Yesterday, Mike posted a diary, "Time for a new discussion", that prompted a very vigorous debate. Mike's diary began thus:
The argument over Obama and the left rages on unabated. It started in earnest the day after his election with the first leaks of who would be appointed to the transition team, and has kept going since....
However, I'm writing this post not to join the debate, but to say that at the end of the day, I find myself confused as to why it matters. Clearly people are very passionate about it, but I don't get why. What matters in my view is not how we judge Obama, but what we do to shape his actions, and what we do in response to his actions. Everything else is just metaphysics and your particular perspective on life.
I think that the short answer to Mike's question is that he's a very task-oriented sort of guy, and that given his understanding of history (read his book, hint! Hint! Hint!) this is prime time to get tasks done. Given that, he sees a vast chasm between task-oriented discussions and "Everything else [that] is just metaphysics and your particular perspective on life." But other people who aren't that task-oriented tend to see much more of an interweaving, which was expressed in a wide variety of ways in the comments. Simply put, in a wide range of ways, the issues raised in the debate affected how people thought they could and should act most effectively, so they simply didn't see the same sharp dichotomy that Mike does.
I myself weighed in by saying:
The Point
at least for me, as I wrote on Saturday: I want to stress that although President Obama is the focus of this discussion, this is really about something much bigger: it's about how we understand history and politics and the meaning of being progressive. Of course, many others will have different reactions, as the comment threads always remind us. But that's what I'm up to.
But this was just one facet of the larger range of contrasting views that all basically amounted to expressing a need for greater clarity in order to act more effectively. I'll have more to say about the diversity of ways that people expressed this, but first I want to take note of the wider discussion that continues to unfold.
The importance of this need for greater clarity was further reflected in a pair of pieces in Salon, one focused on presidents and base discontent, the other focused on the unfocused nature of the meaning of the term "progressive."
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