by Teh Puppet Mistress | None of us here or at Buck Naked Politics has ever mistaken Barack Obama for a progressive---so we are not going to suffer any pangs of disappointment as he continues to demonstrate this. And make no mistake; he has already begun to do so.
At this point, I am quite prepared to be contented that we have as our president-elect a fearsomely intelligent and--not to sound like Joe Biden--amazingly articulate Democrat and also (and this means a lot as well) the first African-American president ever. Obama must certainly be one of the most intelligent presidents elected in my lifetime. For now, that's change enough and change I can certainly believe in.
I do have Obama-supporting colleagues who are already bracing in anticipation for the inevitable let-down.
Via Balloon Juice, and writing about the Rahm Emanuel pick, Daniel Larison commented: "[Progressives] are going to find themselves very disappointed to discover that Obama is, in fact, a Chicago politician who is interested in pushing his agenda rather than being the national psychotherapist they seem interested in finding."
I don't know if this is really a widely held wish on the left---none of the progressives I know believe in magic. But if it is, I agree that some people are going to be in for a disappointment.
P.Z. Myers said bluntly:
[R]umors of the first two appointments by Obama leave me worried. Rahm? No, please — after campaigning on a slogan of "change", buying into one of the most deeply imbedded beltway insiders is not encouraging. Maybe there's some virtue in working with the Democratic establishment, so I can forgive one concession to the status quo, but let's see some innovative thinking, too.
More worrisome is the idea that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could get a prominent appointment... [W]e do not need another irrational purveyor of woo and fluffy substanceless hysteria contributing to this country's administration.
(But then he cheers up a bit:
Salon has an illuminating perspective on Rahm: he's Obama's designated asshole. Yeah, that works.)
I do think Obama's supporters should be prepared to see his posse
consist largely of people he thinks will have his back. That's what
presidents do.
One of the things about Obama that put me off initially was the way
in which people see in him whatever they want or expect. Even his two
books don't settle the question of who he really is. I personally don't
much care, so long as he serves his purpose competently and leaves us a
little better off than he finds us.
I do hope that his supporters won't turn on him the minute he proves
once more---as he did with FISA and telecom immunity--that he makes his
decisions based on pragmatic rather than ideological grounds.
Progressives don't have any use as a rule for compromise and don't tend
to see certain issues as having any middle ground. I imagine that
Obama is all about the middle ground.
Pretend-Obama supporter (the better to concern troll him) Megan McArdle is busily deflating any enthusiasm for Obama that anyone who stumbles across her column might conceivably be harboring.
Susan of Texas says: "Megan McArdle has writtenseven posts that warn Democrats that they'll be sorry Obama was elected. Her posts reek with wrong assumptions, saying that Democrats expect Obama will magically cure all problems in the US." As we like to say, McArdle is a Procrustean thinker, and if an idea doesn't fit within her prefabricated framework, she will stretch it or amputate parts of it or massage it as needed until it does.
Susan sees off her outbursts in various postings, this being my favorite (as generally applicable to all wingnuts everywhere):
[T]he role of the president is not to shelter us from the vicissitudes of life. It is to uphold and defend the Constitution and preserve the nation. Megan, like all Authoritarians in varying degree, wants someone to make her feel secure and safe. It is something that has been missing all the Authoritarians' life. Security is one of the basic needs of life, and they are driven to achieve it in any way possible, even giving up their freedom if necessary.
Everybody's afraid. It's what you do next that counts. Do you choose the certainty of hate and security, or do you choose the risk of hope and openness?
I have no hesitation in choosing the hope of hope. With McCain and Palin, we wouldn't have had even that.
In my case, there was never any chance I'd choose a candidate other than the Democrat, even though it was apparent to me early on that Obama's views aren't really cognate with my own. I am not sure in any case I believe that any change will stick if it's not implemented cautiously and in steps, so perhaps he is the right sort of president for these precarious times. I'm not going to second-guess him at this stage. I'm just going to hope for the best.
John Cole says:
The weirdest thing about this election was listening to Democrats acting if he was the new liberal icon and Republicans attempting to pretend he was the new socialist devil. He is neither, and there was never anything in his speeches or his policies to suggest that he was. Watching Republicans try to demonize him as some wild lefty over the next few years is going to be pretty damned amusing, especially since if anything, Obama represents a competent, nonthreatening centrism.
I agree with this and I am okay with it. For the present, it will be enough of a change just to have a steady hand holding the wheel. I might be a progressive, but I'm also a pragmatist. We can't move forward till we clear up the mess Bush has left us. (Obama said as much in his speech.) In any event, an intelligent pragmatist of generally liberal bent is likely to be flexible enough---and also self-serving enough--to take advantage of any opportunities that arise for moving the country forward. I think IOZ is right: the best we can expect is a Clintonesque regime.
Meanwhile, all indicators point to a Clinton Restoration more complete than even La Hillary could have contemplated. She, at least, would've been constrained by Public Relations necessity to differentiate her administration from that of her husband. Obama, on the other hand, calls a press conference, and it's all like, hail, hail, the gang's all here. I understand that the Bill Clinton administration was the apotheosis of democratic self-government in the modern world, and all, forever and whatever, amen, but for realz? Larry Fucking Summers?
Shit, I'll admit it straight up: I did not expect Obama to start crushing the hopetastical dreams of his dreamy-eyed supporters so quickly, so thoroughly, so soon. I kind of admire him for it.
I disagree that this will be a bad thing compared to what we've had. Everything is relative. But then again, I was never dreamy-eyed about Obama. I did really start to like him till the general election started and he turned out to be as much of a wonk as Hill.
Other progressives are already starting to be disappointed, so maybe there are some people who are expecting more left-leaning leadership from Obama than his record, or his campaign platform, suggests he will provide. From early on, he's made it clear that he intends to "reach across the aisle" and to seek bipartisan solutions to problems. When he talked about change, that's what he mostly meant....though his "soaring rhetoric" was, I admit, hazy enough at times to admit of a different interpretation.
If you look carefully at the things he has said, he's repeatedly shown he wants to walk a middle line. I am willing to give him a chance to move the country forward slowly, provided he does move us forward.
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