I've been beating the drums about President Obama's pragmatism and cautious approach to governing - traits which I admire, traits which led me to support Barack Obama over two years ago (wow), back when he wasn't given much of any chance to become President. Here's me, a couple of weeks ago, discussing the "progressive" rebellion against "Obamacare":You may not agree with the President's choices on this, but they were reasonable choices by a man who cares less about ideology and partisanship than about getting something done. The fact that we end up where many signs hint at where the President expected us to end up doesn't mean that he has failed us. Greenwald and the neo-Naderites see betrayal. This is anything but that. It is, most likely, the best health care reform bill that was ever possible out of this Senate and House. You may not like that, and you may think that the President is a failure or a cheat by not somehow, some way, changing the facts on the ground; you may want to believe that Barack Obama is seedy and corrupt by greasing the pole to make reform palatable to some vested interests. But saying those things does not make it so. Handled in the way the so-called progressive camp is now demanding could just as likely (more so, I would argue) mean that today we're looking back at the complete failure of Obama's health care initiative and a gloating, rather than refexively angry, GOP. It's cliche but also a truism that politics is the art of the possible. Regardless, we are where we are, now. Either the bill is worth passing, or it is not. But whatever the case, it's not due to bad faith by a President who has advanced the cause of health care reform beyond anyone's imagination a year ago.
Let me put it differently. The President is, by natural disposition or legislative and Senate experience or by the guidance of a staff and Cabinet filled with former Senators and Congresspeople, focused on process and realism. His approach acknowledges the flawed nature of the system and the dynamics of corporate interests and money and, most likely, back-room dealing. It sucks, it really does. And so Glenn is right, as far as it goes, to say that this whole process "reinforces all of the worst dynamics of Washington." But those dynamics are real, and the disputes about policy are real as well. Jimmy Carter failed as President for, among other reasons, a stubborn refusal to acknowledge and work within those dynamics. What was the result of Carter's national energy policy, for example? Do we want to remember Obama's health care initiative in the same way, as something that would have been a great leap forward, if only?
It seems that now, everyone is now saying the same thing.
Here's Kevin Drum:
I think the thing that surprises me is that anyone ever thought otherwise. Among low-information voters I understand the disconnect: they heard hopey-changiness, haven't really gotten it, and are disappointed. But even some very high-information voters seem to be disappointed the same way, and it's baffling. Obama's entire career has been one of low-key, pragmatic leadership. He's clearly a mainstream liberal, but during the Democratic primaries he was famously the least progressive (by a small margin) of the three major candidates on domestic issues. He did everything he could to avoid taking dangerously inflammatory stands on button social issues. His advisors during the campaign were nearly all members in good standing of the center left. His nickname was "No Drama Obama," and his temperament was plainly cautious, sober, and businesslike.
This was all pretty obvious during the campaign, and everybody understood it perfectly well when Republicans went crazy and started tarring him a radical socialist and a bomb-throwing revolutionary. Remember how we mocked all that stuff? But I guess that deep down, an awful lot of people were hoping that he was just play acting during the campaign, pretending to be a solid citizen while the real Obama was plotting to turn us into Sweden.
Personally, I wish Obama would articulate the liberal agenda more full-throatedly, and I wish he'd take a few more risks and push his own caucus a little harder. I've thought that ever since the 2008 campaign. But the fact that he hasn't hardly comes as a surprise. He's as liberal a president as we've had in 40 years, but he's no starry-eyed idealist. Why would anyone ever have thought differently?
And the New York Times' Ross Douthat:
Obama baffles observers, I suspect, because he’s an ideologue and a pragmatist all at once. He’s a doctrinaire liberal who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf. He has the policy preferences of a progressive blogger, but the governing style of a seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealer.....
Both right and left have had trouble processing Obama’s institutionalism. Conservatives have exaggerated his liberal instincts into radicalism, ignoring the fact that a president who takes advice from Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates probably isn’t a closet Marxist-Leninist. The left has been frustrated, again and again, by the gulf between Obama’s professed principles and the compromises that he’s willing to accept, and some liberals have become convinced that he isn’t one of them at all.
They’re wrong. Absent political constraints, Obama would probably side with the liberal line on almost every issue. It’s just that he’s more acutely conscious of the limits of his powers and less willing to start fights that he might lose than many supporters would prefer. In this regard, he most resembles Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy. Both were highly ideological politicians who trained themselves to work within the system. Both preferred cutting deals to walking away from the negotiating table.
The upside of this approach is obvious: It gets things done. Between the stimulus package, the pending health care bill and a new raft of financial regulations, Obama will soon be able to claim more major legislative accomplishments than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson.
The downside, though, is that sometimes what gets done isn’t worth doing
And the Times' Adam Nagourney:
As much as Mr. Obama presented himself as an outsider during his campaign, a lesson of this battle is that this is a president who would rather work within the system than seek to upend it. He is not the ideologue ready to stage a symbolic fight that could end in defeat; he is a former senator comfortable in dealing with the arcane rules of the Senate and prepared to accept compromise in search of a larger goal. For the most part, Democrats on Capitol Hill have stuck with him....
Still, Mr. Obama’s approach to this battle should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed his career or his campaign for the White House. He served in the United States Senate and in the Illinois Senate. His choice for chief of staff — Mr. Emanuel — was the No. 4 person in the House Democratic leadership, and many of his top West Wing aides came out of staff jobs in the Senate.
Mr. Obama may find it frustrating that it is impossible under Senate rules to get something through without 60 votes, but those are the rules and he is going to play by them. He was not about to go to Connecticut and to whip up the public against Mr. Lieberman, or to press for him to be relieved of his leadership positions in the Senate, as Mr. Green suggested he do.
“The president wasn’t after a Pyrrhic victory — he wasn’t into symbolism,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “The president is after solving a problem that has bedeviled a country and countless families for generations.”
All of this has come at a time of strains between Mr. Obama and the left. Mr. Obama has come under fire on several fronts, like health care, escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure so far to make good on a campaign pledge to end the ban on open homosexuals in the military.
Mr. Obama has moved to the center on some issues since he became president, particularly on elements of national security. Still, he never presented himself as a doctrinaire liberal, and much of what he is doing as president tracks with what he talked about during the campaign.
Mr. Obama’s call to send more troops to Afghanistan is what he always talked about in the context of outlining his opposition to the war in Iraq. “It’s not like he woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s go fight a war in Afghanistan,’ ” Mr. Emanuel said. “He talked about it in the campaign.”
And Mr. Obama never exhibited the left’s passion for establishing a public insurance option as part of an overhaul of health care. He rarely talked about it during scores of debates, speeches and interviews during the campaign; instead he focused on expanding coverage, lowering costs and ending health insurance abuses....
And so, as we approach the New Year, I go back to what I said on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration in January:
On this eve of Barack Obama's inauguration as the 44th President of the United States, I continue coming around to the thought - the idea that led me to support Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton or anyone else - that, for the first time in my adult lifetime, America is prepared to start moving forward again, rather than lurching from side to side, or left to right, if you must.
This was my understanding of Barack Obama from the start. A man who could transcend division and focus on the best interests of everyone.
I have spent a year (we put up our first Obama yard sign on MLK Day 2008) cringing whenever someone claimed that Barack Obama was the most liberal candidate for President. Whatever that word means in an ideological or political sense, the word didn't apply to Barack Obama's style or inclination as a way of governance. I don't mean to say he does not hold progressive liberal values. But being defined by an ideology - liberalism - is different from believing in goals that are generally liberal in orientation. Obama, to me, clearly fit into the later category, not the earlier one. He wasn't about taking sides, staking claims to representing one side in a war of opposing views. He doesn't aim for division; he aims for bringing all of us together to better the nation. Healing divisions, acknowledging differences and constructively addressing concerns of everyone, rather than expoiting anger and fears. Those are core American values, and the idea that they could be perceived as "liberal" tells us more about America - well, not America but more precisely those who choose to speak for America - than about Barack Obama (or about liberalism or conservatism, for that matter).
The screaming on the left and right continues unabated - perhaps even louder and more irrational than ever. But in the middle of it all, this President is moving the rest of us forward.
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