An invocation and an injunction...

The progressive left and the gay and lesbian community have risen in outrage at President-elect Obama's choice of the evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration next month, noting that Warren is against abortion and also supported the California referendum prohibiting gay and lesbian marriage. As one example of this outrage, on the much-respected blog Hullabaloo, its creator digby claimed that Obama's choice of Warren was "validating the views of the Christian Right" and suggested sarcastically that Obama was now happy to dispose of support from liberals and to replace it with what he could get from social conservatives. This misinterprets the nature of a presidential inauguration and misreads Obama's mind.

A presidential inauguration is the one official ceremony of American government that traditionally has been conducted so as to unite, if only briefly, the entire nation in a moment of respect for our democracy and our shared civic life. If those who've denounced Rick Warren for his stands on social issues are raising a new standard for inaugurations -- that only individuals who agree with the policies of the new president should be allowed a visible role on the historic day -- then they might also need to exclude the outgoing president as well as congressional leaders of the other party. Inaugurations have traditionally been used to try to heal partisan and ideological divisions, not cement them.

Rick Warren has, apparently, treated Barack Obama with great respect, listened to his views, refrained from endorsing his opponent (though he appeared to agree with McCain on more issues), and permitted Obama to address his congregation on more than one occasion. The full number of Warren's followers isn't limited to those who share his religious views. They also include the 20 million purchasers of Warren's spiritual self-help book, "The Purpose-Driven Life." Warren's constituency is vast, and it's not limited to social conservatives, much less opponents of abortion or gay and lesbian rights. Unless Warren is to be branded as representing only two of his positions on social issues, giving him an inaugural role would seem to fit easily within the typically ecumenical, inclusive frame of the occasion.

But let's also look at what are likely to be the broader political reasons for such a choice by Obama, which may ultimately benefit and not harm progressive policies as well as the interests of the gay and lesbian community.

In most of the Western democracies, conservative parties and their allied media have controlled mainstream political discourse for more of the post-war period than their competitors. This includes Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.S. and Australia -- while Canada, New Zealand and the Nordic countries have had a more equal alternation between left and right, and the discourse has not been driven primarily by the right. There has been one main strategy for the left to attain power in the first group of countries: Make rhetorical feints to the right while capturing power in a crisis or recession, and then hold onto power in a centrist disguise while governing as progressively as seems possible. Clinton and Blair were the last two practitioners of this strategy, which did lead to partial re-regulation of markets and more resources for education, health and the environment.

Impatient with this kind of moderate-left governance, the progressive left in the U.S. has frequently marginalized itself, by chasing after fringe Don Quixotes like Ralph Nader or divisive internal challengers like Ted Kennedy in '80. This has always contributed to conservative election victories. In interviews and speeches, Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to terminate both partisan and ideological rancor. Why has he said this? Because the right's discourse is always ready to be more excessive than that of the left, since its victories depend on fear of the left -- they purvey and benefit from the rancor. Obama could not hope to deprive the right of its historical advantage in co-opting the media and political discourse by quickly pushing the most socially contentious progressive-left policies (or by embracing the opposite policies) upon taking power after an election decided on other grounds. The political media would obstruct every other initiative or urgent matter he wished to advance, in their obsession with social issues focused on sex and gender. Just look at how anxious they've been to change the subject of his presidential transition from new people and new policies to the sideshow of a corrupt governor from Obama's state.

This new president will be the first since Franklin Roosevelt to have both the latter's self-confidence and inspirational power and the inheritance of a national crisis so profound as to endanger the very viability of our economy, offering him enormous leverage for change. I think he is going to use this opportunity to try to move the country's discourse -- and with it, the way we even define the nation's purpose -- decisively away from the self-absorbed, intellectually bankrupt frame of reference given to us by an exhausted, frightened and increasingly frightening American right. If you were determined to transform the nation's default political assumptions, which have been largely conservative, would you begin by instantly gratifying everyone to your left and risking being labeled as a social revolutionary, thus reigniting the same kind of intemperate debates which spur the media to inflame political discord even further? Or would you begin by calming and reassuring all those who are alarmed that a highly intelligent, African-American former community organizer was about to assume the White House at a time of supreme presidential power (courtesy of his overreaching predecessor)? The left underestimates the undercurrent of apprehension focused on a man who embodies and doesn't merely articulate the need for dramatic change. Better to lower the temperature of precipitous critics by showing that you're going to govern on behalf of everyone, even those who might be afraid of who you are and what you may do.

Thus far the common traits of Obama's Cabinet appointees have been their competence, political skills and prodigious intelligence, which have impressed the gatekeepers of mainstream thinking. Apart from stagecraft, that is all that's been happening so far in this transition. The new president hasn't been sworn in yet, but those who stand the most to benefit from a new political discourse in America are swearing about who's giving the invocation at the swearing-in. They seem happy to echo unwittingly the acrimony of the old discourse, instead of permitting this unprecedented figure with a great gift of persuasion to fashion a gentler way of introducing the nation to a different way of governing, and a different way of talking about it. One thing certainly to be enjoined now, after a period of extraordinary intolerance by the right, is a little tolerance from the left. That's what the President-elect is offering.

Lincoln and Obama

Politico has an article today quoting the historians Eric Foner and Sean Wilentz as decrying the comparisons of Barack Obama with Abraham Lincoln. The article suggests that Wilentz sees Obama's comments about Lincoln as "brazen", and that Foner says that comparing oneself to Lincoln is "hubris". But neither historian has any real basis for criticizing Barack Obama for comparing himself to Lincoln because Obama hasn't done that. He's only identified Lincoln as having had certain attributes of character and political leadership which he'd like to emulate. There is nothing "preening" about that. What's wrong with Obama taking as his presidential model the greatest president we've ever had? Would we rather he look to Chester Arthur or Warren Harding? And there certainly is a basis in fact for noticing similarities between Lincoln and Obama at the beginning of their presidencies: Each man had spent more time in the Illinois legislature than in Congress before being nominated for president, each man was initially given no chance by political insiders of being nominated, each was a man whose presidential prospects rose dramatically after the extraordinary impact that his speeches had on his listeners, each was known for his writing ability, each was a lawyer who revered the Constitution and the other founding documents, each man emphasized that "reason" rather than passion or prejudice should guide our politics, and each was impressed with the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass (Lincoln met him, Obama read him). Neither Sean Wilentz nor Eric Foner are privileged guardians of Lincoln's legacy. That belongs to all of us, and all of us in this democracy are entitled to judge Obama's accomplishments as president by any model we wish, including that of Lincoln. "Let history judge" is not the standard. Let the people judge.

Feathers ruffled on the left

Feathers are ruffled on the left of the Democratic Party about the supposedly insufficient liberal hue of some of President-elect Obama's key appointments so far. Into the fray comes Obama aide Steve Hildebrand, who in a now-famous post on The Huffington Post gently chastises these critics for their temerity. This condescension to his intra-party critics doesn't do any favors for Obama. It's one thing to reach out to your partisan foes who share key concerns with you, i.e. an interest in strong national security. Being gratuitously dismissive of the way that part of your base expresses its concerns is quite another. But the reality is that Obama's appointments so far have tilted toward experience and professional competence at the slight expense of ideological purity, and that's a wise trade-off -- especially when you consider that there are few if any people on the left of the Democratic Party who have experience equivalent to the most critcized appointees, such as Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary and Gen. James Jones as National Security Advisor. Remember that Obama and the Office of the Presidency itself are both brand new (after the financial "bail out") to the job of managing the nation's financial system -- the new president absolutely needs an insider like Geithner. And remember too that Obama is brand new to the job of managing relationships with the defense and intelligence establishments of the 20 or 30 countries that are our key NATO and other allies -- while Gen. Jones knows that professional landscape like the back of his hand. Obama is not the kind of man who'll be a puppet of his inner circle, and well-traveled heavyweights like Jones or Hillary Clinton have long records studded with various statements that are easy to characterize as insufficiently this or egregiously that on one issue or another. Their past words are not necessarily prologue to their future actions. But Obama needs their tactical expertise. And for their part, the critics are useful in flagging issues to monitor. It's all good.

What John F. Kennedy Represented...

Al Giordano, writing on his blog The Field about the possible appointment of Caroline Kennedy to take Hillary Clinton's seat in the U.S. Senate, has suggested in essence that it would reinforce the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, replacing a Clinton (whose husband made peace with "corporate interests" during his presidency) with a Kennedy. But I'm not sure that, in any meaningful way beyond networks of people oriented to Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton, there is a "Kennedy wing" in the Democratic Party which is more liberal than a "Clinton wing". Too much is made of left, right and center when it comes to Democrats: What unites them is paying attention to the lives and communities of real people, and taking public action to lift up our whole society -- rather than being mesmerized by party dogma that locks us into various fears and hatreds, as Republicans displayed again during the presidential campaign.

What President Kennedy represented was not some kind of canned liberalism (he was superficially criticized at the time, by the older generation of Adlai Stevenson lovers, for being too conservative). He and his family and followers in the '60s were about far more than political labels; they embodied an intelligent boldness about renewing American leadership -- in science, security through peace, civil rights, and all the other larger and liberating dimensions of our life together as Americans, and as human beings. He incarnated the spirit of leadership. I think that's what Teddy and Caroline Kennedy saw in Barack Obama. And that's what's different from Bill Clinton's way of operating, which was to take existing political beliefs and invent a way of getting elected and surviving within them. What was his vision? A "bridge to the 21st century"? Just what did that mean?

In the 1980's, Gary Hart (who was among those who had originally been propelled into political life by the example of the Kennedys) embodied that spirit of intelligent boldness, and it's unfortunate that his personal indiscretions forced him out of politics. If, as expected, he'd been elected president in '88, Bill Clinton would have stayed in Arkansas and the progressive spirit of Democrats might have been reasserted long before now. In January 2008, Gary Hart unhesitatingly endorsed Barack Obama. He saw the same thing that Teddy saw: This man will grasp the future. Obama is not only about his own political success. He's about our common success.

Pragmatism doesn't preclude dramatic change

An article by the progressive author and media critic Norman Solomon, "The Ideology of No Ideology" (http://www.truthout.org/112608R), notes that many pundits' characterization of President-elect Obama's appointments as reflecting "pragmatism" rather than ideology can't really be accurate, since the people selected certainly have ideas. Then he goes on to shed doubt about the past ideas of some appointees, claiming that Treasury nominee Timothy Geithner and economic advisor Lawrence Summers favored the deregulation of corporate power that brought on the present financial meltdown. In these remarks, Solomon joins many on the left who have begun to measure the ideological inseam of Obama's appointees and question their suitability for service to Obama -- as if Obama were not the best judge of that.

The fact of the matter is that Barack Obama's appointments have -- every one of them so far -- been relentlessly technocratic. He has chosen people who know how the present system works, before assembling a full team with whom he says he wants to change it. If he recruited people who did not know how to restructure the nation's financial system, which is necessarily dependent on private capital formation and private employment, American economic power would go right down the drain -- and nothing progressive would be done for the rest of Obama's time in office, because there would be no public resources to draw upon. The nation is having an unprecedented financial crisis. When you're in a ship and a storm comes up, you want a crew around the captain who've been through storms before. Noam Chomsky is not going to be able to advise Obama about how to revive the nation's mortgage credit system.

But if technocratic appointments are a form of pragmatism in the midst of crisis, it does not follow that knowledgeable pragmatists will merely acquiesce to the prevailing arrangements of economic power or any other dimension of the existing system. That might be the tendency in calm seas, but getting a ship to shore when it otherwise might sink can make pragmatic sailors take extraordinary measures.

To imply that a pragmatic imperative cannot override a decision-maker's favorite ideas or that a true pragmatist may be empty of useful ideas -- both of which Solomon argues -- overlooks the political reasons for Obama's explicit preference for technical intelligence above partisan or ideological attachments in choosing people to help him cope not only with the present economic crisis, but also with the crisis in international confidence in American policy-making, and the decline that has become visible in the nation's scientific, educational and physical infrastructure. The recent election produced a leader who many Americans still regard as startling and largely unfamiliar. Obama knows that better than anyone. In order to enlarge and consolidate his perceived mandate to govern and expand the popular acceptance of the changes that he says he wants to make, it makes perfect sense to enlarge the strategic and tactical capacities of the group he's assembling to govern and thus boost the public's confidence in his government.

Less than a quarter of Americans according to the exit polls on November 4 said they were "liberal", much less progressive. That was markedly less than those who said they are conservative, even though the majority leans toward specific policies that anyone would recognize as progressive (e.g. for public investment in infrastructure and human resources, against involvement in foreign wars unless homeland security is at stake). Obama has said he wants to transcend if not historically subvert the entire mainstream-media discourse about liberal and conservative, left and right -- in order to assemble a new, enduring majority for policies that his most fervent supporters believe are more progressive than they are centrist, much less conservative. One way to do that, until serious change is underway, is to embrace pragmatism -- the determination to "get 'er done" -- which has not only strong roots in popular discourse but also in American political philosophy (and constitutional jurisprudence, with which Obama is not unacquainted). In this context, the larger economic crisis, while painful and fraught with risk to the nation, is a historic opportunity.

Bearing in mind this context, let's examine the political basis of the selections of Joe Biden as vice president, Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Secretary of State, and Rahm Emmanuel as White House Chief of Staff, each of whom has been roundly criticized from the left as being too likely to favor the use of military power in a foreign crisis. Going in reverse order: Rahm Emmanuel is not known primarily for foreign policy expertise. He started out as a fund raiser for Illinois political candidates, became an inside campaign operative, and then decided to run for Congress himself. Lots of people in politics start out as a "process" person, and about lots of them it can charitably be said that they are reliable party line followers, vote so as to please their constituency, or tack toward interests that fund their campaigns. Their votes in Congress tend not to enforce deeply held principles. Rahm Emmanuel has been accused of sympathizing with Israeli hawks. But as an American politician first and foremost, he is extremely unlikely to be a peddler of military intervention for its own sake inside the Obama White House; he's only likely to point out the political consequences of option A vs. option B. That he will be Obama's chief of staff should tell us that Obama does not want substantive foreign policy direction from his chief of staff.

Hillary Clinton has policy interests and great intelligence, sufficient to supply her with a substantive philosophy. Does she have one? Over the years her discourse has been all over the map, having taken political positions that have either given her prominence at the moment or that situated herself in a well-protected spot in the public debate. But because she was excoriated by the right-wing throughout her husband's presidency as being an extreme liberal, she began her service in the Senate wanting to wrap the national-security cloak around herself in order to counteract that charge and, and more importantly, develop the reputation of being tough enough to be president, because she would be the first serious woman presidential candidate in history. If there was going to be a way for her to back a military intervention at about the time of the Iraq war, it's possible that her opportunism would have driven her to it. Does that make her likely to favor war in all circumstances? No. Unlike Joe Lieberman, she never spent time smooching up the neo-cons or writing bellicose op-eds in The Wall Street Journal. If Obama picks her for the State Department, it will be because he thinks her global recognizability and kerosene-and-pitchfork personality will help sober up any ornery dictators or state sponsors of terrorism who he sends her to deal with. She'll make Condoleeza Rice look like a drum majorette. But to become a heroine as Secretary of State will require enormous diplomatic strides, even a major peace agreement. To make history from Foggy Bottom, you can't defer too quickly to wars planned across the river.

Joe Biden is more knowledgeable about foreign policy than Clinton, but also more embedded in the weeds of it to such an extent that his rationales for particular positions and programs often begin to sound incoherent. He knows too much and says too much and can't sell much of it to anybody. He was picked as Obama's running mate for other reasons: (1) Other possible nominees that Obama reportedly liked more would have been pounded by the media as inexperienced on the national stage (Sebelius, Kaine) or too conservative and dull (Bayh); and (2) Biden was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and would therefore be Exhibit A against the expected McCain charge that Obama wasn't ready to be in the White House. Also Obama liked his personal narrative and commitment to family (very big things for Obama). How Biden stood on the war in Iraq or even the overall vector of his views on foreign policy did not seem to factor at all into Obama's choice of him. Biden will be in the room when major foreign policy decisions are influenced or made, but he will not have his thumb on the scale.

Could Obama have chosen people for these positions who would be more progressive on key issues and still have delivered equivalent political advantages? That's far from clear. But what is crystal clear is that as progressives think about opportunities to make their case against any problematic nominees or against particular suggested courses of action by the new president, they should make sure their views are seen as a reasoned and serious analysis, rather than as pique about a loss of ideological purity. Analysis based on criticizing Obama's embrace of pragmatism at a time of national crisis is self-marginalizing. If progressives want to help the inner progressive in Obama to emerge more readily, they should not start their relationship with him by denouncing him for doing things that he may have other, extremely good political reasons for doing and which will not inhibit or preclude an eventual progressive direction from the preponderance of what he does.

Thus far, not only is Obama getting good "process knowledge" in his earliest appointees, he's also scoring so highly with the mainstream media and policy community, that his ability to summon and sustain political force, so as to work his will with Congress, Wall Street and "main street" will be unprecedented for a new president since Lyndon Johnson in January 1965. He is not trying to build such a formidable position of power in order to do timid, incremental things or to do the bidding of those who created the present crisis and did nothing to get him elected. Marxist blogs are alive with charges that Obama is a caged pigeon of capitalists, but Marxist blogs are written in Fantasyland.

Barack Obama wants to consolidate his electoral mandate and govern from strength -- in an age when a fickle media can pound the living daylights out of the public's perception of a president. Remember how George W. Bush went from Hero of the War on Terror, to Incompetent Buffoon, in two years flat? He was neither -- he simply refused to pay attention to reality, jammed his way forward on the basis of an arrogant ideology, and in the process did historic damage to the nation's economy and world position, which finally not even the mainstream media could ignore. That's one way that ideology can most definitely matter, but perhaps not in the way that Norman Solomon would recommend.

Plea to the chattering class...

The estimable Arianna Huffington has a new post on her blog in which she claims that the rumored nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State has had "an enormous effect" on Barack Obama's "brand." She then speculates about what famous novelists of the past might have done with this gripping drama. Excuse me: I think everyone with access to a blog would do well to set aside the "brands", "memes", and "narratives" which they believe define the identity and opportunities of our elected leaders. Barack Obama defined reality on November 4 when he won a popular-vote victory larger than any previous presidential nominee who was not an incumbent. Teeth-gnashing about Hillary Clinton, caterwauling from National Review editors in love with Sarah Palin, post-election tantrums about media coverage from Time magazine's Mark Halperin, and all the rest of the psycho-drama from the chattering political class will have a shelf-life of maybe two hours, if we'd all just start focusing on the concrete realities of what is happening to the American economy and what the newly elected president is going to do about it. The nation has borrowed the price of its future from Chinese banks, the outgoing president is a laughing-stock, and the meter is still running on two wars where Americans are dying on dusty roads. Can we please, then, stop speculating about who leaked what to whom about Hillary -- and stop paying attention to those who do?

Obama's "post-partisan" style helps him, not Republicans

From a Comment on Hullabaloo, digby's blog, 11/24/08, "Crisis Management":

digby is right to reassure us that Obama's pragmatism will not affirm the irrational fears of our friends on the left that he'll govern from the "center right", since pragmatism dictates boldness in clearing away the misguided policies from the right that have created the present crises. But she shouldn't be worried either about Obama's feints to exhibit bipartisanship -- for that is what they are. Commander of the bully pulpit already, he will govern with decisive majorities in both houses of Congress and a probable sky-high approval rating as he takes office. Because he doesn't need to be bipartisan in function or reality, being bipartisan in tone and gesture will make any Republicans who haven't been Palinized grateful to share any photo-ops with him -- because, wanting to be re-elected themselves, they know they will not have any coherent strategy for substantive opposition, in the middle of national crises, for the foreseeable future. They are peering over the edge into a political abyss. To be pulled back by the new president himself will put them in his pocket. It is cost-free for Obama to embrace bipartisanship -- or really, to be post-partisan -- at a time when he dominates the stage, because he can dictate its terms.