When The Center Cannot Hold: A Moderate Democrat’s Thoughts on Obama’s Current Strategy

Many Democrats have had reason to comment lately on the conventional wisdom that Democrats must always tack to the center to win an election in this country.

Count me among those who want to see more challenges to that conventional wisdom (which to me just means ‘last year’s assumptions’). While I understand the reasons why candidates do it, the fact is that eight years of neoconservatism has moved all the goal posts way to the right.

To repair the damage done by Bush and his gang of neocons, what’s needed isn’t a balancing bipartisan approach but immediate corrective action. It’s outmoded ‘conventional wisdom’ to believe that Democratic candidates always have to tack centerwards (meaning shift right) to prevail in a general election or to attract swing voters and independents. I don’t buy it.

What most Democrats I know want now is an entirely different approach. With the Republicans still mechanically spouting policies consistent with Bush-era neoconservatism, what’s needed to achieve balance again isn’t compromise action, but corrective action. What most Democrats I know want is a different choice: in our government’s approach to the economy, national security, civil liberties, health care, energy policy and the environment and on and on.

And back-room deals and trade-offs between our elected representatives just aren’t going to cut it. We want to see changes that will restore to us as a nation and as individuals what we lost during Bush’s failed regime.

But is it only Democrats who feel this way? My own sense is that these feelings are shared even by voters who self-identify as conservative. People in general feel as if the car is running out of control, the brakes are gone, and the only way forward is down. Most Americans, being sane, do realize the madness of continuing to follow policies that are demonstrably ill-adapted for the times.

As Paul Krugman pointed out several months ago, while most Americans self-identify as ‘conservative,’ their notion of what is ‘conservative’ is very different from the brand of ‘conservatism’ foisted on us by the Bush administration. In fact, a large number of Americans, regardless of how they identify, agree with items that used to be considered part and parcel of a progressive agenda. On December 26, 2007, Krugman wrote:

[I]t’s true that even now, polls suggest that Americans are about twice as likely to identify themselves as conservatives as they are to identify themselves as liberals.

But if you look at peoples’ views on actual issues, as opposed to labels, the electorate’s growing liberalism is unmistakable. Don’t take my word for it; look at the massive report Pew released earlier this year on trends in "political attitudes and core values." Pew found "increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income
inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies." Meanwhile, nothing’s the matter with Kansas: People are ever less inclined to support conservative views on moral values—and have become dramatically more liberal on racial issues….

The question, however, is whether Democrats will take advantage of America’s new liberalism. To do that, they have to be ready to forcefully make the case that progressive goals are right and conservatives are wrong. They also need to be ready to fight some very nasty political battles….

That middle ground doesn’t exist—and if Democrats try to find it, they’ll squander a huge opportunity. Right now, the stars are aligned for a major change in America’s direction. If the Democrats play nice, that opportunity may soon be gone.  (Slate; emphasis added)

Recently, Glenn Greenwald and other bloggers have discussed the Democrats’ unwillingness to trust the notion that their time may finally have come.

[W]hat…is the basis for the almost-unanimously held Beltway conventional view that Democrats generally, and Barack Obama particularly, will be politically endangered unless they adopt the Bush/Cheney approach… which — for some reason — is called “moving to the Center”? There doesn’t appear to be any basis for that view. It’s just an unexamined relic from past times, the immovable, uncritical assumption of Beltway strategists…who can’t accept that it isn’t 1972 anymore — or even 2002.

Beyond its obsolescence, this “move-to-the-center” cliché ignores the extraordinary political climate prevailing in this country, in which more than 8 out of 10 Americans believe the Government is fundamentally on the wrong track and the current President is one of the most unpopular in American history, if not the most unpopular. The very idea that Bush/Cheney policies are the “center,” or that one must move towards their approach in order to succeed, ignores the extreme shifts in public opinion generally regarding how our country has been governed over the last seven years.
(Salon)

Furthermore, not every issue has a center. It’s not really possible for a member of Congress to take a middle path on the question of whether a bill should be enacted in its existing form: the answer has got to be ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘I refuse to take a position.’ None of these is a middle path; and the third isn’t an especially principled path. Sometimes you have to plant your flag on one side of the line or the other. You have to choose a side.

Which brings me to Obama, whose recent swerve to the right has made a lot of his most vocal supporters very, very nervous.

Not that he needs to worry about whether they’ll vote for him — they don’t have any viable choices. But it is probably a mistake for his strategists to assume that since he’s got these people (including me) in the bag, he can now slide across the line for the sake of drawing in the hypothetical swing voters.

It’s partly a matter of trust and partly a matter of marketing. As Greenwald points out, what Obama’s rightwardl listing risks losing is the intensity of support for him among the people who helped him to victory His appeal was that he promised to clean up Bush’s mess rather than just gloss over it. What does the gung-ho affirmation ‘Yes, we can!’ mean if not that?

Now he seems to be trying to woo conservative voters with a different message. ‘Barack Obama — Less Liberal than Advertised!’ That’s not the message that got people jumping to their feet.

It’s not surprising that this feels like a kind of bait and switch to some of his most vocal supporters. It makes him look as if he’s sailing without a rudder, as Greenwald and others have pointed out.

John McCain sold himself to his party as ‘Bush Lite, Same Flavor, No Cheney’. That was how he got the nomination. As I pointed out, he’s many back-flips ahead of Obama on the flip-flop scale, but unlike Obama, he’s not being inconsistent with what he promised during the primaries. His reversals therefore won’t matter to Republicans, though it might to some independents.

Obama’s policy shifts are upsetting people because those aren’t the capital-C Changes he led them to expect. He’s really shocked a lot of people with his ‘reversal on FISA, …his conspicuous embrace of the Scalia/Thomas view in recent Supreme Court cases, and a general shift in tone….’ (Salon) Furthermore, as Greenwald and others have commented, he looks weak — i.e., both vulnerable to criticism and lacking in firm principles. Finally, he’s insulting the intelligence of the people who supported him because they thought he shared their principles.

Rather than rebuke the GOP for the oppression and failures of the Bush regime, he recently rebuked his own supporters.

His implied criticism of MoveOn.org during a speech on patriotism greatly disturbed me — because if any argument was ever successful at chilling public discussion of the Iraq war, it was the one that identified opposition to the government’s military policy with opposition to the troops themselves.

The offensiveness (not to say lameness and fatuousness) of MoveOn’s ‘Petraeus Betray Us’ slogan might have been shocking in its incivility, but there is nothing unpatriotic about raising questions about a public official’s bona fides and credibility when major policy resolutions depend on them. In the grand scheme, civil liberties trump offended sensibilities.

Besides finding the implications of Obama’s remarks worrying, I find the slap at MoveOn bizarre. Now he tells them?

Last fall — fearing the label “unpatriotic” — Congress voted on a resolution condemning MoveOn.org’s New York Times ad that questioned whether General David Petraeus would “betray us” (i.e., color the facts of his Iraq war report in a Bush-friendly way). Last year, Sen. Barack Obama did not vote either way on the resolution that chastised MoveOn last year (see roll call)…. MoveOn has 3+ million members and endorsed Obama over Clinton in the primaries….

[C]oming out now and telling the world that MoveOn.org had done a bad thing when it questioned General Petraeus is not an example of moving to the “Center.” It’s an example of blatantly distancing himself from a group whose support Sen. Obama doesn’t seem to need so much any more.

Would MoveOn have supported Sen. Obama so enthusiastically in 2008 if Sen. Obama had resisted the urge to not vote and had instead voted “yes” in 2007 on the Senate resolution that essentially condemned MoveOn’s position on General Petraeus? (BN-Politics)

Keith Olbermann — who was heavily criticized for his failure to call out Obama for the FISA reversal – has given him some useful advice on FISA that applies as well to every other issue likely to arise in this campaign.

At Crooks and Liars, Logan Murphy provides a transcript. In pertinent part, it reads:

Senator, the Republicans are going to paint you as soft on terror no matter how you vote on FISA. Or how you vote on the Telecom Immunity Amendment. Or on the next farm bill.

Last week it was Grover Norquist calling you “John Kerry with a tan.” By November 1st, it’ll be Dick Cheney calling you “Osama Bin Laden with a tan.”

When you announced your support of this latest FISA bill (with or without the telecom immunity), the Republicans actually raced to get out a press release accusing you of flip-flopping.

You shared the exact same position, on which they are running their entire campaign and they criticized you anyway!

You’ve already taken the political hit from the Right, for saying you’d seek to strip out, or rescind immunity. You’ve already taken the political hit from the Left, for saying you’d vote for the FISA bill even with the immunity. You’ve paid the political price in advance….

The Republicans are going to call you the names any which way, Senator.

They’re going to cry regardless, Senator.

And as the old line goes: give them something to cry about. (Via Crooks and Liars)

Olbermann is right. Appeasement is by definition a weak and negative stance. It hands over power to the opposition. You waste time and energy trying to show that you’re not the person they say instead of proving the sort of person you are. And if you have to do that, the odds are you don’t have a hope in hell of winning anything.

No one is better equipped than Barack Obama to speak eloquently about the alternatives to the failed policies of the GOP. That is what all the Democrats I know want to hear. I imagine that independent voters, desperate to see someone take hold of the wheel and put the country back on course, are equally desperate.

It’s only been a month since his victory over Clinton and it’s still a long way to the general election. We haven’t even had the convention yet. There’s time for his campaign to think further about the wisdom of losing all that passion and intensity. When Clinton lost, I was initially very disappointed — but I was prepared to give Obama my support as the presumptive nominee. I was ready to get excited about him, even. He’s not yet given me the chance.

As Arianna Huffington, one of those vocal Obama supporters, wrote:

“The Obama brand has always been about inspiration, a new kind of politics, the audacity of hope, and ‘change we can believe in.’ I like that brand. More importantly, voters — especially unlikely voters — like that brand.”

‘Barack Obama — Less Liberal than Advertised’ just isn’t going to bring the crowd to its feet like ‘Yes, We Can.’ No one wants a different brand of Obama than the one Democrats sampled and selected during the primaries. Bring back Obama Classic!