This is not the freshest blogging you'll see on Cogitamus, but I found myself chewing over a blog post over at The Atlantic I read a couple of days ago. On his blog, Atlantic senior editor Clive Crook lamented "Obama's suicide march", assenting with David Brooks' assertion that Obama is on a "leftward surge". He claimed to be baffled by how Obama is choosing to fall out "not with [the liberals] but with the party's moderates." It's a "perplexing" political strategy:
Crooks has a straightforward solution too:
Now this advice is not particularly unusual - at worst, it just sounds extremely dated. It's the standard trope Beltway pundits have given the left for decades, though you never heard them about the need for GWB to "pick a fight" with "the party's conservatives" to prove his centrist bona fides.
The Clinton presidency was the embodiment of what happens when their counsel is taken. Cowed by the Republican tactic of taunting Democrats as "liberal, liberal, liberal" and intimidated by the conventional wisdom of esteemed insiders, the Governor from Arkansas duly picked fights with liberals and cooed at centrists. He set the standard that any serious Democrat should engage in a "Queen Latifah" moment just to prove that he, too, had nothing to do with those despicable, out of touch liberals. And what did he get to show for it? The Republicans hated him with a burning passion anyway, and in the face of their campaign of political destruction Clinton may have retained high approval ratings, but lost any meaningful ability to push for major new policies.
Clinton's presidency was successfully immobilized within a couple of years - and in the meantime Democrats were spending eight more years actively collaborating in making "liberal" a swearword, rather than the proud label for moderately leftwing politics it once was, and shifting the center of debate rightward as they did so.
The half-hearted, pusillanimous Kerry campaign of '04, I would have thought, buried this model. Obama was praised by pundits for devising a new way of winning the centre ground. One that eschewed ritual excoriations of liberals and careful efforts to not seem too different, in favour of setting out grand visions of how major change was good and needed. But Crook still holds to it. Fine.
What got me, however, was the sheer surrealness of a pundit demanding, at this point in Obama's presidency, that he overcome his fear of choosing the party's moderates over its liberals. Demanding that he finally "start disappointing the party's liberals". Start offending them?
Here it's my turn to be perplexed. It's one thing to be a conventional Beltway pundit, it's another to apparently have no inkling of the state of opinion across a swathe of the political spectrum. These remarks suggest someone who hasn't actually read much in the way of liberal opinion in the last half a year, but only the way liberal opinion is rendered in the words of people like Brooks and Broder. Because in reality, of course, Obama has been disappointing and aggravating liberals from the get-go. Just look at this blog.
Whether it was on FISA, Geither's co-optation by the financial businesses, the lack of action on Don't Ask Don't Tell, or the refusal to extend a (painfully slow) revision of Guantanamo practices to "black sites" elsewhere in the world, liberals were disappointed. When Krugman blasted Obama repeatedly for allowing the stimulus bill to become near-fatally flawed in the process of winning over Sens. Snowe and Collins, he spoke for a sizable liberal caucus in the party. How could one have missed that whole firestorm?
One doesn't need to go to someone like Glenn Greenwald, who last month wrote about the Obama administration's "bullying tactics", used "for the war supplemental bill and now for the cap-and-trade bill". Tactics that are "only directed towards the House progressives who want legislation to be less beholden to corporate donors". I suppose he can, after all, still be discounted as an irrelevant outsider.
Instead, to get an idea of how deep-seated the feeling already is that Obama at best ignores the liberals in his caucus, Brooks or Crook could for example read Ed Kilgore, who is firmly grounded in the politics of liberal DC. He provided as good a current summary as any in TNR this week: Left Behind -- Do progressives have any power over the Obama administration?
As Kilgore does admit, Crook is right on one thing: when Obama offends the left, what are they going to do apart from whine? Despite their numbers in Congress and among the activist base, they have preciously little leverage. The baffling part about Crook's post is where he suggests that it's high time this starts happening, and upbraids Obama for not having done it yet. As one rare liberal commenter, exasperated, puts it:
I find this extremely weird. [It's] not particularly weird that Mr Crook and Mr Brooks would find Obama's approach to healthcare too liberal. That's the job of conservatives [..].What is weird to me is the agreement of Mr Brooks and Mr Crook that Obama has been giving in way too much to the left-wing of his party. Even though I realize that conservatives still love to describe Obama as a scary left-winger, it should be obvious enough from reading the occasional newspaper that Obama has been a huge disappointment to the left wing of his party [..].
Quite. That's the thing that takes me aback, and Crook's comments section is full of further examples - one commenter after the other who writes about how Obama is "a hard-core ideological leftist" who "is, [..] has been, and will be, with the party's doctrinaire liberals on all domestic matters" so of course "he won't disappoint them." Like that exasperated liberal commenter, I'm not surprised that these conservative readers see Obama as a leftist - if you're far enough on the right, everyone looks like one. It's that they genuinely seem completely unaware how disappointed liberals are, from their side, about Obama's performance, and actually see him as far too cautious. It's not just that they disagree, it's that they apparently have no idea.
It's easy to blame the much and rightly bemoaned wholly separate, parallel media worlds American conservatives and liberals have apparently come to live in. Ironically, the Brooks column Crook quoted itself tsk-tsks about a "media and activist cocoon" with its own "cherry-picking pollsters" .. except he's talking about the liberals (sorry, the "insular liberals from big cities and the coasts"). An irony that's lost on Crook, who approvingly quotes that description even as he demonstrates a profound ignorance about what the other side is thinking.
But I mean, this is not an article on WorldNetDaily. Crook writes for the Atlantic, which hosts a variety of liberal voices he should be reading, as editor. And again, as that frustrated commenter pointed out, you don't exactly need to turn to The Nation to discover that Obama has long ago started offending and disappointing liberals - just open the NYT and read Krugman. So what is going on here?
(Maybe there's a link with these research findings?)
