December 17, 2007
Obama learns a party trick from Blair
Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency has revived. Until recently Hillary Clinton had a commanding lead in the polls and was starting to seem unstoppable. But Mr Obama has pulled ahead in Iowa and level in New Hampshire, the states that vote first in the primaries. He is gaining ground again nationally. The television debates, in which he performed poorly, are behind him. What matters now is the ability to move a crowd and the energy of campaign staff on the ground. On the first, Mr Obama has no equal in this contest. On the second, he has no grounds for complaint. He is back in the race.
But here is an odd thing: the Democratic party’s progressive base has mixed feelings about this revival. What is their problem, one wonders? What could be more exciting or more transformative, from their point of view, than this candidate? Mr Obama is a clever, reflective and engaging man; he has dedicated his impressive intellect to a liberal political vision; he has a voting record in the Senate that puts him well to the left of Mrs Clinton; he makes, nonetheless, a strong appeal to the centre; he carries none of the baggage of the Clinton dynasty; and, in a country still riven by race, he just happens to be black. What’s not to like?
The main answer is not differences over policy – though it is true that Mr Obama’s positions in the campaign have tended to be in the centre, at least compared with his Senate voting record.
You can read the rest of this new column for the FT here.
Far more important than minute differences over economic matters such as health care will be the ability of the Democratic candidate to stand up to what will undoubtedly be a withering Republican assault based on attempts to play to on racist anti-immigrant sentiment and fears of another terror attack. If the Democrats expect to win next year’s election, they must also stand up for the basic democratic values of habeas corpus, a ban on torture, freedom from pervasive spying, and dismantling the network of government secrecy, all of which are now in grave danger.
Posted by: Roger Algase | December 17th, 2007 at 3:03 pm | Report this commentIn my above comment, I should have written “to play on” instead of “to play to on”. My apologies.
Posted by: Roger Algase | December 17th, 2007 at 3:07 pm | Report this commentGreetings:
It is a shame that so much reporting about political campaigns in the States focuses on election strategy, fundraising, sound-bites (including gaffes — often actually moments of candor), and the constantly changing opinion polls, rather than the issues of the day and the candidate’s character.
Furthermore, it continues to astound me that the mass media continues to classify Senator Obama as a “black.” In fact, Mr. Obama is an individual of mixed racial parentage. He was raised by his mother’s family (who happens to be white — for want of a more accurate term).
To my knowledge, the U.S. Congress has never passed its equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws. In fact, I thought that Britain, the U.S. and numerous other countries were allied in a war 50+ years ago against a country the government of which had developed a pseudo-science of racial classification.
Would it not be more appropriate for the junior Senator from Illinois to be described as a tall, thin individual who earned his law degree from Harvard and was voted President of the Law Review, who if elected would be the youngest person ever to be President of the U.S.?
The public might benefit if there were more news stories discusssing that Senator Obama has been endorsed for President by Zbigniew Brzezinski and in an FT Comment called for the prosecution of all those loan officers and their superiors who improperly qualify persons for mortgages by knowingly entering false data, the consequence of which may be to cause the greatest economic upheaval in the world since the Great Depression or the biggest bailout of financial institutions since the Savings & Loan Crisis.
Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of his desire to see a time when persons were not judged by the color/colour of their skin, but the content of their hearts. If Steven Biko were alive today, he might point out that Mr. Obama’s skin had a brown tone and Mr. Crook’s skin was pink. Indeed it is doubtful he has roots in Armenia, Azerbaijan or Georgia and thus it would be inaccurate to describe him as “Caucasian”.
Cheers.
Posted by: Ethan S. Burger | December 17th, 2007 at 10:40 pm | Report this commentI read Clive Crook in the Financial Times with full attention but frequent irritation. Ex-Economist and ex-National Journal, he is clearly a fully-paid up member of the Washington establishment, with all of the strengths (of access) and weaknesses (of interpretation) thereof. But 2008 is a different kind of year, one in which the old verities are about to prove far less veritable than before. And smart establishment servants would do well not to cling to superannuated models. The center is moving, has moved, and will continue to move leftwards, an outcome not normally contemplated or acknowledged.
Crook argues that Sen. Barack Obama should treat progressives as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair did his party’s progressive wing, namely, as a force to be marginalized in order to show his centrist respectability and electability. Crook, like most of the establishment, thinks Democratic victory can come only at the expense of Democratic principles.
The differences progressives have with Obama (and far more with Sen. Hillary Clinton) are exactly over the policies dividing the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party from the capitulationists. And it is the latter, not the progressives, who are mired in the old Republican-dominated days. On minimizing health care reform and immigration, on only slowing but not stopping the Iraq war, on acquiescing to rather than repairing Imperial White House illegalities of perjury, torture and wiretapping, on not filibustering rightwing judicial appointments and not voting to hold impeachment hearings, the capitulationists are not even in the center if you look at opinion polls.
The capitulationists (fronted by BO and HRC and led legislatively by Senate Majority Leader Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants Reps. Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel) are merely in the center of the legislature, where they keep leaning to the right in the fond, but unrequited, hope of obtaining Republican votes for compromise legislation. But these Bush Republicans, spoiled by six years of swaggering dominance that they even now do not fully concede having relinquished, think compromise beneath them. There is therefore no point negotiating with the current crop of Republicans because they are like dogs that have once tasted chicken blood. Having no restraint and no remaining domestic usefulness, they can be starved out.
Owing to their paucity of numbers, the future post-Bush pack of them will not need to be negotiated with in the same fearful spirit the current Democratic leadership now shows. All the signs are that the year 2008 is about to be a watershed change election in which Democrats increase their margins in House and Senate as well as taking the White House. The only real doubt is whether there will be a filibuster-proof 60 Senate Democrats in 2009; and that is not only not out of the question, it is very much in play. (This cannot count Joe Lieberman, who should be thrown into the outer darkness and have his chairmanships removed before he casts any more Republican lockstep votes in the Senate.)
Accordingly progressives, who see these changes coming far more clearly than establishmentarians do, want to make sure we have a progressive presidential nominee. We don’t want a Blair-like Obama or Clinton to restrain change and divert the precious few years of reforming energy away from the pent-up necessities. We have had one liberal Republican administration already, and that was Bill Clinton’s. We certainly do not need another one in order to repair the vicious constitutional, military, judicial, economic, environmental and social depredations of the Bushies, who are tied, perhaps not coincidentally, for the twin titles of the most right-wing as well as the most incompetent American administration of the last 100 years.
The center does count in 2008, but not the center of the legislature as of 2007. The center of 2009 will have moved considerably to the left in simple, normal compensation for the astonishing degree in which Bush pushed the center to the right for the last seven years. There will be reelections of Blue Dog Democrats, and some new ones; but the surge of traditional Democrats that is coming to House and Senate in 2009 will overwhelmingly change the legislative dynamic.
And all this happens in response to the change in the public mindset that has occurred because of the unnecessary, mendacious, disastrous and immoral war in Iraq. Recent polling lulls have allowed the alleged centrists and certified establishmentarians to seem to write off the war as a motivator for 2008; but once you disturb the American people by continuing a war they would not have wanted had they not been lied to, you must recognize that their anger will assert itself — again in 2008 as it did in 2006 — until change actually happens instead of being promised. The progressive belief is that this assertion will be stronger, not less strong, than before.
And every compromise with the unchastened Republicans now will be a failure of leadership that has to be rectified in 2009. There is going to be so much oversight, repair work and reform required in the next Congress that there is no point in adding to it further with ill-considered compromises over the next few months. If the Republicans in Congress remain impervious to change, then wait them out; don’t foolishly act as if legislation passed with their approval today is going to be in any way sufficient to the country’s gaping and neglected needs.
The country has changed; the legislature has to catch up; and the need for new Presidential leadership is as critical as it was in 1932, only the national crisis is not yet economic but is surely constitutional. At bottom, the theory of the Unitary Executive whereby the President can declare which laws he will obey must not be allowed to continue, even under a Democrat who might pursue it wisely.
Neither Obama nor Clinton has shown the requisite leadership on a sufficiently broad range of issues. Their rush toward centrism under the tutelage of Beltway consultants who listen to establishmentarian columnists is dooming them even now. By playing to each other’s consultants instead of to the increasingly progressive voters who are moving the Democratic center leftwards, they have created a draft for John Edwards. He looks poised to shock them both in Iowa and keep the contest going after New Hampshire, at which time all tatters of inevitability fall away from Clinton and Obama’s trimming looks less principled and more desperate.
The analogy Crook actually wants is to Mrs. Margaret Thatcher’s root-and-branch replacement of Labour mindsets and practices with uncompromising Toryism. She was neither elected by nor governed from the center. Her opponents were tired, they were futile, they were incompetent; and so are the legislative centrists of 2007. Democrats win in 2008 from the left (as she did in 1979 from the right). Neither Obama nor Clinton has evidenced the necessary steadfastness to occupy, proclaim and defend that ground toward which the center of the populace has already swung.
The center has moved past the centrists.
Posted by: Anonymous | December 19th, 2007 at 2:14 pm | Report this comment