Obama: A Real Philisophy of Change

...and probably a plan for getting it done.

Hillary can't make the kind of changes we need simply because she and Bill are polarizing figures among the rank and file Goopers, and now many independents and a few Democrats. She may get along just fine with the D.C. Rethugs (and that is a matter of concern in itself), but it won't help ouitside of D.C., where the cold civil war is a reality. I know this because I live out here and she doesn't.

The election of Obama would probably be the best thing that has happened to this country in over 60 years.

February 02, 2008

Unearthing the real difference -- because there is one, and it is profound

Barack Obama's underlying, fundamental vision of a post-reactionary nation is being buried amidst the rubble of all the tactical warfare. The two surviving campaigns have devolved into a "he said, she said" silliness designed by one to stun the base into a near-apathetic state of resignation -- when in doubt, whenever baffled, in the event of any fence-sitting, just go with the old and familiar. It's a safe and known quantity.

To date, this unprogressive pushback of divide and conquer -- especially through the tedious recourse to balkanizing identity politics -- has taken a toll on the progressive alternative -- inclusion -- although there are welcome signs that the alternative itself is now pushing back and may, in fact, score something of a cumulative victory by Tuesday. That, of course, remains to be seen. But whichever the outcome, it will command the soul of progressivism for years to come.

Meanwhile, the fundamental governing visions that underlie the two campaigns are, as mentioned, getting buried. For all the punditocracy's observations on the two candidate's striking similarities on various and specific policies, there is a profound difference going largely unnoticed. And at the risk of sounding clicheish, that difference is indeed between the unlimited possibilities of the future and the accepted constraints of the past.

The difference in its fuller presentation, however, is soundbite unworthy. It's unsexy, and far less fodder for the Battling Bickersons of network political talk shows than C-span.

Or, perhaps, the New York Times, which this morning has made at least a decent attempt, in an interview with Obama, to sketch the difference.

To appreciate it, one must first remove one's partisan hat. In the long run, and at its core, it's not about one candidate over another, or one ideology over another, or one party over another. It is, rather, about the broadest possibilities of a broad, philosophical pragmatism mixed judiciously with the idealistic; much along the lines of the pragmatic progressivism of FDR (who, by the way, issued repeated appeals to rank-and-file conservatives during the economically troubled '32 campaign).

Three lines from the Times' interview with Obama encapsulate well what has been so clinically entombed by all the campaign raucousness: "Although Mr. Obama’s economic approach comes wrapped in his conciliatory rhetoric, it is in some ways more aggressive than that of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton"; furthermore, "Mr. Obama praised the Clinton administration for reducing the deficit and setting the stage for the ’90s boom. But he said Mr. Clinton had failed to halt a long-term increase in income inequality" -- which, down the road, threatens America's democratic viability as much as its globally idiotic adventurism.

Overcoming that failure is what lies at the heart of Obama's philosophical approach. But we can't get there from here. The "here" of divisiveness in which we've been stalled for so long will only act as a continuing and sturdy obstacle to fundamental change.

Forget who said it and concentrate instead on these words themselves recently spoken by another: "We’ve got to be really clear that this is a struggle, and this is just not a moment where everybody will see the world the way it should be seen and come together to solve these problems." I'm not entirely sure what those words were meant to convey, but they drip with the mindset of constraint -- of limited possibilities, of more and deeper divisions, of endless and compromising battle.

Obama, on the other hand, "also talks about overcoming special interests, but he proposes to do so by changing the terms of the debate, energizing disaffected voters and forging a new majority in favor of his programs." (Again, see FDR).

What a difference attitude makes. "Changing the terms of the debate" -- reframing, that is, the whole bloody mess of it.

"He would start, he said, by trying to turn the discussion about taxes into an advantage for the Democrats during the general election campaign this year." In his words: "We have to disaggregate tax policy between the wealthy and the working class or middle class. We have to be able to say that we are going to at once raise taxes on some people and lower taxes on others. This has been one of the greatest rhetorical sleights of hand of the Republican Party, and it has been a great weakness of the Democratic Party."

One piece of advice, Barack: Start by banning words like "disaggregate" from your vocabulary when speaking to the press, hence the public. Other than that, you have landed on a profound, possibilities-changing approach that is light years ahead of the "here."

Yet it's getting buried in the rubble. And that's a damn shame, because it represents a fundamental restructuring of progressivism's promise.

Add to these domestic musings Obama's philosophical preference of "soft power" over hard -- which is to say, the profitable international politics of inducement and persuasion over the costly, neocon ham-handedness of others; of "attraction rather than force" -- and you begin to see an agent of "change" with profound, global implications as well.

For the genuine progressive, is this really a dicey contest of ideas?

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.