The Left isn't really stupid. I just couldn't think of a catchy title that incorporated "ignorant" into it. The Left is just ignorant of the core of his progressivism. It's not in his policies. The core of his progressivism is in his empathic process. This process is unprecedented in American politics, and it's nearly unprecendented even in psychotherapy and ministry, which is where you might expect to find it. So it's no failing to be ignorant of the use of empathy in politics and governing. Obama has tried obliquely to explicate it with poor results. He hasn't helpfully enough defined his process. I can help.
Perhaps the only well defined version of empathic process as it is used in political relations is in the work of James Blight, the prominent international relations expert in the Watson Institute of Brown. In the book he co-wrote with Robert MacNamara, Wilson's Ghost, he lifts up the concept, "realistic empathy." He means something very simple and easy to agree with. He means that you have to thoroughly understand your opponents' positions from their point of view. If you don't, you're doomed to create self-defeating policies. But this simple version of empathy doesn't go far enough.
Obama understands Blight's principle of relationships and more. What Blight doesn't explain is how empathy can be deepened to most powerfully influence someone. The simple version of this deeper empathy is exemplified in Obama's now famous speech on race in Philadelphia. He did the unprecedented. He empathized with white racists, helping to understand why they might be angry at black people. And his explanation was not demeaning; it wasn't even condescending. It was respectful. It is no wonder then that so many commentators of various stripes expressed profound respect for this speech. Gary Willis, the noted Northwestern historian, writing in The New York Review of Books, compared it vary favorably to one of Lincoln's most important speeches.
This deeper empathy is the heart and soul of what Obama demonstrated in Chicago during his community organization days. For example, other folks in the black community didn't care to include some of the white pastors in one of the organization events. Obama insisted that they were included. I wish everyone could read what the people who worked with him then said about his progressivism. There's an implicit primer on profound empathic process in their reflections.
This way of relating to people goes against the grain of polical saavy both on the Left and the Right. The usual emphasis is on taking a principled position and sticking to it. Obama understands that the obvious progressive principles are, to a large degree, secondary to the principle of empathy/respect. If you want the entire society to change, you have to find a policy position that reflects sufficient respect and concern for enough people to enable them to listen to and trust in your attempts to move them in a progressive direction. This is extremely difficult because of the wide variety of sensibilities. You just can't be sensitive to everyone at once. You can only be sensitive enough to everyone to enable them to follow you, however skeptically. The psychotherapy method I employ, Realistic Empathy Therapy, describes how therapists doing marital counseling must take "equidistant" positions, positions that substantially enough capture the sensibitilies of both parties.
Obama's faith-based initiative is, I believe, the best example of an "equidistant" policy, although his speech on race is the best example of a philosophical basis of a policy. It accomplishes the obvious aim of supporting the Right and the Middle. But it does so ingeniously. He insists that the programs must work. What a concept! So these programs will be competing for funds just as any secular non-profit does. Success in helping people is the bottom line criterion for funding. In addition, he also insists that the programs refrain from proselytizing. The hacks on the religious Right will not like this principle, but the reasonable folks on the Right will respect it.
For those progressives unfamililar with faith-based programs that fit these criteria, I can help. I am an ordained Presbyterian minister (ordained, 1970), and I have Advanced Certification in the Association of Clinical Pastoral Educators. This organization trains chaplains for practically every prison, mental hospital and general hospital in the U.S. When I was in training at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, the place Kennedy was taken after he was shot, I saw first hand what a faith based program was like.
We ministered to all comers, included atheists. We asked simply if they wanted to talk. We were like friendly visitors but were trained in being sensitive to the psychological, as well as spiritual needs of the patients. Our emphasis was on becoming peers with secular counseling staff. And we did. One of my supervisors was selected to be the Clinical Director of a very large delinquency center by all of the psychiatrists, psychologistis, and social workers in the center, because he was clearly the most effective in helping delinquents and most effective in helping other clinicians to help the clientele. We only pursued religious themes when the clients wanted to. And althogh I can't speak for all chaplains, I tried very hard in my philosophical and religious studies to see the correspondence of the best in humanism and the best in religion, and I tried to translate my findings into my non-denominational ministry in these institutions. This is the kind of faith based program Obama knows personally and wants to encourage. He knows that separation of Church and State partly means encouraging both, not prizing one over the other.
It's understandable that the Lleft is skeptical of Obama's latest policy pronouncements. But I think that if we analyzed each one of them carefully and broadly to include all of what he has said, we would see the principle of profound empathy at work in his decision. Many on the Left say he is only epxedient and even centrist and worse. He was perhaps only fooling when he first garnered support from the Left. I don't think so. I think that, at root, he may be more deeply committed to progressive change than his critics on the Left inasmuch as he is willing to stand in the middle and get creamed by both sides in the name of real lasting change.
Obama is at least much more deeply committed to progressivism than a superficial reading of his policies allows. There is a core of profound empathy in him that is difficult to understand because it is so unfamiliar. But for those of us who have spent a lifetime plumbing the meanings and uses of empathy, he does seem an ideal candidate, regardless of specific policies he is forced to take for the sake of engendering enough of a consensus to move the country toward lasting, substantial progressive change.