I see that Nader has announced that now Edwards is out, he might consider throwing his hat in the ring. He considers Obama to be too mediocre a candidate and is disappointed that someone with his community-organizing background is not a more articulate voice for the concerns of the poor. This has been a criticism of Obama from a lot of the people who were attracted to Edwards. They see Obama as too soft on progressive issues. They wonder if he has the spine and the toughness to fight those on the right who have no compunction about using every dirty trick in the book. And will he fight for a progressive agenda if he reaches the White House or will he "Specter" on his supporters–say all the right things, then cave?
So I understand where they’re coming from. And I’ve wondered if I myself have not been seduced by Obama only inevitably to be disappointed. There have been times when I’ve thought Obama’s message of unity a naive message of capitulation to the uncompromising hard right. I understand why Clinton supporters don’t buy into his leadership style, and why they hope he has a glass jaw they can get a shot at to knock him out.
But I don’t think that anymore. I’m rather grateful for the Clintons’ rough tactics, because they have given Obama the opportunity to show that he is not just some mushy idealist. He’s got some toughness, and he’s stylish rather than brutish in the way he displays it. As I’ve written here, and as Obama clearly recognizes, if he can’t handle the Clintons, he won’t be able to handle the really serious nastiness to come in the Fall. Obama has to show he has some gristle and that he’s willing to fight. But he has to fight fair, and he has always to be reaching out to the soft middle with the objective to make them feel comfortable about leaning left after having for so many years leaned right.
And so far I think he’s done admirably well in both showing some fight without becoming a brute. So while I’m by no means 100% certain, I am confident that what my gut tells me about Obama is trustworthy and his long-term tranformational strategy plausible. And that being being the case, here’s what I would say to the people to Obama’s left who see him as too moderate, who prefer Edwards’ hot, populist style to Obama’s cool style, or who would vote for Nader because they see the Democratic Party as hopelessly complicit in the corrupted Beltway corporate system: Politics is not about being ideologically pure–there is a proto-Jacobinism in that mindset; it’s about taking whatever the next possible step forward might be–there’s a healthy Burkean principled realism in that mindset. And our job as voters is to pick the person we think has the best chance of moving us forward. Sometimes you have to vote for someone who only offers to slow down the regression, i.e., Kerry in 2004. But in this cycle Obama offers a rare opportunity to move forward.
But before developing that argument, I’d like to preface it with few thoughts on Edwards’ failed candidacy. I wanted to like Edwards, but there was something missing. The rhetoric and the person didn’t fit well together. Listening to his speeches is a different experience from listening to Obama’s. Edwards’ speeches had energy, but nevertheless seemed scripted and formulaic. Not bad, not great. Animated, yet stale. And then last week I read this criticism by Russ Feingold that brought the causes of my dissatisfaction with Edwards into clearer focus. When asked his opinion about the Democratic presidential candidates, he had this to say about Edwards:
The one that is the most problematic is (John) Edwards, who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq war … He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record.
When you had the opportunity to vote a certain way in the Senate and you didn’t, and obviously there are times when you make a mistake, the notion that you sort of vote one way when you’re playing the game in Washington and another way when you’re running for president, there’s some of that going on.
Feingold really doesn’t like Edwards, and Feingold as one of the few truly principled left politicians is someone any left-leaning American has to listen to. He sees Edwards as the opportunist so many perceive Hillary to be. It looks as if Edwards’ populism was mainly a calculation: he saw that the slot to the left of Obama was open, and so he’d occupy that niche in the hopes of capturing the activist progressive core. So there is a question about how much of Edwards’ campaign rhetoric was tactical and how much was rooted in what he really believed. As with everyone, it’s a mix, but more tactics than sincerity might account for the false note I always found in his rhetoric. He was never well cast for the role of son-of-millworker populist to begin with, and his rhetorical style did little to help him to overcome that fundamental disadvantage.
But let’s allow that he was 90% sincere, his positioning himself in that slot to the left of Obama just didn’t work because the activist progressive core has no electoral heft. Anybody who campaigns from that slot in the political spectrum cannot win national office. That’s just reality. Anybody who insists that Obama take explicit positions on issues farther to the left than he has done is basically asking him to commit political suicide. That’s why Nader’s criticisms seem sanctimonious and stupid. That doesn’t mean that a progressive candidate is doomed to split the difference with the idiocies of the right; it does mean that his effectiveness in the long run depends on his having successfully wooed the malleable middle.
Winning is one thing, but you cannot accomplish anything good unless you are a leader a significant majority of the electorate trusts, and so the first step for Obama is to earn that trust. In a democracy, nothing substantively positive is possible without it. Trust is the foundation that must be laid if his more ambitious goal for effecting transformative change is even remotely a possibility. The progressive left’s discomfort with Obama’s comparison of himself last week with Reagan was remarkably obtuse. He was not telegraphing that he was a closet conservative, but that he is serious about serious change, and that he has the potential to effect it in a way that no one else on the scene does. He can’t do it without first building a substantive national consensus. He cannot fight the hard right unless he has broad support to do so.
Can he do it? I don’t know, but right now he is doing something rather remarkable that no other candidate in my adult memory has done. He stands clearly left of center on the issues, and he’s attracting conservatives and moderates who have become disgusted with what the Republican Party has become. These Republican-leaning moderates are vulnerable to conversion, but while they may be willing to sit in Obama’s church pews, they will never sit in Clinton’s. She irritates them, and I just don’t see her as capable of ever earning their trust, much less their affection. Clinton is on a track for a 51% approval rating at best; Obama has the potential for a 60% or better.
Obama will never win over the stalwart core of movement conservatism, but if he can earn the trust of independents and moderate conservatives, if he can win over the Richard Cizek and Rick Warren evangelicals, if he can substitute a renewed vision of the common good, a "We" politics for the fragmenting Libertarian "Me" politics that has poisoned centrist political thinking since 1980, he will indeed have become the transformative candidate he aspires to be.
Kerry could never have done this in 2004. Bill Clinton didn’t do in the 90s and Hillary has no chance of doing it now. You have to be tone deaf or blinded by cynicism not to see that Obama has a potential that the others do not. That there is a good chance he may fail to realize this potential is a risk I’m willing to take. I’m willing to vote for the possibility of a real movement forward rather than the certainty of stagnation or regression that the Clintons and Republicans respectively represent. That’s what being a progressive should mean. Even if the steps we take forward are baby steps, it’s better to take them than than to criticize as not progressive enough the one guy who has the chance to do it.
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