One of the difficulties of basing candidate selection on campaign rhetoric is that such rhetoric is wide open to subjective interpretation. In the current campaign, Barack Obama is probably the best example of this difficulty. For example, first consider Paul Krugman on Barack Obama:
PK: Yet on health care Obama is behaving as kind of, "Let's make a deal." The idea that he would be talking even in the primary campaign about the big table is suggesting that he is not all that committed to taking on special interests.
On the big problems there's a fundamental, deep-seated difference between the parties. I've always just felt that his tone was one suggesting that his inclination is to believe that we can somehow resolve these thing through a kind of outbreak of good feeling.(…)
EC: But should his conciliatory tone really be the basis to this extent of our evaluation of him? Some, including Matthew Yglesias, have argued that this focus on Obama's conciliatory rhetoric obscures the fact that Obama would still more likely prove a genuinely progressive president than Hillary would be.
PK: When Obama used the word "crisis" about Social Security it gave me a little bit of a sense of, "Hmmm -- I'm a little worried that my initial concerns were more right than I knew."(…)
It's a tone thing. I find it a little bit worrisome if we have a candidate who basically starts compromising before the struggle has even begun.
It is indeed a tone thing, but it is also, as Kevin Drum notes, a Rorschach test. When I hear Obama's rhetoric, to me it comes off as distancing himself from DFHs, appeasing the Washington Elite Bi-Partisan Consensus, and compromising before negotiations even begin. To others, like Frank Rich, it sounds like Obama is opposing himself from conservatives who have long worked to divide the nation along various cultural lines:
For those Americans looking for the most unambiguous way to repudiate politicians who are trying to divide the country by faith, ethnicity, sexuality and race, Mr. Obama is nothing if not the most direct shot. After hearing someone like Mitt Romney preach his narrow, exclusionist idea of "Faith in America," some Americans may simply see a vote for Mr. Obama as a vote for faith in America itself.
I'm pretty sure that both interpretations are correct. Obama both symbolizes and has repeated exhorted that the country should no longer be divided by faith, ethnicity, sexuality and race (although his campaign has made many mistakes on this front). At the same time, he is also distancing himself from the DFHs. The key is that he is trying to come across as a uniting figure on all fronts, ideological, partisan and cultural. This means both no long being divided in the ways that Frank Rich listed, but also no longer being divided on ideological or partisan grounds. And it also means repudiating and distancing oneself from perceived polarizers on both sides.
To be blunt, it feels like a fundamentally absurd vision. Ideological and partisan division will not melt away, and nor should they in any republic. Republicans will continue to prove far more intransigent and unwilling to compromise than Democrats. Conservatives will continue their battle of civilizations against all who are perceived to threaten white Christianity in America, no matter who the next President is and no matter what overtures progressives make to them. Progressives will continue to be unjustifiably blamed for equally causing polarization in America. The Washington Elite Consensus will continue to hate progressive strawmen, and continue their establishment rebellion against relatively powerless DFHs. Conciliatory rhetoric won't change any of this. Fortunately, the progressive pluralist coalition also continues to grow in size, and by 2012 it should become the natural governing coalition in America. Very soon, as long as we continue to cultivate that coalition, we won't need any these divisions to be healed in order to govern effectively.
The rhetoric Obama uses clearly can be interpreted in different ways by different people. For me, it is the single biggest turnoff of his entire campaign. On its ideological and partisan implications, I don't believe, trust, or even want what Obama describes on unity. For many others, it seems to be the strongest selling point for his candidacy, at least on the multicultural pluralism it promises. It doesn't seem like it is possible to have one without the other when it comes to Obama, but figuring out which part of Obama's rhetoric one favors more does indeed seem like a progressive Rorschach test.
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