Robert Wright on culture, politics and world affairs.

Could we give Barack Obama a break?

Even among his supporters, opinions about his handling of health care reform range from the view that he messed up to the view that he really, really messed up.

True, the more charitable critics grant that Obama faced tenacious Republicans in Congress egged on by rabid Tea Partiers. And some acknowledge that, more deeply, he faced a “polarized” nation and was beset by “special interests” on both the left and the right.

But I think the president has been hit by something deeper still — something that empowers all these adverse forces and won’t stop anytime soon. Over the past half century, technological evolution has made it progressively harder to get big things done in this country, and now it’s just about impossible. This isn’t just Obama’s problem; it’s America’s problem.



Once upon a time — 60, 70 years ago — organized special interests were mainly groups that had first gotten organized for purposes other than lobbying. Corporations existed to make money, and labor unions existed to bargain with corporations. And both of them figured that, so long as they were already organized, they might as well pressure the government for policies that favored them.

Had technological change stopped in 1950, President Obama would be basking in the glow of victory. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies and labor unions posed challenges to health care reform, but their challenges were manageable, and as of a few weeks ago Obama had found a sausage recipe that these groups could stomach.

But technological change didn’t stop in 1950. Computerized mass mail came along, and with it the empowerment of a different kind of interest group. You could now reach out and organize a bunch of previously unorganized people for the primary, if not sole, purpose of lobbying.

The new information technology doesn’t just create generation-3.0 special interests; it arms them with precision-guided munitions.

Some of the resulting groups were anti-big government. The National Taxpayers Union — which begat Grover Norquist, who begat Americans for Tax Reform — was founded in 1969. Other groups lobbied to keep government entitlements. AARP — though actually founded a few years before the mass-mail revolution, and before Medicare (indeed it was founded to provide seniors with private health insurance) — eventually discovered the power of mass mail and became a potent defender of Medicare and Social Security benefits.

This generation of political technology — Special Interest 2.0 — has made Obama’s job a lot harder. To the extent that both the AARP and Grover Norquist wielded power, his challenge was this: Come up with a fiscally responsible way to increase the number of low-income people getting health care subsidies (the main point of the exercise) without reducing subsidies for middle- and upper-income people and without raising taxes. Good luck, Mr. President!

If you think this was a grim predicament, wait until you hear about Special Interest 3.0. The mass-mail revolution had worked its paralyzing magic by lowering the cost of mobilizing far-flung groups of people who share a political interest. Obviously, subsequent technological history hasn’t exactly reversed this trend toward the cheaper processing and transmission of data. The personal computer, the Internet and allied technologies have given a new fluidity to political opposition, spawning interest groups almost overnight in response to policy initiatives.

Hence the Tea Partiers. They were in part an offspring of Special Interest 2.0 (Americans for Tax Reform co-sponsored their first big event), but they were also fostered by blogs and Fox News and other right-wing parts of the balkanized media landscape. This balkanization is itself an expression of the technological drift I’m talking about. The Web’s many “cocoons” — ideologically homogenous blogs and Web sites — are in a sense interest groups; they’re clusters of people who share a political perspective and can convene only because of the nearly frictionless organizing technology that is the Internet. Some aren’t themselves activist, but most provide a kind of sustenance to activists who carry their banner.

All of this — a balkanized media landscape and the activist groups that spring from it — is Special Interest 3.0.

And here too — as with versions 1.0 and 2.0 — Obama got hit from both sides. Just as there were bloggers on the right who energized and amplified the Tea Partiers, there were bloggers on the left who opposed any version of health care reform that failed their ideological purity test.

The new information technology doesn’t just create generation-3.0 special interests; it arms them with precision-guided munitions. The division of readers and viewers into demographically and ideologically discrete micro-audiences makes it easy for interest groups to get scare stories (e.g. “death panels”) to the people most likely to be terrified by them. Then pollsters barrage legislators with the views of constituents who, having been barraged by these stories, have little idea what’s actually in the bills that outrage them.

It’s no exaggeration to say that technology has subverted the original idea of America. The founders explicitly rejected direct democracy — in which citizens vote on every issue — in favor of representative democracy. The idea was that legislators would convene at a safe remove from voters and, thus insulated from the din of narrow interests and widespread but ephemeral passions, do what was in the long-term interest of their constituents and of the nation. Now information technology has stripped away the insulation that physical distance provided back when information couldn’t travel faster than a horse.

It’s no exaggeration to say that technology has subverted the original idea of America.

I don’t see a miracle cure here. It would be hard to restore much of the insulation without tampering with the First Amendment.

Less dicey forms of constitutional tampering might help. If we lengthened legislative terms and then capped the number of terms, more people in Congress could spend more time worrying about something other than getting re-elected next year, and this could leave them productively indifferent to the most recently manufactured views of their constituents. But the question may be moot, since a thoroughgoing fix would require reform on a scale that is rendered unlikely by the very forces that created the problem.

Absent such reform, it seems that the only time you can get big things done is amid a sense of national peril. Then you can pass stimulus bills and invade countries (the big résumé items of Obama and his predecessor). In more normal times, getting big things done means walking through a very large and dense minefield. I think anybody stuck with that job deserves a little sympathy.

Am I saying President Obama has negotiated the minefield exactly as I’d have recommended? No, but I’ll hold off on that sermon, at least for now. If there’s one thing a president doesn’t face in the current technological environment, it’s a shortage of sermons.

Postscript: I run a Web site — Bloggingheads.tv — that aims to transcend the balkanizing tendencies of the Internet by hosting video dialogs that feature an ideologically diverse array of commentators. Leaving aside the question of whether the site has achieved transcendence, it has lately featured a number of dialogs that touched on the subject of this column and therefore informed my writing of it. So, as a kind of bibliography:

Joe Klein of Time magazine and Joan Walsh of Salon discuss how interest groups on both the left and the right complicated passage of health care reform.

Tim Carney, who covers lobbying for the Washington Examiner, discusses how corporate lobbyists shaped health care legislation; Tim Noah of Slate and Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic explore much the same theme.

Bloggers Reihan Salam and Matthew Yglesias discuss whether even a more modest health care bill could have gained significant Republican support.