perceptive: "The White establishment is now the minority," he said Tuesday evening, before it was clear that Obama would win. "The demographics are changing. It's not a traditional America anymore."

No, Bill, it's not.

African-Americans made up a record 13 percent of the electorate in 2008. Many analysts attributed this spike in turnout to the novelty of being able to vote for a Black major-party presidential candidate. This year, some pollsters factored into their projections the assumption that the Black vote would decline to a more "normal" 11 percent.

But on Tuesday, African-Americans once again were 13 percent of all voters -- and probably played an even bigger role than this number would indicate in re-electing Obama.

Look at Ohio, arguably the most hotly contested swing state. African-Americans make up only 12 percent of the state population, but according to exit polls, they constituted a full 15 percent of the Ohio electorate on Tuesday. Blacks, in other words, were more motivated to vote than Whites.

Ohio also happens to be a state where Republican officials sharply curtailed early voting. If, as many suspect, this was a transparent attempt to depress minority turnout by making it harder for working-class Ohioans to vote, it didn't work. In fact, it backfired.

Look at Colorado. In 2008, Latinos were 13 percent of the electorate; just over 60 percent voted for Obama. On Tuesday, Latinos made up 14 percent of Colorado voters -- and, according to exit polls, three-fourths of them supported the president. Think this might have something to do with Mitt Romney's "self-deportation" immigration policy? I do.

Nationwide, roughly three of every 10 voters Tuesday were minorities. African-Americans chose Obama by 93 percent, Latinos by 71 percent, and Asian-Americans, the nation's fastest-growing minority, by 73 percent.

These are astounding margins, and I think they have less to do with specific policies than with broader issues of identity and privilege. I think that when Black Americans saw Republicans treat President Obama with open disrespect and try their best to undermine his legitimacy, they were offended. When Latinos heard Republicans insist there should be no compassion for undocumented immigrants, I believe they were angered. When Asian-Americans heard Republicans speak of China in almost "Yellow Peril" terms, I imagine they were insulted.

On Tuesday, the America of today asserted itself.

This time, it was about us -- who we are as a nation -- and a multihued, multicultural future.

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Democrats Are Split Over How to Shape Approach to Gun Bills

Many Democrats, and some Senate Republicans, believe the only legislation that has a whisper of a chance of passing would be bills that are tightly focused on more consensus elements like enhancing background checks or limits on magazines, subjected to debate in committee and then brought to a vote after building bipartisan support.

That would be a departure from recent years, when the leadership often sidestepped committees and sought to take fights directly to the floor.

Others, particularly those senators who have long fought for gun control measures, believe a plodding process allows too much time for opposition to build, and prefer to fast-track measures by adding them as amendments to other bills, even blocking bills in ways that have angered Democrats, until they are granted votes on those ideas.

“We can’t sit around for months talking and letting the gun lobby run out the clock,” said Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey. “If we’re going to make progress, it’s essential that we move quickly and start voting as soon as possible.”

Democrats are united on one point: For any legislation to reach the Senate floor, Mr. Obama will have to put the full weight of his office and bully pulpit behind it.

Without constant public pressure and a concerted effort to woo conservative Democrats, especially those up for re-election in red states in two years, there will be little impetus, numerous Democrats said, to move legislation along. Democrats also may be forced to decide whether to endure a lengthy legislative battle on guns at the expense of priorities like immigration.

Recognizing that public pressure is going to be required to move such contentious measures, the president’s former campaign aides in the weeks ahead will convert the Obama for America operation into a different kind of outside political group led by Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s former campaign manager, according to people familiar with the plans. The new organization will be able to raise money for grass-roots campaigning on behalf of the president’s second-term agenda, they said.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader who has spearheaded other legislation desired by the White House, will take a more passive role with any gun legislation, aides to Senate Democrats say, letting the administration set the agenda and allowing senators to press ahead through their committee leadership or interest in the issue.

Mr. Reid, who was deeply disturbed by the shootings last month in Newtown, Conn., is a longstanding gun rights supporter, a necessity for any statewide official from Nevada.

Mr. Obama’s efforts on Capitol Hill will provide the most crucial test of whether the mass shooting in Newtown, and the obdurate response from the National Rifle Association, has ushered in a new chapter in a legislative era that began in 2004 with the expiration of the assault weapons ban. Since that time, most new gun legislation has emerged in statehouses, and Washington has largely enforced gun rights.

The political sensitivity around guns can be gauged somewhat through the measured statements of lawmakers long associated with gun rights.

“Some have asked whether I will try to block or filibuster this debate because of my support of the Second Amendment,” said Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who in 2009 sponsored a successful measure that repealed a gun ban in national parks. “My goal is the opposite. I believe Congress has a responsibility to review all of our laws and make adjustments as necessary in a transparent, open and deliberative manner.”

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee and has a mixed legislative record on guns, said the first hearings he would schedule in the new Congress would be on gun legislation. Mr. Leahy was the only senator to attend an event with Mr. Obama this week to announce his push on gun laws.

Ashley Parker contributed reporting from Williamsburg, Va., and Michael D. Shear from Washington.

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Democrats Behaving Badly

Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, couldn’t just stand back and relish the recent spectacle of House Republicans making callous fools of themselves by stalling aid to communities walloped by Hurricane Sandy. He wasn’t satisfied that these Republicans were vilified not only in the news media but also by some members of their own tribe, like Peter King and Chris Christie. No, he had to get into the ring himself, and his genius strategy once there was to pit one storm’s victims against another’s, to stage a bout between Atlantic City’s splintered boardwalks and Louisiana’s failed levees. What a titan of meteorological tact.

Noting that Congress had provided help after Hurricane Katrina more quickly and generously than after Sandy, Reid said: “The people of New Orleans and that area, they were hurt, but nothing in comparison to what happened to the people in New York and New Jersey. Almost one million people have lost their homes. One million people lost their homes. That is homes, that is not people in those homes.”

Let’s put aside, for the moment, his fleeting difficulty distinguishing a biped with a weak spot for reality TV from a wood, brick or maybe stucco structure in which several bipeds watch TV. Let’s focus instead on his math. The one million figure is easily more than twice the combined tally of domiciles not only destroyed but also damaged in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It’s an invention. And if comparisons are to be made, consider this one: as a result of Katrina, 1,833 people died — more than nine times as many as died in connection with Sandy. Using the word “nothing” anywhere in the vicinity of Katrina defies both belief and decency, and Reid was indeed forced last week to apologize, his effort to shame his Republican foes having brought a full measure of shame to his own doorstep, yet again.

Why did he make the effort in the first place? Democrats came out of the 2012 elections looking good, and the country’s changing demographics suggest that they could come out of 2016 and beyond looking even better, especially if Republicans don’t accomplish a pretty thorough image overhaul. And that overhaul isn’t exactly proceeding at a breakneck pace. The perseverance of far-right obstructionists in the House stands in the way, leaving the party in grave trouble. If its foes were smart and humble, they’d do what a sports team with a big lead does. They’d play error-free ball.

Not Reid. And not President Obama, whose recent actions have been careless at best and cavalier at worst. There was the gratuitously provocative nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary, followed by the gratuitously insulting invitation of Louie Giglio, a Georgia pastor, to give the inaugural benediction. That plan was abandoned after the revelation of Giglio’s past remarks that homosexuality offends God, that homosexuals yearn to take over society and that a conversion to heterosexuality is the only answer for them. Giglio would have been the second florid homophobe in a row to stand with Obama and a Bible in front of the Capitol — Rick Warren, in January 2009, was the first — and while it appears that this double bigotry whammy wasn’t the administration’s intent, it’s an example of vetting so epically sloppy that it gives an observer serious pause about the delicacy with which Obama and his allies, no longer worried about his re-election, are operating.

The pick of Hagel underscores that indelicacy. There’s a potent case to be made for his installation as secretary of defense, but there are potent cases for others, and it’s hard to believe that Obama couldn’t have found someone who shared his values and would further his agenda but wouldn’t be such a guaranteed lightning rod for his Jewish, LGBT and female supporters, all of whom played crucial roles in his November victory.

Regarding women, Hagel’s record on reproductive freedom is as conservative as his record on gay rights, and it included his support for a ban on abortions in military hospitals, even for servicewomen prepared to pay for the procedures themselves. What’s more, Obama rolled Hagel out in a cluster of other high-profile nominees (John Brennan, Jack Lew, John Kerry) sure to be noted for their gender uniformity and to rekindle questions about the predominantly male club of advisers and golf and basketball partners who have the president’s ear. The upset was predictable and avoidable.

It has been noted, rightly, that the president put two additional women on the Supreme Court and that his percentage of female appointees is as good as President Bill Clinton’s was. But given the march of time since then, and given the questions raised during his first term about how valued women in the administration felt, and given his drumbeat that he was a champion for women in a way Mitt Romney could never be, shouldn’t he be surpassing Clinton? Going out of his way? There’s a perverse streak of defiance in him, and as donors and even Democratic lawmakers have long complained, gratitude isn’t his strong suit.

While Hagel lurched toward his confirmation hearings and Giglio skittered away, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it was sending each of the 35 Republican freshmen in the House a “tea party membership card,” which spelled out their rights to put “ideology over solutions,” to be horrid to women, to coddle Big Oil and “to create and/or ignore any national crisis.” Thus did the Dems turn legitimate gripes into schoolyard taunts that were more likely to inflame G.O.P. freshmen than to bully them into bipartisanship. What, beyond the theater of the gesture, was the point of it?

Granted, Republicans had done their own adolescent taunting, calling Democrats lap dogs in the Nancy Pelosi obedience school. But Democrats pride and market themselves as the reasonable adults in the equation, and that’s part of their currency with many voters. Why fritter it away?

And why abide the overwrought antics of Reid? He once compared opponents of Obama’s health care reform to enemies of emancipation. He took valid questions about Romney’s low tax bill and spun them into the unsubstantiated claim that Romney hadn’t paid any taxes for an entire 10-year period. Then he said the burden was on Romney to prove the charge untrue. Good thing our criminal courts don’t work that way.

Just before and after the 2012 election, it looked as if Republicans might be successfully burying themselves. All Democrats had to do was hammer the nail in the coffin. But the way they’re behaving, they’ll raise the dead.

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Obama’s First Term: A Romantic Oral History

Nadav Kander for The New York TimesClockwise from top left: Joseph R. Biden Jr., vice president; Desirée Rogers, former White House social secretary; Jon Favreau, speechwriting director; Rahm Emanuel, former White House chief of staff; Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser; David Axelrod, former senior adviser.

Four years ago, on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, this magazine devoted nearly an entire issue to a photo essay, “Obama’s People.” The photographs, 52 of them, depicted a team arriving on a wave of hope despite inheriting an economy in trouble, a collapsing auto industry, two wars and a continuing terrorist threat.

Four years later, they have met some of those challenges, been daunted by others and created new ones of their own. The economy is better but still anemic. Osama bin Laden is dead and the Iraq war over, but Afghanistan remains a morass and the prison at Guantánamo Bay remains open. The auto industry has been saved and health care expanded, but national debt has soared. A dictator in Libya has been toppled, but a dictator in Syria slaughters his own people undeterred.

Roughly half of the people in the photo essay are now gone, some embittered by realities they did not anticipate or cast aside by a president cutting losses. The gauzy hope of 2009 has faded into the starker realism of 2013. The Washington they promised to transform is as divided as ever. As the president prepares to take the oath of office for a second term, his team looks back at the four years that brought them to this point. Told in their own voices, the story is, unsurprisingly and perhaps out of necessity, a romantic one.

Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council (2009-11): I remember coming out of the transition office the day before the inauguration, and it was like walking into a street festival. It was sunny, and people were happy, and there were tons of people, and it was very, very festive.

Desirée Rogers, White House social secretary (2009-10): We had a certain amount of time to prepare the home for the first family. Someone asked me, “What side of the bed does the president sleep on?” I’m like, Yikes, I don’t know if I know that. For people that look like me, for my race, to be there and to have witnessed that — I just kept thinking about my grandfather and how he would feel had he lived to see this day, because in so many instances the gentlemen that served the president looked like my grandfather.

During the swearing in of the president, Chief Justice John Roberts mangles the words in the oath.
Gregory Craig, White House counsel (2009-10): This opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel says that if the president does not say all the words of the oath, then he is not president of the United States. I said, “Is there anybody over there that really thinks he’s not president?” David [Barron, acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel] said: “No, no, no, we all think he is president. But there may be a judge somewhere, or some hearing could be called on this, or it could be a problem in the future.” I thought, We gotta fix this. There was a long line of people waiting to shake hands with the president in the residence. We said, “Mr. President, can we talk to you a second?” There was a little bit of, “You gotta be kidding.” I said, “I’ll call the chief justice’s chambers and see if he can come down.” The chief justice carried his robes, and the president arrived. The chief justice goes into the corner and says, “This is a ceremonial occasion, I’m going to put on my robe.” The chief justice is doing it from memory again, and I thought to myself, Would it be wrong for me to go forward and say something? At which point, the president says, “Now, let’s keep this real slow.” They did it, and that was it.

Shortly after taking office, Obama decides to sign a large spending bill with thousands of earmarks to avoid undercutting Congressional support for his $800 billion stimulus package. In doing so, he helps establish an image of himself as a big spender.
David Axelrod, White House senior adviser (2009-11): He was very much of a mind to veto the bill. We were in the midst of trying to pass the Recovery Act, and some of his legislative folks said, “Mr. President, you can veto the bill, but if you do, you jeopardize our ability to pass the Recovery Act.” He was very frustrated. He just kind of glared, and he ultimately sort of nodded. I’m not sure he even said anything. But I know in retrospect that was probably one of the decisions he regretted the most.

In March 2009, after a sharp debate among his advisers, Obama decides to bail out the auto industry.
Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff (2009-10): All the advisers were divided, the public was absolutely against it. Nobody is giving you consensus, there is no consensus. Nobody had ever done what we were about to do. And he picks the hardest option.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 19, 2013

A collection of pictures on Page 36 this weekend with an article about President Obama’s first term includes members of the administration or key players during Mr. Obama’s first term; not all of them are members of the administration. Also, the pictures tinted blue represent either members of the administration or key players who are planning to leave or who have already left — not only those who have left.

And Ken Salazar, who is not shown as one of those leaving, announced after the magazine had gone to press that he was stepping down as Secretary of the Interior, as expected.

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