Obama’s Progressive Street Cred

The selection of Rick Warren for the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration is troubling, to say the least. Many progressives are rightly outraged at the selection of a man who is virulently anti-choice and homophobic. Yet, this is only the latest in a series of Obama decisions that has left many progressives wondering who it was, exactly, they voted for. Apparently, “change” looks a lot like the Clinton administration. Rahm Emanuel is back. So is Eric Holder, formerly Deputy Attorney General. Most conspicuous of all, Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State. A bevy of liberal-but-not-quite-progressive apologists have tried to explain away all of Obama’s decisions. Here is a list of some of their justifications:

• Obama is pursuing Abraham Lincoln’s “team of rivals” approach. Authors of this justification also cite Lyndon Johnson’s phrase: it’s better to keep one’s enemies “on the inside, pissing out” rather than “on the outside, pissing in.” By keeping his enemies in the White House, those enemies are not in Congress or on K Street trying to defeat his plans.
• Remember how we all said for six months that Obama’s qualifications don’t matter? Not so much. As such, he’s surrounding himself with a group of people who have experience working in a presidential administration, and the last Democratic presidency was Bill Clinton’s, so it only makes sense that he would choose people from there.
• Obama is sneakier than he seems (think I, Claudius, I suppose). He’s putting a lot of center-left (and, in some cases, center-right) Washington establishment politicians in key positions to pay lip service to that establishment. Don’t worry, it’s only a front. The real reforms are going to happen, but from behind a veil of mainstream non-reform. That’s the only way he can get things done down there.
• Obama does not want to continue the divisive politics of George W. Bush. Even though it might anger those on the hard left, Obama would rather heal and reconcile than punish.  Turn that cheek!

Some of these justifications are disturbing. The last one, that Obama should be conciliatory instead of punitive, is put forth by people who believe that the crimes of the George W. Bush administration should not be investigated. The country needs to heal, they say. It’s time to get on with the business of the United States, where “business” is defined so as to exclude investigations of the previous administration. Of course, this logic ignores the fact that the law has been broken. As Glenn Greenwald has observed, politicians are more than ready to throw the full force of the law at marijuana dealers, but when it comes to prosecuting their own, politicians are equally ready to be lenient, even though the marijuana dealer harmed no one and the politician may have, oh, I don’t know, been responsible for torture, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretapping at the least. When crimes are committed, they should be investigated and prosecuted – not just for poor people, but for everyone, including politicians. For Barack Obama to suggest that Bush administration criminals should go free is to suggest that politicians live in a special class above the reach of the law. It also encourages more illegal activity in the future, once it is known that the government won’t prosecute those activities.

Furthermore, it’s not even up to Barack Obama to decide what is or is not investigated. The cult of personality surrounding him is great (in fact, it contributed to getting him elected), but even though we like him we must not forget that, as the president, he has constitutional limitations. It was irresponsible for the media to even ask what Barack Obama thought about Joe Lieberman being kicked out of the Democratic caucus. On November 5, Obama’s life as a senator ended, even though he didn’t officially resign the position until three weeks later. The president has absolutely no say – none! – in the operation of Congress. It would be different if Obama were acting in his capacity as a senator, but after winning the presidential election, especially in a nation eager for a new leader, any notion of Obama acting solely in his capacity as a senator would be extremely naïve. Obama must repudiate the unconstitutional powers that George W. Bush has claimed for himself, either through complete fabrication or malicious misreading of constitutional law.

Given his opinion of things like same-sex marriage (he tactfully says that same-sex couples should not be allowed to “marry” as such, but then says that they should have the same rights as heterosexual couples), NAFTA/CAFTA, and Israel, no one could confuse him for a true progressive. Obama’s apologists rationalize his decisions by pointing out that Obama never claimed to be a progressive at all!

Or could they? George W. Bush’s method of saying-without-saying is well-documented. While he never explicitly said that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks, there is definitely a reason why, in 2001, virtually no Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible, but in 2003, one third of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible.

Could it be that Barack Obama, whose campaign P.R. was spectacular, performed the same saying-but-not-saying function? Yes, it is entirely possible that Obama clothed himself in the cloak of progressivism while still wearing the mainstream Democrat’s clothes underneath. He has suggested massive new spending on entitlement programs, but he wants to increase the size of the military. He wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire, but he voted in favor of retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that assisted the administration in warrantless wiretapping. His foreign policy goals consist of using real diplomacy instead of threats, but he voted in favor of NAFTA. He wants to provide government health care for people who have no health care, but he stops short of suggesting a universal-payer system like Canada’s or Great Britain’s. Obama’s positions are a wash: for every progressive-sounding idea, there is another conservative-sounding one to balance it out.

Or, on the other hand, it could be that Obama never suggested anything, but that he was forthcoming about his non-progressive credentials. It could be that we, the progressive Americans, were so thirsty for a change that we latched onto the only candidate (outside of Dennis Kucinich) who even brought up the issue of health care reform (at those early Republican primary debates, not a single candidate brought up the issue of health care), social reform, and getting out of Iraq (Hillary Clinton and John Edwards failed on at least one of these). We projected onto him the candidate we wanted him to be, ignoring the fact that he was not that candidate. Did we set ourselves up for disappointment? Yes, that is possible, too.

And then there’s the argument that all this complaining is pointless, that Obama isn’t even the president yet, and we should all just wait and see what happens on Jan. 20. Well, Rick Warren will happen Jan. 20, and that gives me even less optimism that, at noon on that day, Obama will suddenly throw aside his centrist mask and shout, “You fools! You thought I was just like Bill Clinton! But you were wrong! Free health care for everybody!” Agreeing to take part in Warren’s Saddleback (which sounds dangerously like “bareback”) debate with John McCain, Obama could conceivably have been seen as paying lip service to evangelical Protestantism, just like every president since Nixon has had to do. But putting Warren on the bill for Inauguration Day? Imagine if George W. Bush had hired Hillary Clinton to give a speech at his second inauguration. Yeah, it’s like.

Most troubling in my opinion, though, is Obama’s own insistence, ever since March of 2007, when he announced his candidacy, that he is not an ordinary politician. His grassroots, fifty-state strategy was unparalleled in its success. His speech about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was intelligent and it treated the American people as though they, too, could understand long speeches that contained nuanced thoughts, as opposed to the Manichean sound bites of George W. Bush. His political maturity happened after the Vietnam War era, and, as Andrew Sullivan has suggested, the very core of his being is not instilled with a reflexive fear of Republicans and conservatism.

Conservatism demands the acknowledgment of a false dualism in every aspect of life, with the promise that conservatism will lead people to the correct side of this duality. Democrats buy into this framework and then try to argue the opposite side. The true progressive would never let the Republicans frame the debate and then proceed to work within their ill-conceived framework. To the progressive, there is no debate about whether or not health care should be free, or if there should be a premium for minimum services, or if the government should control it. The answer is: the current system of privatized health care doesn’t work and it should not be repaired, it must be rebuilt from the ground up. Obama appeared unafraid to work outside the existing framework and create a new framework that works in the interests of everyone. “Should it be a public solution or a private solution?” is not the correct question. “What solution is best for the country?” Now that’s the right question. It’s a question that Obama appeared to be asking during the campaign, but one that is being substituted by justifications for increasingly conservative behavior.

The End of Conservatism As We Know It?

As the days pass, the news gets better and better for progressives. Republican pundit Bill Kristol had to publicly contradict himself about the efficacy of the McCain campaign strategy he once pushed for. McCain and Palin are in disagreement about whether they should create pitchfork-wielding mobs or not. Sarah Palin, an independent investigation concluded, had abused her authority as governor. That bailout bill had to pass without any debate even though it gave the Treasury unlimited power to do anything it wanted and had no oversight and no guarantees. But that doesn’t matter because any legislation is good legislation right now, and if we don’t pass this thing then the Earth will crash into the sun! Remember that one? And how, once it passed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has continued to tank, now roughly a mere 25% lower than it was a month ago?

Oh, crap. And Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

It’s not a great time to be a conservative. The party that has run the country — first the executive branch, then the legislative branch, then both — for the last twenty-eight years (with only two years completely on the outside) is on the outs. The Republican Party, once the object of admiration by even the most liberal admen for its unified, coherent image, is publicly fighting with itself over what tactics to use next.

Extreme conservatism is on the way out. Eight years of extreme conservatism has turned the United States into a shell of its former self. That stuff’s poison!

Consider that unilateral militarism has proven to be, not a force of good, but a force of confusion, corruption, and destruction. Supply-side economics has made the poor poorer, the rich richer, and the middle class smaller. The United States is no longer regarded diplomatically; a ludicrously botched war has made us the laughingstock of the international community — when, that is, that laughter isn’t interrupted by contempt. Health care costs are rising, but the response of conservatives is to let the very same market that permitted those costs to double in eight years continue as is. In fact, McCain even wants more deregulation of health care.

But that’s just a start. You get the point. As a theory of governance, extreme conservatism should never work with government, anyway. In fact, many extreme conservatives never believed the government should be there in the first place. It’s hard to do your best at a job that you don’t think should even exist. The best-case scenario would be that the government gets dismantled, everything becomes privatized, and everyone goes home to the consulting firms they started in order to get lucrative government contracts. Grover Norquist would like to drown the government in a bathtub, but not drown it so much that it can no longer sign checks.

The nation is at a crossroads, except this crossroads is over a river of liquid-hot magma. Which direction will you choose? Liberalism? Or conservatism? Make it fast because your shoes are melting, and you can’t afford to buy new ones. If this election goes the way it looks like it might go, with Obama and the Democrats handily defeating the Republicans, extreme conservatism will have to pack its bags and redefine itself in a more moderate form.

The fact that the southern vote might be in question is proof enough that something’s going on, here.

Extreme conservatism — and with it, the mantra that The Market is a powerful force to be feared and obeyed — has failed to deliver on its promises for every American. True, it has enriched a few, but that has too often been at the expense of the poor or the American taxpayer. Apologists of the completely unchecked Wild West Market want to privatize the gains, but socialize the losses. This is why we are now paying $700 billion, on the outside, for a few firms to enrich themselves tremendously. We went through this before, remember? In 2001, with Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco. We put those guys away because they found new and interesting ways to purchase a $15,000 umbrella stand and then leave taxpayers with the bill once it all came crumbling down.

It’s not just people with investments who stand to win with more regulation and less reliance on The Market to police itself. Consider the 47 million Americans without health care–conservatism could continue living out the rest of its days unencumbered in the knowledge that people might be dying of curable ailments, if only they had enough money to afford them.

The people who claimed to know best are now unable to solve the problems plaguing our democracy. The Bill Kristols of the world, championing the cause of William F. Buckley, are powerless to help us get out of Iraq, fix our economic problems, and repair our world image. All they offer, to quote Joe Biden, is “more of the same.” Because it’s that same that has hurt us for so long. After a person has been punched in the face for eight years, it’s easy to find a cause for that person’s headaches. President Bush’s stock response of “trust me, I know what I’m doing” is now obviously a facade.

A weary nation realizes that the policies of the past eight years are no longer sufficient to solve the problems caused by the policies of the past eight years. Too little, too late? Perhaps, but better than not at all.