November 18, 2008

Obama's "Moderate" Revolution

The hand-wringing on the left over the potential cabinet appointments of such ideological suspects as Robert Gates (DOD), Hillary Clinton (SOS), and Lawrence Summers (Treasury), is surely an expression of the left’s deeper anxiety over just what kind of president they helped to elect. It’s an anxiety that has roots. While many scoffed at the right wing fear mongering attempt to paint Obama as a socialist during the campaign, it’s not difficult to imagine that some held out hope that there might be at least a little truth to the charge. Likewise, Obama’s constant self-characterization as a unifier, an agent of reconciliation who had both the desire to listen to opposing voices and the ability to forge working alliances with those across the aisle, probably struck many as better political boilerplate than actual governing practice. After all—and after eight years (or forty years, depending on your measuring stick)—liberal Democrats were finally in charge, with a mandate for change; what’s the point of compromise?

A careful and close reading of Obama, his books, his campaign, and now his transition, suggests that he is a true believer in his own message. He takes seriously the need to bridge the divide between parties, races, ideologies, and people. And this means working in good faith with all the “Others” of American society and politics. This also means that for liberal Democrats hungry for pay back, an ideological purge of the political culture, the next four (or eight) years will be more frustrating than the last eight. With Bush, there was no reason to check hostility; it’s far more difficult to unleash on the captain of your own team.

Does this mean that Obama is a moderate? Or, if he is a liberal or progressive at heart, might he also be a de-facto centrist, a liberal so habituated to compromise and conciliation that he lacks either the imagination or the courage to advance an aggressive agenda that reflects his values?

No.

My hope—and my faith, from the perspective of this early date—is that we are on the cusp of a bold and dramatic redirection of American politics and policy. And what some are reading as a moderation in the new president is really more a matter of method. Not tactics, per se, but a perticular way of thinking about change that impacts both the way change is

In "The Visionary Minimalist," published early in 2008, Cass Sunstein offered a useful way to think about Obama by casting him as a paradoxical hybrid combining two, otherwise antithetical, dispositions. For Sunstein, Obama is both a pig picture visionary and a methodological minimalist. He explains:

Not unlike the great conservative Edmund Burke, minimalists are fearful of those who are gripped by

Continue reading "Obama's "Moderate" Revolution"

Posted by stevemack at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2008

Obama and the Virtue of Excellence

When reading the tea leaves to discover how Obama will staff his administration and, ultimately, govern, Howard Fineman observed that “excellence” was one of the President-elect’s animating values. The notion resonates more deeply than perhaps even Fineman is aware. It is a value straight out of Camelot and the Kennedy Administration’s faith in the powers of technocratic governance and its impulse to populate its ranks with, in David Halberstam’s ironic phrase, “the best and the brightest.” From a forty-eight year distance, the idea is likely to seem either naïve or banal—either a dangerous faith in experts (the sort Halberstam reminds us got us into Vietnam), or utterly lacking in the in the kind of deep human purpose that would make the work of those experts meaningful. But it’s worth remembering that, for Kennedy as for Obama, such a sharply defined faith in the transformative power of excellence is nothing less than a faith in human possibility. It was, and is, a belief that there is nothing we cannot do if we think smart enough and work hard enough. It is the silent verb buried deep within the American Dream. And, if those words strike us as just a little bit silly, even embarrassing, it’s because not believing them has become the defining attitude of our age.

Obama, of course, is no baby boomer, and so his connection to Kennedy’s unique brand of idealism is not a matter of generational nostalgia. But, it’s rather clear that the Kennedy connection is explicit for him, that it is a value he has inherited more or less directly from Kennedy himself. The link is his parents, both father and mother. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he describes his mother as a very real person, an eighteen year old Kennedy-style idealist who was attracted to his father in part by her own political romanticism. In several telling and poignant passages he makes it clear that her idealism was childlike in its innocence yet remained a potent force in her life until she died—driving her to live and work with the poor of Indonesia. Correspondingly, he presents his father as a larger than life, mythological figure—a stature he achieves in part because he genuinely had a charismatic personality and in part because he was absent, and thus owned a fictional persona unchallenged by its contrast with the more prosaic identity never came into conflict with its mythic counterpart. But more important still was the content of that myth. In his own estimation—and the estimation of others as well—he was a living embodiment of the same ideals Obama’s mother had fallen in love with. He was a bright, young, endlessly energetic African student who came to America not only because it was a place where he might realize his own promise of excellence, but because it was the fountainhead of promise itself. When he returned to Kenya he went back preaching the American gospel of a meritocratic society. He was eager to transform his homeland along the lines of the ideal America he believed in—to make it a place where a thirst for progress and a faith in the power of excellence could break the shackles of tribal cronyism and corruption. Barak Obama Sr. was a Kenyan Horatio Alger.

Though Obama only met his father once, the book makes clear that the myth of his father was a constant companion. It was kept alive, in part, by his mother. In Obama’s nomination acceptance speech he recounts a time while they were living in Indonesia that she decided Barak “was an American, and had better learn what that meant.” In that speech, out of context, it sounds like a throw away line—something might say to burnish his patriotic credentials, especially if they were being challenged by some jingoistic opponent. It’s a deeply unfortunate interpretation. In context we see exactly what his mother meant. It comes at a moment when she sees her son being corrupted by the necessities of raw power, a jungle law unmediated by American ideals, American hope, and American faith in the ability to envision a better world—and the human potential to make it.

This is the Kennedy legacy.

And this is Obama’s obsession with “excellence.”

Posted by stevemack at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2008

"Negative Attack: More Constitutional Stupidity from McCain / Palin

George Will recently penned an op-ed lamenting the various ways McCain/Palin have evinced either ignorance or indifference to the constitution (especially as Will prefers to see that document interpreted). Appropriately titled “Careless with the Constitution,” he argues that “carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism,” citing all sorts of evidence from Palin’s apparent ignorance about the Vice President’s constitutional duties to McCain’s sponsorship of campaign finance reform (a favorite bug-a-boo for Will).

But Will also goes after other conservatives as well (“faux conservatism”), singling out, for example, Dick Cheney’s attempt to write in a fourth branch of government all for himself. Will is surely on to something here.

A particularly irritating example of constitutional stupidity came last week when an NPR interview of Obama dating back to 2001 surfaced in which he laments the way Civil Rights movement over emphasized the capacity of the judiciary to bring about social (i.e., economic) justice.

As Jake Tapper reports the interview:

Obama in that interview said, "If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order, and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be OK."

"But," Obama said, "The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it's been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that, generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted."

Obama added, "one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways, we still stuffer from that."

Once the conservative echo chamber got a hold of the interview, Obama’s words were promptly taken out of context, distorted, and out right misread to mean things that were the very opposite of what he actually said. (So much for “original intent” and textualism.). McCain, Palin, and an army of official and unofficial surrogates claimed that Obama had wished that the courts had been more willing to bend the constitution to achieve some sort of redistribution of wealth—when, in fact, he argued that the movement should have been more focused on the possibilities for social change offered by community and legislative action.

But no matter. Such distortions may demonstrate illiteracy or dishonesty—but not necessarily a fundamental ignorance of basic principles of American constitutionalism.

What really shocked me, however, was another line of attack. When disgraced former majority leader Tom Delay appeared on Hardball a few days ago to rant about Obama’s comments, he made a point of emphasizing, in sneering tones accusatory tones, Obama’s description of the Bill of Rights as “negative.” In Delay’s rendition, just describing the contents of that document as negative was apparently evidence of Obama’s disrespect for our fundamental liberties. In the day or so leading up to Delay’s appearance I had heard something of the same out of both McCain and Palin, though it seemed that they had been a little less obvious or forceful.

Well, here’s the deal: As any constitutional law student will tell you—indeed, as most Poly Sci undergrads will tell you—referring to basic constitutionally protected liberties such as freedom of press, speech, religion, and all the others as “negative” is nothing controversial. The usage simply draws attention to the fact that our rights are expressed in terms of things the government may not do to us. Alternatively, positive liberties are understood as things the government must provide us—or, as we typically call them, “entitlements.”

Now, being the kind, forgiving sort of person I am, I’m happy to give them the benefit of the doubt. But the truth is, I have no idea whether McCain, Palin, or Delay understand the distinction. So I really don’t know what giving them the benefit of the doubt means. What’s worse? Assuming that they know more than they pretend and, in fact, are only trying to demagogue an issue of constitutional principle—or that they are fundamentally ignorant about the constitution of the nation they hope to lead?

Posted by stevemack at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)