E.J. Dionne looks past the MSM fixation on ephemera to describe the deeper significance of Obama's somewhat politically contradictory position taking during the past few weeks in a new Op-Ed that is well worth reading.
Over the last week, the true nature of Obama's political project has come into much clearer view. He is out to build a new and enduring political establishment, located slightly to the left of center but including everyone except the far right. That's certainly a bracing idea, since Washington has not seen a liberal establishment since the mid-1960s.
Read the whole column at http://www.sacbee.com/...
Obama will strive, Dionne says, to keep anyone from calling this "movement" a new "liberal establishment." But it WILL be left of center, and it will wind up isolating the far right (read: Republican Party) for a generation.
E.J. Dionne Op-Ed is called "Obama's 'establishment' offers promise, if it stays realistic." I think it offers more than "promise."
Dionne writes, "Bill Clinton tried to create a Third Way. Now, President Barack Obama is doing it." Dionne points out that the "liberal establishment" in the 1960's established Medicare, food stamps, Head Start, and federal aid for schools. It passed the civil rights laws that enabled us in 2008 to elect our first African American president.
Explaining Obama's current foreign policy in this context, Dionne points out that the 1960's liberal establishment "was also resolutely tough-minded in its approach to foreign policy and national security....And it is no accident that the Vietnam War was that philosophy's undoing." LBJ was "fearful that a communist victory in Vietnam would revive the far right's critique of alleged liberal weakness," and this caused him to go "into Southeast Asia with guns blazing."
Dionne gives a first hand account of how Obama is carrying out his agenda to create this new political alignment. Building this new alignment "requires him to send rather different messages to its component parts. Playing to several audiences at once can lead to awkward moments."
So on Thursday, before Obama's speech on Guantánamo detainee treatment, journalists were ushered into the White House and unbeknownst to them, were divided into two groups, a centrist group with some moderate conservatives, and a "liberal" group, which included Dionne. Obama then made an unscheduled appearance at each briefing.
To the liberal group, Obama emphasized the aspects of his detainee plan that break from Bush policies, and to the centrist group, he emphasized the "toughness" of his approach and that it matched with Bush's more moderate moves in his second term.
This dual selling job "was helped immensely by former Vice President Dick Cheney's attacks on Obama right after the president's speech."
Dionne says the left, while unhappy about Obama's decisions on preventive detention, got reminded by "Cheney's outlandish explosion...of how much better Obama is than the guys who came before."
This caused the left to concentrate much of its fire on Cheney. Meanwhile, the center and near right, dismissed Cheney as "over-the-hill" and commented that Obama's position was "sound" and "realistic."
Dionne thinks Obams's next move (in the chess game he is always playing three steps ahead) is to bring civil libertarians and moderate conservatives together to work out the rules on handling detainees.
"These [rules] would be more protective of their rights than Bush's were but tougher than the American Civil Liberties Union might have in mind."
In the domestic arena, Obama's "center-left two-step" means he is pushing "programs that progressives have sought for years – and in the case of health care, for decades." On the economy, however, he has moved to the center, rejecting the approach of nationalizing banks and working with the financial establishment.
The Obama goal: a more regulated financial market, but no disruption of "the basic arrangements of American capitalism." The result: "investment bankers will make a bit less money and pay more in taxes, but they'll still be rich."
Dionne's view, and the key point here:
The establishment Obama is trying to build would make the country better – more equal, more just and more conscious of the government's constitutional obligations. The far right is being isolated, and Republicans are simply lost.
Dionne is concerned that "establishments have a habit of becoming too confident in their ability to manipulate people and events, and too certain of their own moral righteousness." That would be the "liberal" concern, because it's exactly what brought down the Rove Republicans so suddenly and spectacularly. But for now, I'll accept Obama's chess game, and laugh as the Repubs cannibalize one another as they fight it out for the "soul" (ha) of THEIR party.
UPDATE: Apropos of the thrust of this diary, everyone should read a new front-page L.A. Times article describing how Obama has pulled all the stakeholders (except the Repubs) together to make significant advances just this week on raising CAFE standards, etc. The bottom line: business sees the train leaving the station, and wants on board.
The Times story is at:
http://www.latimes.com/...