Over at the Huffington Post, Peter Daou has a good article up about the ongoing intra-progressive argument about supporting the Obama administration vs. taking an oppositional stance to the administration. Here is the intro:
There is a civil war on the left over Barack Obama. The fault lines are jagged, and depending on the issue, porous, but broadly, the split is along two fronts:
- Those who believe that critiquing — and occasionally opposing — the president on issues such as gay rights, civil liberties and national security is healthy and necessary and those who believe that Obama’s progressive critics are going too far, reinforcing rightwing attacks and undermining his presidency.
- Those who argue that an incremental approach is the best we can hope for and that Obama’s list of accomplishments is impressive and those who say that in the long run, watered-down legislation, half measures and empty ‘bipartisanship’ are worse for America (and the Democratic Party).
I agree with Peter’s premise that this is largely a false choice. There is no reason why you can’t work toward an ideal aim while, in the face of powerful entrenched opposition, accepting whatever victories you can manage along the way. In fact, as Peter notes, selling the core values that undergird your completed vision for the country is necessary in order to make your incremental victories as large as possible:
Strikingly, this civil war is premised on a false choice: that an incremental legislative approach and a well-articulated grand ideological vision are mutually exclusive. They’re not. Rapid, sweeping changes may not be feasible in the face of entrenched interests and steely GOP obstructionism, and credit should be given to the president for seeking and achieving solid wins. But neither is the White House prohibited from standing up for core Democratic ideals and presenting them powerfully and unflinchingly, explaining to the public in clear terms why Democrats have the better plan for America. Nor does the glacial pace of progress in Washington obviate the need to reverse George Bush’s radical excesses, something the Obama administration has failed (so far) to do.
Perhaps this civil war keeps raging not because people fail to understand that this is a false choice, but instead because there is a third dimension to the argument. Specifically, the third front would be between
- Those who believe that the Obama administration achieved as much incremental progress as was possible over the last 18 months, or very close to it;
versus
- Those who think significantly more could have been achieved had the Obama administration been more progressive and / or aggressive.
For my part, I am definitely in the second camp. More could have been achieved with a more aggressive and / or progressive administration. A public option was possible. A bigger stimulus was possible. Stupak was not invulnerable. A whole lot could have changed in our homeland security policies. We could definitely have passed a stronger Wall Street reform bill. As someone who was closely involved in a couple of these fights–health care and financial reform-I will simply never accept that we could not have done better (and I was, and still am, in favor of passing both bills).
However, to throw in a wrinkle, I also don’t trust progressives who place no blame on themselves for what was not achieved. This is not meant to draw equivalence between individual grassroots activists and members of the Democratic leadership, as the latter obviously shoulder more responsibility due to their relatively greater influence. What I do mean is that there are ways we all could have acted more effectively, even if sometimes those ways were only visible in hindsight. For example, a Medicare buy-in was probably always a more viable (and perhaps better) idea than a public option, financial reform probably should have been tackled right after the budget fight finished up in April of 2009, and the netroots still have a very limited Capitol Hill presence.
To put it as plainly as I can, I think that the Obama administration could have done better, and that both sides of the intra-progressive debate Peter Daou describes could have been more effective, too. Further, since I am not in the Obama administration, I am actually more interested in the ways that progressive online organizations can be more effective, since those are the groups and the people who I actually work with. From my vantage point, that is also a lot more empowering than just sitting around arguing over whether or not President Obama is actually a progressive at heart.
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