Obama Needs Nuance Without Ambiguity

"I don't do nuance," President Bush supposedly once said to Sen. Joe Biden.

And he didn't, during the past eight years, in ways too disastrous, too numerous, too familiar to list.

If Bush's problem was not doing nuance, Obama is facing the opposite problem: doing too much of it. Good for policy, bad for politics.

He goes to Iraq, sees what's happening and realizes that the timetable he favored needs to be more flexible than he first believed. Obama made the shift only after he satisfied himself in person that the actual security situation on the ground required discarding rigidly preconceived, ideologically driven troop movements deadlines.

It's what presidents are supposed to do (though we can think of one who didn't). Yet Obama got hammered for flip-flopping.

Obama has also been attacked for changing his mind on any number of other issues: offshore oil drilling, dipping into the strategic petroleum reserve, NAFTA, negotiating "without preconditions" with Iran and Cuba, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Not every Obama supporter is going to like every tug and adjustment. What could he possibly have been thinking when he called the D.C. gun ban unconstitutional?

And some of those tugs and adjustments are self-serving. Nothing else explains his opting out of public campaign financing.

So there's political calculation mixed in there with the policy nuance. Well, it is politics. But now Obama's job is to show that it is not all politics.

He can do that by leading a reform of affirmative action.

Obama has the opportunity to bring nuance to these policies because there is no agreement on what affirmative action is, or even on what its purpose should be.

On one side, there are liberals who fear that any recalibration of racial preference programs means disaster for ethnic minorities left unprotected from discrimination.

The left that loves nothing better than a nice wallow in virtuous victimhood saw no problem with the program at the University of Michigan that was struck down by the Supreme Court five years ago, under which Barack Obama's daughters would have received an automatic 20 points on a scale of 150 because they would have been deemed underprivileged. To assume that being black equals being socioeconomically disadvantaged is nothing less than a hidden form of racism.

Obama sees the absurdity in that. He told George Stephanopoulos last year that his daughters "should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged." And he added that "we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed."

It's a move toward an affirmative action that considers factors other than race. But without forgetting race, because at the same time, Obama needs also to confront conservatives who like to pretend racial discrimination is no longer a barrier to progress. These people, too, love their own right-leaning wallow in virtuous victimhood -- remember that infamous Jesse Helms ad with the "white hands" crumpling a job rejection letter because "they had to give it to a minority"?

An Obama reform of affirmative action must have as a premise the fact that racial discrimination is much more likely to affect people who are not white -- while at the same time, the policy must be nuanced enough to recognize that indeed, reverse discrimination is also reprehensible and should be every bit as illegal.

Then there is that buzzword, "diversity," derided on the right as mere political correctness. Well, "diversity" in the workplace brings together individuals from different backgrounds, with different ideas and different ways of doing things so that an enterprise can consider a product or service from various perspectives. Why does that make some on the right uneasy?

And so, there you have Obama's nuanced affirmative action: It should be used to oppose racial discrimination, whether overt from the right or the veiled, patronizing kind from the left; it should boost disadvantaged people regardless of race; and it should promote the benefits of diversity.

He has said much of all that, a little bit here and a little bit there, sometimes ambiguously. Now he needs to lay it all out. Nuance without ambiguity. Because what this country urgently needs is a president unafraid to act boldly upon shades of gray.

Comments

[djkrlsn]

In terms of what Obama was thinking when he said that the DC gunban was unconstitutional was that if he continues with the usual Chicago politician support for gun control--McCain will become president/.

[Pherdnut]

I think the intelligence of the American people needs to be challenged more often, personally. And while he's a gifted speaker I don't think Obama goes particularly heavy on the vocabulary.

But yeah, I don't see why this is hard. If we can track economic standing we can make affirmative action about poverty in a way that will continue to benefit minorities who are overrepresented in it. At the very least it will give the bigots one less thing to gripe about but it could also bring opportunity to where it's needed.

It's like gay marriage. Easy solution. It's not the state's job to validate a religious institution. Everybody gets civil unions. The churches and the gays can debate whether it's "real" marriage among themselves.

Why is everybody arguing when nobody really has to compromise?

[standard]

Nuance, and the detail related to it, isn't the answer.

News stories have headlines as well as copy. It's a campaign's job to outfit the candidate with snappy headlines (sound bites) that aren't misleading as well as copy (speeches and policy papers) that are accurate and articulate. The Obama campaign has succeeded in this, while under heavy attack, better than most.

The problem is that the Neo-Cons (and the Clintons, for that matter) love to deliberately misinterpret their opponents' sound bites and base their attacks on groundless assertions unrelated to fact. If no one calls them out, they get away with it.

The cure isn't more nuance. It's more and better sound bites, and disseminating them takes money. But this year, the Democrats have the advantage. Let's celebrate the day that McCain is formally nominated: that's the day after which all his direct campaign expenditures must fall within FEC limits! (That's not the whole ballgame, but it's a major advantage for Obama.)

[rosal]

I hope he start speaking as plainly as possible. Dems tend to think everybody is an intellectual, they use logic, facts, solutions, all the time using big words. Repugs on the other hand, talk as if they are talking to their neighbor outside their garage. The Dems most probably don't want to insult the intelligence of the American people, but I think the time has come to express their ideas as simply as possible. And of course, it depends on who the audience is, but it seems the Repugs are not concerned about who is front of them. It seems to work for them.