There is a logic behind Obama’s decision to enlist reasonable Republicans in his administration and convert them to the Democratic Party. In some cases, the logic is easy to calculate. Keeping Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense gives Obama cover for his foreign policies. Arlen Specter gives the Senate Democratic Caucus sixty members. John McHugh’s House seat is a potential pick-up for the Democrats. Governor Jon Huntsman was a potential Republican presidential nominee in 2012. But, there was no obvious political benefit to appointing Ray LaHood as Secretary of Transportation or Jim Leach as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. They were both retired.
The benefit of all these appointments is cumulative and of a more general nature than any narrow, immediate advantage. What he is doing is making it safe for former Republicans to associate themselves with a party they have opposed all their lives. He is taking away arguments against cooperating with and identifying with his administration. If Robert Gates and Colin Powell support his foreign policies, then they can’t be that radical. If Jim Leach, Lincoln Chafee, and Ray LaHood support his domestic policies, then they can’t be too out of the mainstream. If Arlen Specter has just switched to the Democrats, then his policies towards Israel cannot be anti-semitic.
The Republicans still launch the same attacks. Obama is a socialist. He’s soft on terrorism. He’s a secret Muslim who wants to undermine the Jewish state. The Republicans would have made these charges anyway. But the charges have no saliency because everywhere you look there is a former Republican who is helping to implement those policies. If it isn’t a Republican, it’s Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod. How could they be too tough on Israel?
What began with the nomination of Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State has just continued. Even the decision to let Joe Lieberman keep his Homeland Security chair should be seen in this larger scheme. Obama has piece-by-piece peeled away all centers of potential opposition and put them to work enacting his policies.
For progressives, this has been a little frustrating. All these jobs that have gone to centrist Democrats and Republicans could have gone to progressives. And there are lost opportunities involved, including some watered down policy in some areas. But Obama is building a super-party. There is almost no one making intellectually coherent arguments against his policies right now. What little there is is coming from his left, not his right.
For impatient and frustrated progressives, my advice is to keep things in perspective. FDR got a lot done with a Big Tent party, too. But his Big Tent included, as its biggest part, the segregationist South. Obama’s Big Tent includes main street Republicans and foreign policy realists. I’ll take that trade in a heartbeat, even if it means I have a less pure party than I might like.
For progressives, the battle is not to keep Obama from expanding the party in the center. The battle is to own all the seats that demographics say that we should own.
That’s exactly it. I’m not sure Obama’s strategy will do it, but I don’t think there’s any progressive who wouldn’t agree with the goal, or who hasn’t been frustrated by seeing large swaths of the public vote against their own self-interest because the GOP is playing to the uglier side of human nature.
It’s not so much that I don’t think that the basic approach is effective as far as it goes. Subtlety and working behind the scenes can be tremendously effective: visible power is power challenged. On the other hand, I think Obama — who is more of a celebrity than most presidents — needs to be more active in using that celebrity power to appeal directly to the public. Not necessarily for any particular bill or program, but to push progressive values in that amazingly non-confrontational way that he does when he’s in top form.
Co-opting Republican politicians is not necessarily a bad thing if and when it works. But that alone is not going to co-opt Republican voters. They have to be approached directly if we don’t want them to fill the legislative seats Obama is emptying with replacement wingnuts, of whom there is no shortage.
Like RollaMQ said;
Obama plays chess while the others play checkers.
nalbar
I’ll remember where is the ledge.
I’m not sure what this means. The voting patterns of demographics change over time.
That overstates the importance of segregation in putting together the big tent. All of the US after the Ku Klux Klan resurgence of the 1920s was segregationsist; look at the media representations of blacks from that time. Segregation was not the fault line of the Democratic Party that it became later. And what drew Southerners to Roosevelt was the promise to end the agricultural depression that had existed in the South since the early 1920s. A classic case of overproduction leading to low prices. And Roosevelt’s progressive approach to labor issues (however unwillingly that might have turned out to be behind the scenes) brought pro-labor advocates from the textile belt, like Olin D. Johnston into power.
In some respects Obama’s big tent is more unruly and his ability to pick up cross-party support more difficult that was that of FDR. Add to that the fact that Roosevelt could draw radio and newsreel coverage and Obama has to fight through the cable clutter.
And the groups that you mention mean that Obama’s big tent is more oriented to small business than to labor (unless labor starts exerting itself). And in foreign policy alignment with foreign policy realists (not realpolitikers like Kissinger), Obama is very close to where Roosevelt’s foreign policy was – neither Wilsonian nor isolationist.
Oh yes, purity in parties is in the eye of the beholder. And no party is every pure enough for the purists.
no our policy should be to pass progressive legislation. Seats are unimportant if we end up passing republican policies.
I am through with the dems. They just want power at the expense of principles.
I’m looking for third party alternatives.
Huzzah! I see no semblance of “principles” here. There is no such thing as a little bit of principles. Either you have them or you don’t. The moderates and centrists keep telling us to wait in line and to stick our thumbs in our mouths (among other places) while Obama plays chess. A snide and condescending way of intimating that “frustrated” people like me are children who need to be told to SHUT UP while the “grownups” who advocate the excitement of what’s ending up to be a warmed-over Lawrence Welk revival play their mind games with wars and Wall Street welfare. There is no bankruptcy court big enough for this catastrophe.
FDR successfully resisted fascism at home and abroad. I am still waiting for signs that Obama will do that. If he does not, and instead lets all of the torturers and economic royalists keep their freedom and their jobs and their loot, then all of the political victories and the largest tent in the history of politics won’t be worth a damn.
Yep. Marginalize and ridicule the Left, who gave him his job, while enriching, providing political cover for, and being conciliatory to the glorious Right. Big Tent, that. He couldn’t have provided even one–just ONE–token liberal progressive anywhere near him because that would burn the country down and waterdown his excessively Barry Manilow approach to governing.
Reading the history of FDR’s first year is instructive.
Obama is not the religious second coming of FDR; I see more of JFK’s worst middling and rightist (Vietnam, anyone? Looks like Afghanistan to me) tendencies.
Read about how the Frances Perkins set thought about Roosevelt during his first year.
Also read about how Roosevelt came up with the bank holiday idea (it wasn’t his natural proclivity).
FDR was not the progressive principled saint that today’s left makes him out to be.
Events shoved him into what he did just as they are Obama.
And Roosevelt made changes to his policies as he went along, feeling for what Congress would accept.
What limits Obama is the Republican stonewall in Congress. What limits Congress is the absence of the grassroots pressure that Roosevelt had on his Congress.
I don’t believe this. The one thing that makes me extremely skeptical of his alleged more liberal stances is his now almost-certain anti-gay stance. Many gay servicemen are getting booted out of the armed forces for no better reason than being gay. They are being robbed of their hard earned benefits and pensions because of DADT. All Obama has to do to stop this is to issue a simple Stop Loss order. He doesn’t need Congress for that. But nooooo, he can’t be seen doing that. Why? Because he is busy playing chess.
President Truman didn’t wait for Congress in order to desegregate the armed forces. And Congress still to this day hasn’t desegregated the armed forces.
I feel that this issue is more personal with Obama. There is something that he finds distasteful about dealing with the issue of civil rights for the LGBT community. Yeah, he gives wonderful speeches and kind, even hand-written, words but he’s very good at empty political rhetoric when it suits himself. A real leader would take this issue of “gay” marriage and equality and give it a push.
Obama has consideral power to change debates. But the only debates he wishes to change is from being anti-war to being pro-war; being semi-anti-establishment to backing Arlen Specter as a “Democrat”; being a fighter to being Mr. Conciliatory. It goes on and on like that.
If Obama won’t get in front of an issue that he would surely win, then what does that say about the rest of his so-called progressivism?
Obama might be smarter than I am. But he sure ain’t better.
Aha, so we are talking about only one part of the progressive agenda. I don’t know what is going on with DADT, but I know that virtually all of the Congressional Representatives from NC are still opposed to lifting it – Democrats and Republicans alike.
Truman had the freedom to act because he knew that Congress would not counter by passing legislation resegregating the military on the basis of race.
Unlike the situation with the northeastern legislatures, it is not a sure win right now.
As far as the North Carolina Congressional delegation is concerned, Obama is too far out in front already by merely promising to eliminate DADT. And this is true not only in Southern states.
Oho…that’s merely an example–the best example, mind you–of one of Obama’s mealymouthed stances. I’m not in the military and I am not being married to anyone anytime soon, so those issues don’t directly affect me (yet). But if one person is against fairness and civil rights for one segment of the population, irrespective of his high Q ratings and congenial telefriendliness, then said person is just another bigot. And I don’t trust bigots with anything.
Didn’t FDR shut down the banks for a few days in his first year? I doubt the banksters were happy about that.
LOL. FDR also didn’t force labor into bankruptcy while cutting massive welfare checks to the financial sector in the name of “helping families.”
No, what FDR did was inter japanese people, punt on civil rights, subsidize rich people by paying for gold, organized cartels through the national recovery administration, and bailed out banks.
Whitewashing Reagan is one of the biggest problems that conservatives have in their party. They can never resolve his contradictions because they pretend they never existed. The left runs the risk of doing the same thing with FDR. We try to ground FDR’s political success in a fairytale rather then reality.
but we also should blackwash his history by confusing him with Obama.
The first thing he did after taking office was outright shut the banks down. Then he opened them again with completely new management and put a halt to all dividend payments, and he only bailed them out with strict agreements that they behave.
In otherwords temporary nationalization, and he didn’t buy up their bad debts.
Roosevelt really was more more spunky on many issues that Obama.
Bullshit.
The vast majority of banks reopened with Treasury funds in their pockets and access to federal credit (and the ability to sell preferred stock to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation) because they passed government inspections. The insolvent ones got taken over by the government, but that was because the FDIC didn’t exist at that time (the FDIC has already taken over something like 30 banks this year but i don’t see you thanking obama over that shit).
You got banking regulation about a year AFTER the banking panic was over. Obama can’t even get through a 100 days without hearing bitching and moaning.
I wasn’t whitewashing FDR. I was mocking the religious aspect of whitewashing Obama as Jesus/FDR. FDR committed some atrocities. And so is Obama. But FDR did some good things. And, personally, I don’t see one good thing that Obama has done yet. I see him speaking good words and giving good ceremonies and attending good parties with “good” people, but his good works are few and far between.
Booman, these never ending rationalizations of Obama’s repudiation of liberalism are sad, just plain sad. Obama is University of Chicago disaster capitalism.
Pressure exerts itself in all directions. Give and take is just that: they may be enacting his policies but they’re also Republicanizing those same policies and the basic assumptions behind them. The “third way”, in my estimation, was a disastrous failure.
I still believe Obama’s heart is in the right place, moreso than any president in a couple of generations. But he’s taking a huge gamble with his “one nation” theory and his belief in his own ability to stand against subverters in his own house. I just hope he has a brilliant backup plan when he finally accepts that there are a whole lot of people, especially in Washington, to whom you don’t reach out if you want to keep your arm.
Obama is building a super-party…that stands for nothing. Except perpetual war for oil and trickle-down economics. Oh, I forgot union-busting.
I agree with BooMan. I think more will get done in the long run with Obama’s initial moves. Right now it’s about softening the opposition. Later, more progressive initiatives can be implemented.
sounds quite unlike the soldiers-as-canon-fodder neocons: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1901342,00.html
The main problem I see with Obama’s strategy is the way it will marginialize the “left/progressives” If anything the democatic party does not want is power in the hands of the DFH crowd.
Obama is clearly part of the “centrist” crowd. During the campaign he attacked from the right.
I fear that the defections of the right will tilt the D party more right than it is already. Steny Hoyer anyone? If they get enough of them then my side is done with the Dem party, they will the same as the republicans “moderates”