If You Don't Like Third Way Politics, You Might Have Difficulty With Barack Obama's Politics.
I’ve finished reading Senator Barack Obama’s "Dreams from My Father", which I gave glowing reviews in a previous diary, and now I’m reading Senator Obama’s "The Audacity of Hope", which I find quite insightful and thought provoking. I confess that I have only read the first 70 pages, yet certain things stand out so far:
Obama says of Bill Clinton’s Third Way politics: (Please follow me beneath the fold.)
It was Bill Clinton’s singular contribution that he tried to transcend this [Left vs. Right] ideological deadlock, recognizing not only that what had come to be meant by the labels "conservative" and "liberal" played to Republican advantage, but that the categories were inadequate to address the problems we faced. At times during his first campaign, his gestured toward disaffected Reagan Democrats could seem clumsy and transparent (whatever happened to Sister Soulja?) or frighteningly cold-hearted (allowing the execution of a mentally retarded death row inmate to go forward on the eve of an important [1992 Democratic Presidential] primary). In the first two years of his presidency, he would be forced to abandon some core elements of his platform – universal health care, aggressive investment in education and training – that might have more decisively reversed the long-term trends that were undermining the position of working families in the new economy.
Still, [Bill Clinton] instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the America people. He saw that government spending and regulation could, if properly designed, serve as vital ingredients and not inhibitors to economic growth, and how markets and fiscal discipline could promote social justice. He recognized that not only societal but personal responsibility was needed to combat poverty. In his platform – if not always in his day-to-day politics – Clinton’s Third Way went beyond splitting the difference. It tapped into the pragmatic, nonideological attitude of the majority of Americans. "The Audacity of Hope", p. 34.
In light of America’s hardened Left v. Right paradigm in which the Republicans seemed to have assembled a working cultural majority pre-Clinton, I tend to see Senator Obama’s analysis of why Clinton’s Third Way was successful electorally. I also suspect that Obama’s mostly favorable analysis of Clinton’s Third Way foretells to some degree both how Senator Obama would govern if elected President, and also explains why Senator Obama has sometimes received a cool reception at DailyKos; "Third Way" is often considered synonymous with "triangulation", a concept sometimes considered too vulgar and indecent for words, and yet Senator Obama clearly is seeking a "Third Way" that bypasses traditional boundaries of "Left" and "Right".
Obama argues that that there are "shared values" that underlie much of our competing ideologies. Obama says,
For those of us who believe that government has a role to play in promoting opportunity and prosperity for all Americans, a polarized electorate isn’t good enough . . . What’s needed is a broad majority of Americans –Democrats, Republicans and Independents of goodwill – who are engaged in the project of national renewal, and who see their own self-interests as inextricably linked to the interests of others . . .
Unless political leaders are open to new ideas and not just new packaging, we won’t change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious energy policy or tame the deficit. We won’t have the popular support to craft a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorism without resorting to isolationism or eroding civil liberties. We won’t have a mandate to overhaul America’s broken health-care system. And we won’t have the broad political support or the effective strategies needed to lift large numbers of our fellow citizens out of poverty. "The Audacity of Hope", p. 40.
In other words, Senator Obama aims to forge a national consensus for these goals including more than just the traditional Democratic constituencies. So, for those of us who are looking for a candidate willing to habitually infuriate conservatives while playing to the Left, Senator Obama is not going to be the one. He wants to bring along even people whom we normally disagree with.
Senator Obama cites for an example of his consensus building an Illinois law he passed requiring the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in death penalty cases. He says that initially the law and order crowd opposed the bill as pro-criminal while the anti-death penalty crowd opposed the bill as a half-measure that might make it harder to eliminate the death penalty. Senator Obama convinced both sides that underlying their concerns was the basic American fairness value that innocent people ought not be executed and guilty people ought not go free. Listening to both sides and incorporating their suggestions when they were constructive, he was able to pass a first-in-the-nation statewide bill requiring videotaping of interrogations and confessions.
In "The Audacity of Hope", Senator Obama specifically mentions his blogging at DailyKos. He says,
I made this same argument in a (DK diary) (Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party) to the left-leaning blog DailyKos in September 2005, after a number of advocacy groups and activists had attacked some of my Democratic colleagues for voting to confirm Justice John Roberts. . . . I had come to appreciate the give and take the blogs afforded, and in the days following the posting of my letter , in true democratic fashion, more than six hundred people posted their comments. Some agreed with me, others thought that I was being too idealistic – that the politics I was suggesting could not work in the face of the Republicans PR machine. A sizeable contingent thought that I had been "sent" by Washington elites to quell dissent in the ranks, and/or had been in Washington too long and was losing touch with the American people, and/or was – as one blogger later put it – simply an "idiot".
The fact that Senator Obama remembers this "idiot" insult at DK enough to mention it in his book made me reflect tonight on the way diverse voices are treated at DailyKos, particularly in light of the diary on the rec list right now, "In Defense of a Diarist", decrying the treatment that an elderly and blind diarist has received at DailyKos. I wonder if Senator Obama’s people or Senator Clinton’s people, for that matter, have paid any attention to the banning of that black man blogger, francislholland, who was constantly arguing on behalf of Hillary Clinton and haranging us to support a non white-male president for 2008? Many people didn’t agree with that guy, but does banning bloggers who support the cause of Obama and Clinton really serve the purposes of DailyKos in the end? If Barack Obama were not a US Senator, might there have been efforts to ban him as a "troll"?
I wonder what Senator Obama's people thought of the "monkey" controversy that swirled around DailyKos for a week or more? In any case, that francislholland guy has started a black blog of his own, cross-posting at MYDD and denouncing DK as a a nearly "exclusively white blog."
Many people didn’t like francislholland, but banning him and now having him out there blasting DK as "nearly exclusively white"? I think that mostly only hurts DailyKos.
But, I digressed. Although I haven’t finished the "Audacity of Hope" yet, Senator Barack Obama’s second book is thoughtful and goes far beyond the usual primping in advance of a Presidential run. He seems truly to be mulling over what it takes to build a consensus in America sufficiently strong and broad-based to tackle issues like national health care and global warming.