Mark Matson, one of the most thoughful Obamaphile commentators here at Open Left, posted a quick hit overnight, excerpting a recent Marc Ambinder post, "Obama And A New Liberal Consensus". It's worth taking a closer look at, because I really do think it makes the best case I've seen for Obama, and in turn, this also helps sharpen the focus of criticism. This is not unfamiliar territory, of course. But Mark has a good eye for a good presentation. Here's his excerpt, which he calls "quite thought provoking":
Some Democrats are wary of Obama's professed bipartisanship. But there's been no evidence that his views are torn between the left and the right; he is clearly putting forth a progressive, or liberal, agenda. So, rather than a Democrat bringing in a bunch of Republicans to govern by splitting the baby between the two sides, it appears that we have a case of a Democrat bringing in Republicans to put a bipartisan face on progressive policy, shades of, say, George Bush bringing in Ted Kennedy to put a bipartisan face on "compassionate conservatism."
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But if he taps some of the most well-known Republicans in America to serve in his administration, it will be tougher for conservative Republicans who are opposed in principle to Obama's agenda. Even the Republicans are Democrats these days, is what the impression would be. In other words, liberal consensus.
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He seems to want to mainstream Democratic philosophies and the Democratic worldview, rather than focusing on pure party-building (though he's certainly built up the party as well). It's a long-term strategy, and a far more ambitious one than people seem to realize.
Say we give Obama the benefit of the doubt here. Say this is his strategy. Say he's crystal clear on it. Say that a lot of folks have been misreading him (I freely admit to having a very hard time reading him at all). Say he's a true political genius, and this is clearly a plan that could work. Say all that. What then?
Several problems clearly remain:
(1) Choices like keeping Bob Gates at defense are not merely matters of building concensus. People matter in terms of what they have actually said and done. They are not mere interchangable symbols. Gates has a long history of politicizing intelligence and misleading Congress, going all the way back to the 1980s.
If you must have a GOP SecDef, it should be someone like Lugar, for exmple, who has a long history of working to try and get rid of loose nukes--something most elite Reps couldn't care less about, but that must make a whole lot of sense to their base. Note: I am not arguing for Lugar per se. He's simply provided as an example of the sort of record and relationship to others that Obama should be looking for.
(2) Even worse are choices like John Brennan as Obama's transition chief for intelligence policy, who was not, like Gates, a fourth quarter BushCO replacement, but a BushCo cheerleader for its most noxious policies. As Glenn Greenwald has written:
Obama's transition chief for intelligence policy, John Brennan, was an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity.
This is bipartisanship, all right--in the most pernicious Iraq War Vote sense. Obama owes his entire political viability on not having been part of that consensus, and choices like Brennan do not point to a new liberal consensus, but to the exact opposite: the long-term acceptance of Bush's radicalism as part of a center-right bipartisan consensus.
(3) The complete lack of any progressive Democratic figures is not the least bit necessary for a consensus-building strategy, while severely undercutting the prospects that any consensus Obama forms will actually be "a progressive, or liberal, agenda," as Ambinder claims it will be.
(4) Sacrificing a focus on the rule of law--including the prosecution of Bush-era crimes--in order to "get things done" is precisely the path that Clinton took in 1993, and it was repaid with a level of savagery virtually unherd of in US history. There is no evidence whatsoever that such a strategy will be any more successful now than it was in 1993.
It would be far more bipartisan and responsible to appoint someone such as Bruce Fein--a prominent conservative critic of Bush-era lawlessness--to be a special prosecutor responsible for overseeing all Bush-era criminal investigations.
This is hardly an exhaustive list, but it is sufficient to show that Ambinder's argument cannot be accepted as is. Perhaps his argument is what Obama thinks he is doing, but in that case, Obama's judgment is clearly flawed, and just as clearly subject to the Verailles bubble effect, which screens out 90%--at a bare minumum--of what happens outside the Beltway.
We need to be very clear about this reality, and about the fact that Ambinder is simply selling us a Bridge to Nowhere. For if we do not realize how utterly misleding this narrative is, we will be in no position to change it.
As Greenwald notes in his diary today (with emphasis added):
Barack Obama is a centrist, establishment politician. That is what he has been since he's been in the Senate, and more importantly, it's what he made clear -- both explicitly and through his actions -- that he intended to be as President. Even in the primary, he paid no price whatsoever for that in terms of progressive support. As is true for the national Democratic Party generally, he has no good reason to believe he needs to accommodate liberal objections to what he is doing. The Joe Lieberman fiasco should have made that as conclusively clear as it gets.
The point isn't that this reality should just be passively accepted and nothing done about it. The point is that for anything to be done about it, the reality needs to be accepted. The campaign we began earlier this year with Accountability Now and are now vigorously developing and pursuing -- to devote all resources and energies to defeating incumbents in primary challenges -- is grounded in the premise that one's political beliefs and principles will be ignored until there is a price to pay for ignoring them. Democrats don't perceive there is a price to pay for ignoring progressives, and so they do. That isn't surprising. What would be surprising is if, under those circumstances, anything else happened.
Arguments such as Ambinder's are valuable, not because they are true, but because they make the contradictions much clearer and easier to spot. This particular argument has the added benefit that it presents a vision that most of us would very much like to make come true, and so we can fruitfully criticize it in its own terms.
