When the Democratic nomination was up in the air, friends would tell me I should support Obama because "he's reachable." That is, that he would be more influenced by pressure from the left than Clinton.
Besides the obvious (what "left"? And, no, college students don't count), I didn't buy this logic then and don't buy it now.
Obama seems unusually honest for a high-level politician. He never claimed to be a leftist, and has given no indication that he was lying about this.
I think the left was (is) aware that they, sadly, have almost no popular support, and accordingly were hoping Obama was a sort of Trojan Horse candidate--that all his talk of centrism was merely subterfuge to get elected. Then he'd push through an agenda that converted the country to our cause.
If you really thought that a motivated, influential grassroots American left existed, Clinton would have been the best candidate. She's proven she''ll blow with any prevailing political wind.
Obama has stuck to what he promised he'd be--a centrist conservative far less brazenly corrupt than his predecessor. (Bush, you'll remember, promised to be a "compassionate conservative" not far different than Clinton on policy issues, just less sexually unhinged.)
His campaign advisors were well known, and well-reported on in this magazine, as being pure ideological right-wingers. Especially his financial and foreign policy advisors, who ended up on his staff (as campaign advisors generally do.) There was never any reason to imagine Obama's administration would be anything else than what it's been--and there's every reason to imagine it'll veer further right in the future. (They talk a lot about "entitlement reform," and I think you all know what that means.)
The question now isn't if he'll surprise us all and become a progressive. He won't. The question is, will the leftist community defend him to the bitter end--as they did with Bill Clinton. Last time, this killed a generation's budding enthusiasm for progressive politics, and provided pure fuel for right-wingers who rightly condemned the left's blindness (while underplaying their side's cynical opportunism.) The "tax revolts" on April 15 showed that this recent history could be repeating itself. (They were right to be angry at the bailouts, just wrong to think Republicans wouldn't have done the same, and worse.) If we stay loyal to the Democratic Party this time, no matter how far to the right Obama takes it, the damage could be irreversible. It took us long enough to recover from it after Clinton, remember...
James Fillmore
St. Paul, MN
04/28/2009 @ 02:27am
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