Learning to Hear Obama

I could be wrong about the signals I'm hearing in Obama's response to Stephanopoulos. (As Rachel Maddow would say, "I need talking down!")

Obama has explicitly left the door open to prosecutions in his statement, and he indicated succinctly their obvious rationale, and the truth is that Obama has a tendency to redeploy the rhetoric we have come to associate with progressive capitulation ("centrist," "bipartisan") in ways that actually serve progressive ends (his use of the term center seems to be functioning to move the public discourse of the center leftward, his bipartisanship seems more strategic than we're used to from Democrats lately).

It may be that the endlessly betrayed and derided (but also usually correct) critical left has not yet learned to read Obama's public utterances. To amplify this point a bit, nor am I sure we quite grasp yet the different terrain on which an emerging generation of citizens and activists are operating together with Obama.

The radicalism of my best students now, for example, is neither the radicalism of the New Left of the 60s I vaguely remember from childhood -- I was born in 1965 -- nor is it the theatrical radicalism of my own most radical days with Queer Nation, ACT UP, and Food Not Bombs. My radical students are very serious and enormously informed, but their pragmatic and partisan instincts really differ from my own in ways I haven't always come to terms with. My early support of Edwards over Obama, and the discussions I had with students about why we disagreed (and also the fact that they were right and I was wrong) bespeaks this a bit, I think.

Anyway, maybe I am hearing the wrong "signal" in this "moving on" business. Maybe the corporatized Dems have burned me too often to permit me to take Obama's utterances at face value? I don't know.

Apart from the truly morally bankrupt and politically tone-deaf misstep of the Rick Warren choice for the inaugural Invocation, I will admit that I have disagreed with many public intellectuals and critics whose opinions have been indispensable to me during these awful Bush years when they seize nowadays on this or that Obama appointment, proposal, or utterance as signs of betrayal of progressive principle or inadequacy in the face of the corporate-militarist juggernaut. To be honest, when all is said and done, it seems to me Obama has assessed the left wing of the possible in a pretty masterly way, engaging in a whole lot of that "reframing" business the left blogosphere spent half a decade pining for (in this rhetorician's view in a rather facile way sometimes, but still), disabling in advance a number of right wing dirty tricks through his appointments and deft formulations.

Also, it may be that Obama is indicating that he expects Congress to do the yeoman's work in this area. Obama seems to expect Congress to nudge his own more moderate opening proposals in more progressive directions in matters of size of the stimulus, of the proportion of the stimulus devoted to actually necessary and useful infrastructure spending as against idiotic tax-cut welfare for the rich scams, of the universality of the soon-to-be implemented health care system, and so on. I am reminded very much of FDR's famous: "I agree with you, now make me do it." Maybe Obama the Constitutional scholar thinks it should be Congress that brings the Executive Branch to heel, and maybe he thinks it is we, the people, who should be demanding they do this?

I'd be lying if I said I was happy about the way this is playing out so far, though.