The Kirchners Compare Themselves To Obama

Argentine President Cristina Fernández is enamored with U.S. President Barack Obama. So, it seems, are a number of people in her administration. Several people in the government have been eager to show that Fernández is high up on Obama’s priority list. When Obama called Fernández after he was elected, she immediately told TV reporters traveling with her about the call. (To see my post about her giddy response, click here.) But, since that November call, there has been little contact and Fernández, by all accounts, has been antsy for a more public display of affection. 

Argentine media reported widely about a second round of calls Obama made to regional leaders like Colombian President Uribe, Chilean President Bachelet and Brazil’s ultra-popular President Lula. But Fernández, as local papers seemed to gleefully report, didn’t get a second call.

When opposition leader and fierce Fernández foe Elisa Carrió traveled to the U.S. earlier this month to attend a prayer breakfast with Obama, Clarín made it appear that Fernández was appalled at the idea that Carrió might be the first Argentine pol to get a photo-op with Obama. All of this seemed a bit like more high school politics than a serious matter of state.

The U.S. State Department was aware of the situation and Fernández’s sensitivity about the matter. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent letters to Fernández, which Argentine officials quickly released to the press.

It seems clear from the way Obama’s letter was released that officials here were trying to bolster Fernández’s image in the eyes of local voters, many of whom hold Obama in high regard. Obama, who is arguably the single most famous person ever to breathe, remains remarkably popular. He’s a bit like political magic – everyone wants a bit of his spark to rub off on them. Politicians right and left appear eager to be associated with him and his popularity. 

Obama’s letter, which you can see reproduced here (in Spanish with some typos) by Argentina’s state news agency, seems fairly standard. It’s positive and and professional, courteous, and, in the last sentence, even warm. It’s not overly affectionate but seems appropriate and to the point.

Argentine officials, evidently eager to show that their president is on the same footing as leaders like Lula, touted the letter as a major move by the Obama administration. All of this seemed a bit desperate. “Finally, yesterday, the awaited communication from Barack Obama to Cristina Kirchner arrived,” wrote Clarín. Other papers made similar comments, reflecting the degree to which Argentine officials want to be close to Obama.

This was too much for the local daily La Nacion. In an editorial last Saturday the paper described Obama’s letter as a mere “courtesy card.” The paper then described recent statements by Fernández and her husband and predecessor, Nestor Kirchner, comparing themselves to Obama, as “absurd.” La Nación, which also knocked Fernández for saying that Obama must have studied Perón because his ideas appear similar to the general’s, went further:

“Nothing could be further from reality, just like the excessive importance that the Argentine government tried to give the short, three paragraph letter that the president received from Obama while she was arriving late for her meetings in Madrid. The fact that an Argentine diplomatic delegation … is now traveling to Washington to establish contact with the new government doesn’t mean that Argentina’s bilateral relations with the country will be restored overnight.”

La Nación then reviewed a couple of the many swipes taken by the Kirchners at the U.S. government over the years. Among other things, the editorial listed Fernández’s derogatory descriptions of U.S. policy, including her postulation that the entire Antonini Wilson suitcase scandal was concocted by  a U.S. intelligence agency. The editorial also mentioned the timing of a trip by Fernández last month to Cuba and Venezuela. On the same day that Obama took office by swearing on the Lincoln bible, Fernández was meeting with Fidel Castro.

But even if these are minor points, and to some in Washington they are not, what should we make of the Kirchners and their repeated comparisons to the new U.S. president?

Clearly, it’s a good thing that the antagonism and resentment which characterized Argentina’s relationship with the U.S. under George W. Bush has abated. A new era has begun and with it comes fresh opportunities for cooperation and progress. But this doesn’t mean relations will change overnight or that career U.S. diplomats will forget about previous frictions or the Kirchners’ continuous praise for leaders like Chavez and Castro.

Meanwhile, improving relations between the U.S. and Argentina will require more than lighthearted public displays of affection and positive, if overreaching, comparisons. As for the comparisons themselves, there’s little substance to them. They’re based largely on faulty analogies.

Last week Néstor Kirchner said Obama reminded him of himself back in 2003, when he took power. Shortly afterwards, Health Minister Graciela Ocaña compared the two presidents.

“Kirchner took Argentina out of the crisis,” said Ocaña. “We still don’t know if Obama will get the U.S. out of its crisis. Because of that, for me, Kirchner isn’t like Obama. He’s much, much better than Obama.”

That’s a nice line for someone employed by the Kirchners. But it’s hardly accurate. It’s true that we don’t know if Obama will get the U.S. out of its economic meltdown. But we do know it wasn’t Kirchner who got Argentina out of its crisis. 

Kirchner took office at the end of May, 2003. By that time Argentina’s economy had already been emerging from its historic 2001-2002 crisis for six months. In the first quarter of 2003, the economy grew 5.4%, according to the national statistics agency, INDEC.

During this period Kirchner was a little known governor in Santa Cruz, a small windy province in Patagonia. Neither he nor anyone in the government can rightfully claim he was responsible for the economic growth that began before he took office. In the second quarter of 2003, the economy roared ahead at an even faster rate, growing 7.6%. Kirchner was president for only a few weeks in this period. To say he was responsible for getting Argentina out of the crisis is simply inaccurate. One could argue that Kirchner’s policies allowed the economy to continue growing between then and 2008, but it was really Eduardo Duhalde, Kirchner’s predecessor, who “got Argentina out of the crisis.”

For her part, Fernández has also repeatedly compared herself to Obama. Consider what she said earlier this month: ”All over the place you see state intervention. In the great capitals, where they always criticized us, they are now enacting policies that we could almost say were copied from what has been our model since 2003.”

Fernández was referring, among other things, to the take over of AIG and the rescue packages being dished out to banks in the U.S. and Europe. But these policies are hardly comparable to the Kirchner’s constant, heavy-handed state intervention in the private sector. Whereas Obama is taking exceptional measures to deal with a once-in-a-century crisis, the Kirchners’ interventionist policies are the rule, not exceptions to it. They are the very heart of their economic model; the soul of the Kichners’ economic worldview. This view may be better or worse, but it is not identical.

Meanwhile, Obama seems to have a healthy dose of skepticism about the role of the state – and its limits – that the Kirchners don’t. The world isn’t binary or black or white: a healthy economy requires neither total state control nor a complete dearth of it. As Obama argues for a more assertive state role, he also has said that poor public policy itself was partly responsible for the crisis.  

Smack dab in the middle of this once-in-a-lifetime crisis, Obama seems to see state intervention as a necessary evil, but also as an exception to the rule. He is said to be reticent about nationalizing banks even as a growing chorus of economists say it’s necessary. This is hardly comparable with an economic model focused on state intervention at virtually every level of the economy, where key private sector decisions are imposed on businesses by the threatening presence of a government commerce czar.  

The Kirchners’ policies are enforced by Commerce Secretary Guillermo Moreno, a man widely described as a thug who sometimes physically and verbally threatens business leaders into complying with government mandates. According to more than a dozen contacts who have experience with Moreno, including at least one reader of this blog, Moreno is not a necessary evil but rather an unnecessary obstacle to economic growth.

He intervenes, orders, mandates, curses, pounds the table and threatens business leaders into making decisions that are not necessarily in their companies’ interest but instead are in the Kirchners’ interest. Private sector decisions about pricing and production, business leaders say, are all too often made by Moreno, without any kind of previous consultation.

But perhaps the biggest difference between Obama’s view of state intervention and the Kirchners’ is that key policy decisions, Obama believes, should be arrived at by consensus. In his brief time in office and also during his transition period, Obama has made a constant and very public effort to dialogue not only with opposition politicians but also the widest possible swath of business leaders. His aim is for them to figure out, together, how to best strengthen the economy. Obama will make mistakes, but he won’t make the mistake of unilaterally imposing mistaken ideas on the entire country. 

In Argentina, by contrast, the Kirchners talk frequently about consensus but do little to achieve it. Their strategy doesn’t entail finding the best ideas and persuading society to get behind them. Instead, they impose their ideas on the country through the means of raw political power. Not only do the Kirchners refuse to meet with key opposition politicians (Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri being a perfect example) or those who disagree with them (farmers, for example), but they refuse to meet with many of the country’s leading executives.

Consensus building is viewed as a sign of weakness, not strength. It is interpreted negatively, as a kind of undeserved concession to political foes. Last week this approach was on display again as the Kirchners declined to meet openly with farmers who have sought – almost begged – for dialogue with the president. 

In contrast to all of this, Obama put together a diverse economic advisory team and demanded that it present him with a wide variety of policy options. He said repeatedly that one of the biggest mistakes his predecessor made was to focus too narrowly on the policy prescriptions of a close-knit group of like-minded thinkers. Doing so, Obama has said, led the former president to pursue policies that were more ideological than practical, more political than pragmatic. 

This is exactly what the Kirchners appear to do. They frequently impose sweeping economic policies on the nation without talking to any of the key sectors affected by the policies. Economic decisions are made not through a process of debate and dialogue, but simply by personal opinion about how things should be. I have written about this process in previous posts and don’t want to belabor the point here.

Obama seems to be pursuing a kind of state intervention based on the idea that all factions of society have to work together for any one faction to prosper. (If one sector of the economy is sick, as is the case in banking, it must be healed so its disease doesn’t spread and weaken other parts of the economy.) In the Kirchners view, it seems, exactly the opposite is true: selected factions (or political allies) can only do well if other factions are controlled and properly managed. 

To expand on the economic health analogy, the Kirchners’ Argentina is like an emergency room, where the modus operandi of government is triage. The country lives in a constant state of emergency, in which only the Kirchners are capable of diagnosing maladies and assigning degrees of urgency to injuries and disease. Only the Kirchners can make decisions about the order of treatment – about who will get treated and when. But this model of emergency room management works only if the patients are in such dire shape that they cannot communicate, either because they are unconscious or are unable to think or express themselves coherently.

In such cases, emergency doctors must proceed without the benefit of knowing what exactly is ailing the patient. If a patient isn’t bleeding or suffering from some obviously detectable problem, the doctor’s job becomes all the more complicated. In the Kirchners’ case, Argentina itself is the patient. When things were going well and the economy was booming (i.e., when the patient was healthy), there was less need to have a doctor on call. But now the patient seems to be weakening, making an accurate diagnosis of paramount importance.

Of course, Argentina, the patient, isn’t dying. Neither is it unconscious. But it is in need of care, as is, to an even greater degree perhaps, the U.S. And since it’s not terminally ill or otherwise impaired, Argentina is completely capable of communicating, which is exactly what it has been doing in recent weeks (the farmers are now on strike again and politicians are defecting from the ruling coalition). 

Yet while Obama seems to be the kind of doctor who would ask his patient what is wrong before operating, the Kirchners seem to have no need to waste time on such a thing. So they operate without previous confirmation that their diagnoses are correct. Obama, you’d hope, wouldn’t make this mistake.

*Obama Photo: Feb. 1, 2009: In the White House family theater, the President serves cookies to his guests during the Super Bowl. Many of the guests were Congressmen and Senators, and their families. Among the guests were opposition politicians. Courtesy: The White House, photo by Pete Souza