New York Times (March 12, 2010) "Getting Obama Right"
By David Brooks
Who is Barack Obama?
If you ask a conservative Republican, you are likely to hear that Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.
If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.
You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.
The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.
He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center — in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.
But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.
Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He’s just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That’s just not a fair reading of his agenda.
Take health care. He has pushed a program that expands coverage, creates exchanges and moderately tinkers with the status quo — too moderately to restrain costs. To call this an orthodox liberal plan is an absurdity. It more closely resembles the center-left deals cut by Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, or Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Obama has pushed this program with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history; with more tenacity than Bill Clinton pushed his health care plan or George W. Bush pushed Social Security reform.
Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency.
Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term. Obama conducted a long review of the Afghan policy and was genuinely moved by the evidence. He has emerged as a liberal hawk, pursuing victory in Iraq and adopting an Afghan surge that has already utterly transformed the momentum in that war. The Taliban is now in retreat and its leaders are being assassinated or captured at a steady rate.
Take finance. Obama and Tim Geithner are vilified on the left as craven to Wall Street and on the right as clueless bureaucrats who know nothing about how markets function. But they have tried with halting success to find a center-left set of restraints to provide some stability to market operations.
In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.
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Brooks writes, “We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect.” This statement from the last paragraph is, I think, the thesis and the most important point that Brooks makes here. My sense is that too few Americans, let alone Christians in America, obtain the majority of their information from print sources (or an online analogue to a print source). There is no perfect source of information. I’m not even sure that “perfect” is appropriate word here. But TV, radio, and blog sources seem to be severly unreliable because they tend toward extremes in their delivery. And millions see/hear/read them every day. Of course there are extreme publications as well, but no one (relatively speaking) reads them. The 24 hour news cycle plays a part in all this as well in that if you play or air the same tragedy every 30 minutes (or 15 minutes as the case may be) for days straight viewers/listeners might get the impression that its bigger, more devastating, and more threatening to “everyone” than it actually is. If you air, or have pundits comment on, the same offensive or idiotic quote by some politician during every 30 minute segment throughout the news day and a person subjects him to that commentary for several hours a day, he might get the impression that the politician is more incompetent, more arrogant, or more immoral than he actually is. Because of the plethora of sources available to most Americans today, we really can seek out our respective “information cocoons” and allow them to utterly shape (or distort) our view of reality.
ReplyDeleteI want to address the dangers I see for Christians in this context. Brooks says that if one looks at the perspectives of partisans on both sides with regard to President Obama one finds views that are diametrically opposed. I agree. The questions we have to ask are the following: is it usually helpful to say that if one is not a liberal then one must be a conservative, or if one is not a Republican then one must be a Democrat, or if one is for freedom of the individual one must be against any positive view or function of government? No, it serves to confuse people and creates no space for actual debate. There ARE genuine disagreements between conservatives and liberals in the American political setting that ought to be vigorously debated. But should Christians always be willing to define our political convictions within these pre-determined parameters? No, because then we become just another interest group that can be placated and incorporated by one of the two political parties, often by simply paying lip service to a few key issues. I realize that not every Christian has the time or desire to be a sophisticated observer and participant in state and national politics, but what we can all do is resist the mind set that there is somehow a coherent political philosophy deserving of our support which connects, for example, a commitment to outlaw abortion with other Republican positions on health care reform or U.S. foreign policy. The point is, just because you’re not a Democrat, this doesn’t mean you’re a Republican. If you’re a Christian and a thoughtful conservative, then it ought to be because you have considered and can now articulate how this political framework affirms the biblical theme of justice and some school of thought within Christian social ethics. More can be said on the substance of this at a later time.
In addition to what I’ve just said, I wouldn’t mind hearing responses to Brooks’ characterizations of the President as a “center-left pragmatic reformer,” as misunderstood by most partisans, etc.