Idiots and Ideologues

My buddy Mike and I have had an on-going argument since Barack Obama was elected in 2008.  While both of us agreed he was an unabashed leftist, I claimed he would learn from the mistakes of Bill Clinton's early presidency and initially govern from the middle.  After he'd won a few victories which included Republican support, particularly a middle-of-the road stimulus package which actually helped economic recovery and convinced the skeptical, he would then have the political capital he needed to push his leftist agenda.  Mike claimed the opposite, that Obama would run immediately to the left - that he could do no other - and that he didn't give a damn about building coalitions or wooing public opinion.   If he did take such a track, I claimed, he would fail.

Well, he didn't fail.  Obama got his leftist agenda through, so far as he could.  He signed into law a leftist stimulus package, a semi-socialist health care bill, and an over-reaching financial regulation bill.  So on that level, Mike was correct and I was wrong.

But I still think I was right about tactics.  Obama had won over leftist and independents during the 2008 campaign.   All he needed was to bring over a portion of the less conservative wing of the Republican party during the first few months of his administration.  To do so he simply needed to compromise his agenda a little, and not much.  Once accomplished, the right would have been disarmed and his legislative opportunities would have opened up.  Then he could run left, and he would have had much more public support because he would have proved his bona fides.

So, though it seems I've lost the argument with Mike, it's good to see someone as brilliant as Jay Cost agrees with me:

Was there an alternative approach the President could have taken? I think so. Such a tactic would have acknowledged the sizeable McCain bloc. McCain won 22 states, making his coalition a politically potent minority. Obama should have governed in light of this. I don't mean in hock to it. He didn't have to make Sarah Palin his domestic policy advisor, but he should have ignored the hagiographers who were quick to declare him the next FDR. These flatterers always manifest themselves anytime a new Democrat comes to the White House, and they are of very little help for Democratic Presidents who actually want to be great.

What he should have done instead was disarm his opponents. If he had built initial policy proposals from the middle, he could have wooed the moderate flank of the Republican party, marginalized the conservatives, and alleviated the concerns of those gettable voters in the South and the Midwest. This is precisely what Bill Clinton did between 1995 and 2000, and it is what the President's promises of "post-partisanship" suggested.

Our system of government can only produce policy when geographically broad coalitions favor it. The Senate, more than any other institution, forces such breadth. Obama created breadth the wrong way. He watered down initially liberal legislation to prompt just enough moderate Democrats to sign on. Instead, he should have built policy from the center, then worked to pick up enough votes on either side. The left would have been disappointed, but the right would have been marginalized and, most importantly, Independent voters - who have abandoned the President in droves - might still be on board.

This argument is the one I've been making to Mike for over a year now. But it matters little at this point what either I or Jay Cost thinks. Mike was right about the tactical strategy the Obama administration would pursue. But at what cost? They've gotten much of their agenda passed using this strategy. But they've whipped up a furious backlash that might cost Obama the House and the Senate, and perhaps, eventually, his presidency. At the very least it seems the opportunity to pass any more large, leftist programs are gone for the balance of Obama's presidency, even if he is re-elected (barring a rogue lame-duck session after the November midterm.) If the backlash is as successful as many of us hope, it even threatens to undo the much of his legislative success thus far.

Which leads to the other, related, argument Mike and I have been having. Are they more idiot or ideologue? For much of the first eighteen months of this administration I've argued the former, that incompetency rules the roost inside the White House. Mike claims that what I see as incompetence is often strategy, or at least the beginning of strategy. For instance he believes that within hours of the BP explosion, where many of us saw tragedy, and in the following weeks incompetence, this administration saw opportunity: opportunity to ban off-shore drilling, one of their long term goals. So letting the oil spew forth, allowing the public to see it as a disaster of unparalleled proportions, was a good thing, a strategy. They would then have more of the public on-board when they announced their clearly illegal ban on drilling.  I've come around to Mike's way of thinking, as many others have, and I've decided that I can no longer interpret this administration's actions in the traditional terms of political strategy.  Their way of thinking about the world is so different from most of us it is futile to do so.  We must start to interpret the Obama administration's actions in the light of who they are: leftists who've spent their lives marinating in the intellectual snobbery of academia and in the tactics practiced on the streets of Chicago.  They have a contempt for the United States of America at large, and a disdain for ordinary Americans like you and I.  They are ideologues marching to their own faith.  So in my initial argument with Mike, wherein I posited that Obama would work the middle first before he move left, I was clearly naive.  Martin Luther claimed that, in adherence to his faith, he could do no other.  It's clear now that Barack Obama, in adherence to his own faith, that of unbridled leftism, can likewise do no other.