I would question that he is moving. He was always in the middle. More on that later.
The issue that matters now is whether his perceived move is undercutting his brand and actually making it harder for him to win. One thing is for sure. Obama and his top advisors made a calculated decision. First backing out of the public financing (I didn't hear much complaining from progressives on that one), then the FISA compromise -- on through death penalty, late-term abortion, reaching out to the faith-based -- and finally talk of "refining" Iraq policy.
That is a whole lot of adjusting in a very short time. They obviously decided to do this, and to do it all at once. They're not dopes. Why the rollout?
My guess is that they want to give true believers who provided his campaign with so much money and energy time to adjust. People should have seen this all along but, in their fervor, somehow they missed it. There is nothing radical or new about the substance of Obama's politics. He's a pragmatic centrist and he always has been -- even as president of Harvard Law Review, there he was, smack in the middle, holding the factions together. The best profile of Obama I ever read came out in May of '07 in the New Yorker. It was called The Conciliator.
Barack told us all the truth about himself. He said he's always been a Rorschach test, a figure upon whom people project what they want to see. He came right out and said that. And what has happened is that some activists with the policy inclinations of, say, Dennis Kucinich (that would be me) let what really is radical and new about Barack convince them that policy was part of Obama package (that would not be me).
What's radical and new about Obama is his person -- his youth, first of all, and the way he embodies postmodern fusion and inclusion in his very being. Also radical and new is the way he sees things, precisely because he has lived at the margins of various worlds all his life. He is uniquely detached and, at the same time, deeply empathic, able to understand all sorts of different people in all sorts of circumstances. In terms of character, there's never been a president remotely like him, except, yes -- Lincoln. Obama's already signaled his respect for a book called Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Check it out if you don't already know that Lincoln spent his entire political career in the middle, holding factions together.
What disillusioned Obama supporters must come to terms with is this: Barack has always been serious, however unrealistically, about bringing Americans together -- evangelicals, bowlers, red states, whoever. That isn't just rhetoric. That is his real ambition, his transcendental ambition, and he is going to persevere along that path. He really is post-partisan.
That's a new politics, isn't it? Many of us, including me, aren't going to like a lot of what that will entail. It doesn't confirm what we already know and assure us that we've been right all along. But that's what "new" actually implies, isn't it?
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Posted July 8, 2008 | 09:39 AM (EST)