I'm a great believer in overdetermination. Virtually nothing in human affairs has a single cause. So nothing in this diary is meant to disparage, diminish or trivialize other factors. There are all sorts of socio-political reasons for Obama's obsessive and equally fruitless mania for "consensus." Corporate power has grown so enormously over the past 40 years that it's grown far more daunting to oppose it straight-out, and this, in turn has given rise to a welter of reasons not to do so-not to mention the entire Versailles political culture that finds such opposition quite literally unthinkable.
But there's more to Obama than simply going along with the political tides. There's also the vast pretense of doing no such thing-of being someone who brings sweeping changes... by seeking consensus with the titanic forces of the status quo. Contradictions such as this should also be understood as being primarily generated by the socio-political system as a whole. (Just to take one example-if Obama really were the great reformer he pretends to be, would he have been Wall Street's #1 beneficiary of campaign contributions in the 2008 election cycle? Or would he have been starved for such funds, like, say, John Edwards, or even Dennis Kucinich?) But a politician who actively and continually embodies such contradictions in their everyday life will have a definite edge if their personal psychology is particularly suited to embracing those contradictions for purely internal reasons. A true believer in public falsehoods has the edge of "authenticity"-always a big plus in politics. And it's hard to argue that Obama's relentless, ideological commitment to centrism is inauthentic.
So what explains it? The specifics may be rather complicated, but in broad outline, the answer is fairly simple: it's the ego-defense mechanism known as reaction-formation. Wikipedia explains:
One of the great things about going home (Nebraska and northwest Missouri) for the Christmas vacation, especially in a year like this, is that you get to brag to everyone when you get back about the weather. Freezing rain the day we flew in, 15 inches of snow on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day (and we still did the full family Christmas dinner at my mom's), 40 mile an hour winds, minus 5 degrees Celsius one night. I feel so hearty and toughened up. My only regret is that it was 2 degrees when we left, but got down to minus 14 degrees yesterday, so now I'm feeling like I missed out on some even better weather to brag about.
Having survived all that, I am now back in DC eager to see the health care reform fight finally finished, and have the political focus move on to all those other easy issues: financial reform, jobs legislation, the energy bill, immigration reform. It should all be a walk in the park. Or maybe not.
President Obama has done plenty of things to infuriate me, but you have to give him credit: he has been willing to take on the biggest, most intractable, most complicated and messy issues around. I wish his proposals had gone further; I wish he hadn't made some of the compromises and tactical decisions he had; I wish he had fought harder and communicated better on important policy choices. But he deserves a lot of credit for taking on these huge issues and trying to get them done- it shows a courage few politicians have.
The truly mystifying thing is how he has handled the politics of it. As I wrote in my last post of 2009, it takes special talent to take on all these big issues that progressives have been dreaming of working on for decades and yet have your activist base this disillusioned. So what is going on?
There's been a lot of talk in Washington, DC lately of a "new, centrist compromise" gaining momentum in terms of how to fund health care reform, and that is taxing health care benefits. The problems? It's not new, it's only centrist in the bizarre inside-the-Beltway world of what qualifies for centrist, it's one sure way to make health care reform incredibly unpopular, and it's a bad policy idea. Remember how popular Ira Magaziner's "health alliances" were in the Clinton health reform battle? This would be worse. So let's go through this point by point:
Chris Bowers posted today on the debate raging within the progressive blogosphere and even in some segments of the traditional media punditocracy over how to interpret Obama's staffing and cabinet picks. Some believe Obama's centrist picks are part of a brilliant plan to provide cover for progressive policy initiatives. Others believe the centrist picks signal Obama's intention to govern in a centrist manner. Bowers falls in with group B.
This time, Osama Bin Laden is telling insurgents in Iraq to cut the partisanship and come together to find centrist middle.
After all these years, I never suspected that Bin Laden was camped out in David Broder's office, but it sounds as if they've been drinking from the same Kool-Aid.
I literally laughed out loud when I saw the headline for this come up on Drudge. What a great story to finish the day!
I just participated in a discussion with thereisnospoon and hekebolos from Daily Kos about the terms "moderate" and "centrist" and how they played out in yesterday's debate on Meet the Press between Markos and Harold Ford. You can listen to the discussion via podcast over at Political Nexus.
We all know that the debate between the DLC and the blogosphere for the soul of the Democratic Party is not one about liberal versus moderate; it's about inside versus outside, about a few oligarchs versus a panoply of voices.
But by way of extending the discussion, and showing how DLC rhetoric actually harms people, allow me to posit this question: what has happened to this country?
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