The adjective "motley" does not mean what, in my experience, most people think it does.
1: variegated in color (e.g., a motley coat)
2: composed of diverse and often incongruous elements (e.g., a motley crowd)
People often think that "motley" means "of poor quality." That is because, traditionally, items that are motley often are of poor quality. A patchwork coat, or a jester's outfit, is motley. (A beautiful paisley is also motley, but we don't usually describe it using that term.) A "motley assortment of furniture" is often the result of not having the money to purchase the vaunted "matching set"; a "motley crew," assembled of people who don't seem to belong or mesh together, is often one cobbled together of necessity. (The same goes for a "motley coalition," such as Democrats.)
We have a motley President. His ancestry is literally motley -- delightfully so, in fact -- but that is not my interest here. It is his motley belief system that interests me. There is much that is bad in it; disagree if you wish, but after this either stupid, weak, or evil (choose your poison) debt-ceiling deal, I don't think that that's much up for debate. (That debate will occur below anyway, but it will be nothing new. Expect a motley comments section.)
The question for me is: is the good Obama brings with him -- and there is good -- worth the bad? Or maybe the question is: how -- if at all -- do we embrace the good in President Obama without being tarnished, in our souls and in our political effectiveness, by the bad?
Put otherwise: how do we progressives craft a political message, for those amenable to it, that we can use Obama for our purposes? This is, frankly, the only message that has a chance of resonating with many (not all, not most, just "many") voters. (Again, many people reading this will loudly deny it. If they don't want progressives to answer this question, they can try to shout us down.)
This diary initiates what I envision as a four-part series:
Tuesday: "What sort of politician is President Obama?"
Wednesday: "What does it mean to vote for someone?"
Thursday (and I promise, this diary written for the President's 50th birthday will amaze and astound you): "How we can primary President Obama."
I don't yet know what Friday is, but I have a feeling that I'll need a conclusion.
For today, though, let's consider our motley, patchwork, incongruous President.
Return of the Pie Hole
Over the last few days, the fault lines on this website have become more clear. There have been Obama partisans until now, and also Obama detractors, and then a bunch of us in the middle. I have considered myself in the latter group. I still do, in some sense, but this debt-ceiling debacle has pushed many of us off of the fence. We have come to the great division of the next 15 months on this site, and it is a familiar one: "SYFPH."
I'm writing this essay series with the hope that it may extend its reach beyond Daily Kos alone, so I'm going to watch my language a bit here. "SYFPH" was, so far as I recall, a term coined by our excellent (and currently erstwhile) contributor Jeff "Yes, that Jeff Lieber" Lieber in the months leading up to the 2004 election. It sought to advise people on how and when they should criticize the positions and practices of Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry. It stands for "Shut Your F%&@ing Pie Hole." (Let's pronounce that middle word, for these purposes, as "fracking.")
This week, we have entered the SYFPH stage of the internal debate. Let's take a moment to appreciate the ludicrousness of our situation.
Obama's Cunning Plan
Obama's advisors have a theory of victory. Oh boy, do they have a theory. Obama's willingness to "compromise," to see the baby saved rather than cut in half as the Republicans were prepared to do, will attract (!) and excite (!!) independent voters to his side. He will also, presumably, do exceeding well with the unicorn vote.
I'm not going to bother going through all the problems with this tenuous (but very convenient) theory, though I will remind everyone that voters like "strong" over "weak" even more than they do "good" over "bad," and the Republicans came out of this looking very strong. Obama and his advisors are so desperately and dramatically out of touch with average people that they expect them to accept a vicious thwacking by our opponents as a victory. They really think -- they really think! -- that voters will reward Obama for being a responsible mainstream politician even if, as one has to expect from these proposals, they will destroy jobs and mire the economy in a rut when we need it to have arisen. It is as if, the day after Election Day 2012, they will claim that no one could have foreseen a Republican campaign based on the slogan "where are the jobs?"
"You guys killed them!"
"Hey, you agreed to it!"
At the same time, they think that support for Obama is so fragile that a few of us saying, in spasms of candor, that the Emperor Has No Clothes can destroy him, so we had better shut up and fall into line! The contradiction between believing that Obama has been deftly setting up the pathway to victory and that such victory depends on a lockstep ideological rigidity that requires us to -- sorry, but I don't have a better word for it -- lie to voters about what has happened this week does not appear to sink in for them.
At some point one can't argue with such people. One has to work around them. They, in turn, are welcome to work around us. We're seeking largely the same ends, after all. Few of us, besides the "things must get worse before they get better" Leninists, want the Republicans to win, after all. Our problem is how to deal with the problem that our political strageists are nuts and demand nuttiness from their followers.
You can't talk reasonably to true believers, whether in politics or religion, because they can't accept that others don't accept their premises. The notion that people just won't give people much credit for having fought by Marquis of Queensbury rules when the Republicans strode around with brass knuckles and tire irons is simply lost on many prominent Democrats. "It should be, therefore it is."
Well ... no. That's not how it works. Let's examine, instead, what is, and see what we can make of it.
Motley Obama
The President has his good side. Let's remember that.
The President is reasonably decent on the environment. Sometimes he just talks a good game, sometimes he doesn't fight hard enough for the victory, but he's not hostile to the environment. Yes, there's "clean coal" and nuclear, and much more, but he is not trying to break the bones of the environment and suck out its marrow, and that's better than the Republicans.
He's not really anti-labor, though again it's not enough of a priority.
It is possible to imagine a decent transportation policy from this Administration.
His Supreme Court appointments have been solid. His federal court appointments have been good, but few -- and he has chosen not to "take it to the people" on them.
While he has been a target of great GLBT ire, great strides have been made on his watch without the amount of social convulsion that most would have expected. We would not likely have seen them under a Republican or a socially conservative Democrat.
He supports basic fairness of the electoral process -- which these days is huge.
He would like more progressive taxation, even though he seems to be a little ashamed of it.
He's good on women's rights. He's not bad on immigration. (Remember how bad "bad" is.) He supports many aspects of the Constitution that Republicans don't, and where he is weak the Republicans are weaker.
Then there's some bad. I won't belabor these; you know them. There's the national security state. (If, in fact, he has any choice in the matter.) There's his benighted policies on education. There's austerity. There are aspects of his war policies -- though, again, there's a difference between the grimness of Afghanistan under Obama and the orgiastic plummeting and contractor enrichment in Iraq under Bush.
There are two bad things that really stick in the craw of progressives -- and someday, a Democratic leader may figure these out.
(1) He sucks up to large donors.
Obama especially sucks up to Wall Street. His worst policies largely stem from not wanting to piss off Goldman Sachs. Now, there is a rationale for it -- just as there was a rationale for FDR to suck up to racist Southern Democratic Senators: it's what the system requires of you if you're going to win. But it's terrible and he doesn't even pretend not to like it.
(2) He belongs to the "anything but the Left" party.
It an interesting exercise to imagine -- and this is just my own fanciful exercise -- how Obama would vote if offered a choice between Dennis Kucinich or Raul Grijalva or Maxine Waters, on the one hand, and the Republican candidates on the other. Unless the Supreme Court was an overriding issue for him, I think that he'd vote for Huntsman over any of them. Probably Romney too. Maybe Pawlenty over at least Kucinich. I don't think he'd vote for Bachmann, Santorum, or Gingrich. (If it were Perry against Kucinich, he might not vote.) He's from the "not from the Left" Party, and he has undermined the creation of a "not from the far Right" Party, partially by handing them important victories as he did this week.
Obama is, like most successful Democrats, a "hippie puncher." It's enormously galling. That is why when someone tells me that he is "the only adult in the room" or that I am "living in a fantasy world," I want to break things. It does not motivate me. Being treated like a punk by people whose political ideology appears to consist of several memorized bumper stickers does not please me. Someday, Democrats will figure out not to do this. One of the few benefits of the rise of the Tea Party is that Democrats are getting a sense of how one does and doesn't treat insurgents. But Obama does it -- he triangulates -- and that is one reason that I feel no compunction, none at all, about being nasty to him when he warrants it. He wants people to feel sorry for him? I'm willing to give them something that really makes them feel sorry for him (although I hold most of my worst stuff in reserve.)
So that's our President, warts and all. He's motley. He's not just bi-racial, he's multi-ideological. The different parts of his political make-up co-exist like a crazy quilt. They don't work together, they don't make sense. A patchwork doesn't have to.
Now, buckle up your seat belts; this diary is about to take a wrenching turn.
How Can a Progressive Democrat Support Obama Without Continually Wanting to Die?
Now, here is the problem -- and here is the point where I lose many of the readers I have thus far kept and regain a few that I have lost: I still want Obama to be re-elected as President in 2012. I just don't see a real alternative. Believe me, I have looked. (Self-respect demanded it.) Unless he decides that this diary series has been mean to him and withdraws from the nomination process in a fit of pique, he's our nominee. He knows it, too. We can't change him. But we can maneuver around him. And, where he bites, we can bite back.
So: how -- assuming that, given the alternatives, we want to -- do we even try to sell this motley President to the discerning and understandably cynical public?
I don't think we sugar-coat it. I think that we accept that the President as motley. We don't run around giddy and rosy-cheeked. We accept that he has good and bad in him, in his policies, and we are frank with voters. Much of the bad is not his fault -- it's bad circumstances, though in many areas he hasn't helped things -- and we do have to compare him to his alternatives.
I can say honestly to my progressive friends: Obama's not great, but he's worth my vote and yours. I understand why you'd disagree -- especially this week. But I'm going to offer you a pro-Democratic message this week that is not defeatist, not simpering, not nice, and that Obama and his supporters will not like.
But, it's the message that, after this betrayal, I plan to carry into 2012. The message that we progressives can craft has two parts:
(1) Obama can still be a means to our desired ends.
(2) We can wrest important areas of control from Obama -- without threatening to bolt the party.
Those topics are what I cover in turn over the next two days.
My answers will explain how I can be a progressive Democrat and still work for Obama's re-election. My estimate is that half the site will have been too pissed off to have gotten this far and 40% of it will have jumped off the bus at this last paragraph -- because we all think we're right and we're in no mood for reconciliation. So, this is to the 10% remaining. Do me a favor and don't pre-judge the arguments before I make them. The stakes are high.
Copyright 2011 by the author. License granted for non-commercial use with attribution.