Getting Past the Netroots Pearl Clutching Over Obama

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

Friend of Blog, Ryan McReynolds writes: [T]here's "I disapprove because this isn't far enough for me," and there's "I disapprove because this is dangerous and stupid." Obama has been erring on the side of the latter too often for my taste.

I approve of your distinction, but disagree with you that Obama is making too many errors of the kind you describe. I don't think he is making many errors of that kind at all.

He drew on too many Washington insiders in his haste to address urgent problems in a way that ultimately clashed with his effort to make some structural changes in corrupt DC political culture, and the confirmation speed-bumps over lobbying and taxes were the result. To his credit, he is mostly opting to take the PR hit but keep the better principles intact, so I can't stay mad about it.

He also focused on setting up bipartisan groundwork for future effective governance to the cost of making a forceful public case for his stimulus -- probably thinking the urgency of the crisis and his conspicuous mandate gave him a little wiggle room on that -- a miscalculation which he began to correct yesterday.

There, two Obama errors. Both understandable, both presently under address, but errors.

these are often center-right or even far-right moves.

I couldn't disagree more.

Do you realize what a shift to sanity (not to mention the left) the lifting of the global gag rule, the new lobbying restrictions, the end of extraordinary rendition, the "diplomatic surge" (so-called), the reanimation of FOIA, the infrastructure support in the stimulus, the emerging politics around card check, renewable energy, and healthcare reform are?

What kind of world are critics living in that they expect so much more than this that they would regard this as right-wing movement? I honestly don't get it.

I have serious doubts about his ability to pull it off.

So did I earlier in the campaign. Then I observed carefully what he was doing.

Nobody with sense wouldn't have serious doubts about anybody managing what needs to be done. But I consider Obama more equal to the task than I would ever have expected in an actually-elected President.

I do not think he is capitulating. I think h[e] is triangulating

I disagree that this is the right lens through which to understand Obama's "bipartisanship." Clinton triangulated with the right both because he had to do so (the numbers were worse for him than for Obama), but also because Clinton was himself more center-right than Obama is.

Obama is moving the center back to the center-left (and hence, reality) in the name of bipartisanship, meanwhile Obama is pressuring the Republican Party to reinvent itself in the face of new realities by forcing the remaining Movement Republicans to self-marginalize into a Confederate Rump and extending a hand to the more Eisenhowerish Republicans who offer the figurative unclenched fist. This isn't Clintonian triangulation in the least.

I think he is setting himself up for a Republican comeback

Reality is shifting beneath Republican feet. Demographics are against them, the hideous neoliberal Washington Consensus is under pressure both internationally and domestically, p2p formations have transformed the media terrain, America is a secular nation, the left won the culture wars (even if re-staging them is the only way the right can summon anything like enough discipline or money or attention to appear even remotely relevant).

Obama is riding a wave, he didn't summon the ocean.

I don't see how one can stand for certain values while supporting the systematic reversal of them

I think it is a serious error to perceive anything even remotely like "the systematic reversal of [progressive democratic] values" in Obama's moves. I just don't.

I see a lot of tactical compromises, I see a lot of symbolic gestures to rivals (appointments aren't policy -- appointees implement the President's agenda, they don't set it -- Obama in citing the "Team of Rivals" indicates that many of the appointments that are troubling people are well-known already as rivals to his own convictions rather than signals of betrayals of his asserted convictions -- survey the long history of Presidential cabinets and your perspective may change a bit), I see a lot of early stage-setting for immediate, medium, and longer-term legislative agenda implementation.

Everything is going better than I expected.

I think the Netroots is still awkwardly adjusting to the changed realities of what it means to push a sane center-left President with a Democratic Congress and an energized progressive majority base effectively from the left, just as they had to learn how to be an effective opposition to a lunatic authoritarian reality-denying clown college eight years ago.

These things take time. Perhaps I should learn to be more patient with my friends.