What has been overlooked in the discussion about Mr. Obama's centrism is that the Left can be as racist as the Right. And because of this, a smart politician uses what s/he can from both sides, knowing that neither really has a monopoly on the higher ground.
Admittedly there are significant nuances within the landscape of our two-party state.
But I want to press the issue that the Left has not sorted out its borders.
And I'm not advocating the Left always move Right. (This past week's yes vote by 40 Republicans in the House for SCHIP is a promising example of forces joining in common interest.)
But it's hard to be effective when you're intentions are unclear. How do we solve the commonest of problems? - Take the plague of drug related homicides in this country. The Boston Globe reported this week that Jordan Manuel's half brother and two accomplices robbed, shot and stabbed Jordan and burned his body in the woods. Jordan was 16 and grew up in a family of drug dealers on the Massachusetts Cape. The Right thinker might conceivably say, "personal accountability - when will families take responsibility for the sons and daughters they raise to be killers?" A Lefty might argue, "the system failed that family - we can't trust the police and social services aren't doing their job." But if the aim is resolution, something useful could be taken from both points of view.
What about arguably more complex problems, like those we face overseas, say in Afghanistan. How do we resolve that dilemma when we can't even order our own homes? (It's not hard incidentally to understand the Right's indefatigable focus on "family values" as an effort to exert some control over this problem of 'home.') Ann Jones writes that we're all but doomed to fail in Afghanistan. She lists a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that we disempowered Afghans by giving vast amounts of reconstruction money instead to US contractors unable to account for it now. There is a racial component to this, would America treat 'white' people this way? The Left can do better at defining how to find a reasonable way to collaborate with Afghans to rebuild their own country. But looking, for example, at the US's largely Democrat run inner-cities, pock-marked by corruption, drug crime and where many children go uneducated or jailed, some understanding about what people need and what works has not gained traction, or perhaps more shockingly, is even unknown to the Left.
And this is the heart of it: in avoidance of this work, the Left has a way of getting caught up in mountains of details with no clear narrative, no moral indignation to make the storyline/s stick. This week, for example, John Tanner (formerly head of voting rights at the Republican dominated DOJ) was caught on record saying that he likes his coffee, "Mary Frances Berry Style - black and bitter" and that, "voter ID laws discriminate against the elderly, and therefore not against African-Americans, because African-Americans die younger." For the record, if this is the worst he's said, I feel sorry for him. I've surely heard a range of inappropriate things from Lefties. From the reporting on Tanner, there is some ambiguity about the goal of his words: blacks do die younger and this is tragic. Blacks can be bitter and the question is why. If we don't accept these facts, how can we see the truth? How can we solve that which we deny exists? American blacks who wish to be in the world can't really get by (or ahead) by being blind in this way. They'd scarcely have anyone to work with if this were so.
An undefined Left and a heap of problems. I've listed just two in the points above - drug crimes at home and Afghanistan overseas. And in the midst of this an undefined Left by turns assails and supports their guy Mr. Obama. I suspect it'd be in better shape if it worked out in detail where it stands on its family values: What does it hold most dear? What is im/moral to a Lefty? In the meantime, I certainly understand why a politician would take a moderate view and be open to ideas wherever they come from.
