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I've talked about this before, but evidently not nearly enough. Two major points:
(1) Obama is a raging ideologue. He is not a pragmatist. "Pragmatism" is his ideological rhetoric, nothing more. It's progressives who are the real pragmatists today. Not all of them, and not all of the time, but it's pragmatism to note that the war on terrorism is a miserable failure, and we need to try something else. It's also pragmatism to note that (a) law & order responses to terrorism generally work a whole lot better than military responses and (b) soft power--including efforts at dialogue, understanding, humanitarian aid and the like--works a whole hell of a lot better than blowing people to bits. It's fact-hating ideology to oppose such measures.
Likewise, it's pragmatism to use cheap money (damn near free) to invest today in putting people back to work building the green tech and human infrastructure of tomorrow as a way to get out of the recession. It's fact-hating ideology to reject this as "discredited Keynesianism". And it's scientifically-based pragmatism to get atmospheric CO2 down below 350ppm as soon as possible. It's fact-hating ideology to reject this as "politically naive" or "extreme" or whatever, as if physics and chemistry give a damn about hominid politics.
Starting to see a pattern here, are we?
(2) But here's something more to help fill out the picture--a bit of an explanatory backdrop, if you will. From digby yesterday, "Triangulating In The New Millenium":
The base was in a very different place in 1992. Clinton ran as a New Democrat promising to end the "braindead politics of the past," much like Obama. The idea at the time was rather technical however, at least in part --- that you can use modern market based processes to achieve liberal goals. Now certainly there was a political desire to neutralize social issues, particularly about being soft on crime and changing the "incentives" in social welfare, which sort of defined DLCism of the 90s. But essentially Clinton was saying to liberals, "I'm with you on the goals, but we need to shed the old labels and try a different way of getting there." At least that's what I think liberals heard, whether or not it was true. Regardless, throughout the Clinton years, for the most part, there was a belief in his good intentions -- and he was actually pretty clever (more clever than Obama) in sending the liberal dogwhistle and telling the folks that he was on their side. (Taylor Branch's Clinton biography says that Clinton really was a liberal who was backed into the compromises and changing his priorities, just like Obama. But who really knows?)
Liberals were a defeated force in that decade and were willing to try this new thing to see if it might work. (We were all pragmatists then.) I know that I was open to seeing how the experiment would come out, and at the time, when the economy picked up and happy days were here again, we thought it might have worked. It's very hard to argue with prosperity. (And then there was the modern conservative movement hitting congress like a gale force, which was like nothing we'd ever seen before ...)
When Bush came in and blew a hole in the hard won balanced budget by giving tax cuts to millionaires, it was finally irrefutable to even the die-hards that it had all been a fools game and that the DLC experiment was a failure. It was clear that the Republicans had become ideologically bankrupt political terrorists and the Democrats had basically done their dirty work for them.
Barack Obama, however, has never agreed with that. Indeed, Sargent is right that he primarily sells himself as a conciliator and a bipartisan deal maker who is doing the best he can in a hostile situation. But then Clinton did too. In fact, all Democrats have thought that since the 1980s. The problem for Obama is that unlike Clinton, the experiment in "pragmatic, non-ideological" politics in the age of GOP nihilism has already been tried. And it failed. (They may have had a nice party for a while, but the hangover is one for the books.) He's living in the past and liberals are trying to drag him into the present.
"He's living in the past and liberals are trying to drag him into the present." The exact reverse of Obama's standard Versailles-approved shtick. Turns out that he's the one wedded to the failed policies of the past.
The point here is simple: Once upon a time it was at least plausible to argue that liberals were wedded to outmoded ideas and ways of viewing things (and in some ways, I'm sure they were--though much more in terms of strategy than anything else, I'd argue.) They needed to try new ideas. And so we did. And what did we get for our troubles? We lost the House after holding it for 40 years--and lost it for more than one term for the first time since 1932. We got a president impeached as the result of the 5-year witch-hunt. We got a presidential election stolen in plain sight by the Supreme Court, while Versailles applauded. We got a balanced budget which the GOP immediately plundered to plough enormous wealth into their their rich and super-rich base. In short, we got an epic political and policy failure. That's what digby is reminding us of.
So, after all that, one can no longer adopt the Clintonian policy position on the grounds of pragmatism. Although it had some limited successes, that position overall has proven itself to be a spectacular failure. Ergo, those who continue pushing it are doing so as a matter of ideology (or pure corruption, take your pick). Now, because of past history, they may adopt a rhetoric of "pragmatism" and even profess an ideology of "pragmatism" ("We're doing this to solve America's problems.") But the clear reality is that there's nothing whatsoever actually pragmatic about what they're doing. They're either shallow, clueless, unreflective ideologues, or else they're simply shills.
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