Obama: Not Throwing Any Bones to the Progressive Base?

by Damozel |  Our fellow progressives are already expressing a certain amount of disappointment and disillusionment.  Many of them worked hard to get him elected and understandably were hoping to see some degree of gratitude reflected in the policies currently being considered.

Matthew Rothschild has a whole list of disappointing decisions.

And he says:

When is Obama going to appoint someone who reflects the progressive base that brought him to the White House?

He won the crucial Iowa caucuses on the strength of his anti-Iraq War stance, and many progressive peace and justice activists worked hard for him against John McCain.

Like we had a choice. 

I remain bemused that his progressive supporters didn't hear in his emphasis on unity and bipartisanship a commitment to compromise and reaching out to the opposition.  I like Obama a lot, but I couldn't help noticing that he had wide approval from moderates, including moderate Republicans, as well as progressives.   In fact, he won precisely for this reason---that moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans viewed him as a centrist pragmatist and disregarded the absolutely untrue attempts of the right to cast him as an extreme liberal.  

I'm troubled that there are all these complaints now.  Didn't anyone bother to look back during the primaries at who his advisors were?  Back during the primaries, I was worried about the presence of lifelong Republican and Mike McConnell protegee on his team.  When Obama seemed to be taking the position that the telecoms shouldn't be given immunity, John O. Brennan was afraid he couldn't agree.  From March 7:

In a new interview with National Journal magazine, an intelligence adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign broke with his candidate’s position opposing retroactive legal protection for telecommunications companies being sued for cooperating with a dubious U.S. government domestic surveillance program.

"I do believe strongly that [telecoms] should be granted that immunity," former CIA official John Brennan told National Journal reporter Shane Harris in the interview.  "They were told to [cooperate] by the appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context."

"I know people are concerned about that, but I do believe that's the right thing to do," added Brennan, who is an intelligence and foreign policy adviser to Obama.  (The Blotter)

And we all know how that eventually went.  Obama voted for telecom immunity while Hillary---whom Rothschild in the above-cited article rants against a bit---voted against it. 

Now it appears, according to Ambinder, that Brennan may well end up as Director of the CIA.

hat former National Counterrorism Center head John Brennan remains the favorite to be nominated director of the Central Intelligence Agency even as his pending appointment raises the hackles of some Obama advisers because of his ties to George Tenet and controversial programs.

The sources say that Brennan has begun to recruit a team he hopes to bring with him to the agency, and that he has been vetted. Brennan did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.  Along with former CIA official Jami Miscik, he is helping to organize Obama's intelligence agency transition and policy review.

I'm not happy about the Brennan pick.  There.  I said it.  But I would be lying if I didn't expect it.

Back in July, I remember there was a certain amount of discussion of Obama's ideology and the difficulty of pin-pointing it.  Dan Balz wrote:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama put himself on the opposite side of his party's leadership in the Senate yesterday by reversing course to support a compromise intelligence surveillance bill. His vote was the most dramatic in a series of moves toward the middle that have focused new attention on where he stands and where he would take the country....

One factor in Obama's success has been his ability to confound both left and right. But while that may be a measure of a skillful politician determined to win a general election, it has left unanswered important questions about his core principles and his presidential priorities....

Statements he has made over the past month have ignited a debate about who Obama is ideologically. His current policy positions have convinced some progressives that he is not one of them. Matt Stoller, editor of

OpenLeft.com, said that an Obama win in November would be a victory for "centrist government," adding: "Progressives are going to have to organize for progressive values."

In a piece called "The Audacity of Listening," Gail Collins defended him.

You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right? He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.

Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?

When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise....

It’s not his fault that we missed the message — although to be fair, he did make it sound as if getting rid of the “old politics” involved driving out the oil and pharmaceutical lobbyists rather than splitting the difference on federal wiretapping legislation. But if you look at the political fights he’s picked throughout his political career, the main theme is not any ideology. It’s that he hates stupidity. “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” he said in 2002 in his big speech against the invasion of Iraq. He did not, you will notice, say he was against unilateral military action or pre-emptive attacks or nation-building. He was antidumb.

I wonder how so many progressives failed to take this on board.  I argued at the time that Obama was not measurably more progressive than Hillary Clinton.  Once we decided it would be him and not her, we needed to come to terms with this aspect of Obama----his liking for compromise and his wish to reach across party lines.  He said he would do that.  And that is exactly what he is now doing.

Perhaps as the meltdown of everything which Bush willed on us continues, the progressive case will start to ring true with more Americans.  For now, I think we will probably have to be content with a government less bad than what we had before---and, of course, the utter and epic FAIL of the far right and all it stands for and the entertaining spectacle it affords.

And as I've said before, that's change I can believe in, even if it isn't quite the Change I hope for.

Memeorandum has more

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Comments

[Joe]

The fact that Obama was a pragmatist is fine and not unexpected. So, I'm not surprised or too upset at various expressions of that.

But, a "uniter" is not fungible and he is a "uniter" from the (center) left. This justifies his base to expect a few somethings, "bones" if you like, and not to be totally disrespected too often.

I didn't expect him to go against Lieberman this time around, for instance. But, he in effect supported him (this is what "I don't mind" meant in the real world); why not just say "that's the Senate's call" and end it there? And as Glenn Greenwald notes, the potential CIA pick crosses a line too.

And, a "uniter" will have a few clear libs in his Cabinet. I expect a few. HHS makes sense.