All this shock and awe at Obama’s centrist drift ignores history. Barack Obama was never an uber-liberal, despite his (thin) Senate voting record saying he was the chamber’s resident lefty.
No one better chronicles Obama’s rise to national power than the Chicago Tribune’s David Mendell in his book Obama: From Promise to Power. For the book, Mendell followed Obama from 2003 until he announced his presidential run in early 2007. The politician Mendell describes is a pragmatist with a liberal’s heart; an egotistical, insanely ambitious, and mercurial man who wants to be loved—even if that means appealing to the center for votes; a man whose career has been guided by Washington-insider David Axelrod, with an above-all focus on personal narrative; a natural wonk who has traded policy for vague rhetoric to achieve political goals; and someone whose political fortunes were dependant on Penny Priztker and Chicago’s Gold Coast monied elite. After reading the book, there’s no question Obama has what it takes to be president. But he’s a politician not a progressive activist.
Those ever-( dare I say over-) influential “Netroots” folks on the left did not study the facts before crowning Obama liberalism’s savior. Obama ran a primary campaign that was to the right of Hillary Clinton on domestic issues. (Remember, triangulated centrism was a mid-90s Clinton specialty.) Still, the net-left gave Barry unending support.
Now Obama’s disregarded the constitution in favor of telecoms—you know, phone companies, the little guy. He supported a Supreme Court ruling overturning a handgun ban in a city with an unprecedented history of handgun murder. He told black people not to try and be “the next Lil Wayne” (even though Wayne’s studied political science at U Houston and his latest record ends with a six-minute spoken-word political essay), prompting longtime Obama supporter Jesse Jackson to say he wants to “cut his nuts out.” He wants to “refine” his unrealistic 16-month Iraq withdrawal promise. And so on.
None of this should come as a surprise, however. Nor does it make Obama a weaker candidate. It just makes him less of the hope/change martyr the net-left worshipped. Of course, it’s hard not to be offended by Obama’s recent moves. But politically I respect his, well, Clintonian dedication to electoral victory at any cost.
After eight years of GOP illegal wars and criminal rule, we need a winner not a savior. And on foreign policy Obama remains a committed multilateralist. I’m looking forward to seeing how Europe and the Middle East greet him on his upcoming tour. Although this TNR piece is pessimistic about the latter stop, saying recent statements at AIPAC on Israel have soured Arab opinion, I’m not sure I buy the authors’ argument. Arabs are foremost a hospitable people. When Obama arrives as a guest, I hope and assume they’ll respond with the same open mindedness that I received upon visiting the region. If Obama needs to drift to the center to win an election so he can carry out a liberal foreign policy, that works for me.
TAGS: Barack Obama, BOOKS, election, GOP, Hillary, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Jesse Jackson, Lil Wayne, NPR, NSA, obama, political, Politics, Supreme Court, Trade, war
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July 10th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I’m all about winning, but election season is also the time to run ideas. No one will ever listen to Barack Obama more than they are right now, and if he really wants to enact liberal policies, now is the time to get it out.
Georgia Bush is one of the greatest politicians ever (or has one of the greatest machines ever) partly because he spent campaign seasons getting public opinion to come around to the policies he favored. Even though he repeated that “compassionate conservative” mantra three million times in 2000, he also made the whole country into supply-siders by talking about how terrible it is that when you work so hard to make more money, you end up paying higher taxes. By the time he was in office, his tax cuts were already a forgone conclusion. Bush’s second term has looked like a disaster, but the fact is we’re still in Iraq and the man gets almost anything he wants from Congress (FISA), and I think a big part of that is because he was so effective with the “stay the course” thing in 2004. Social security didn’t work out because he never touched it in campaign season, and when he brought it up (right after he was elected) it was a huge NO WAY.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Yeah, Bubba had to compromise w GOP congress; Bush just gets what he wants from Dems. Why is Pelosi such a loser?