I mentioned a short column by Robert Novak that attempts to redefine Barack Obama’s rather sizable victory as something short of a mandate — a meme that is being pushed now by the very same conservative and centrist writers and commentators that viewed George Bush’s 2004 election victory as just that.
The folks who inhabit the alley of political conventional wisdom refuse to let go of their long-held belief that we live in a center-right nation. But the results should demonstrate that their alley is too narrow. We are a nation of pragmatists more than anything else. As pragmatists, we are interested in things that work and make our lives better. Pragmatically, that means we are moving to the left, toward becoming once again a center-left nation.
Don’t believe me? Consider What E.J. Dionne Jr. had to say yesterday:
In choosing Obama and a strongly Democratic Congress, the country put a definitive end to a conservative era rooted in three myths: that a party could govern successfully while constantly denigrating government’s role; that Americans were divided in an irrepressible moral conflict pitting a “real America” against some pale imitation; and that market capitalism could succeed without an active government regulating it in the public interest and modestly redistributing income to temper inequalities.
The GOP — and the media — failed to realize that
a substantial majority rather likes spreading the wealth if doing so means health coverage, pensions and college opportunities for all, or asking the wealthy to bear a slightly larger share of the tax burden.
“John McCain calls this socialism,” Obama said at a Pittsburgh rally last week. “I call it opportunity.” So did the voters.
Obama, he writes, altered the political landscape by refusing to be cowed by the right.
Obama exploded the old framework. He explicitly rejected the idea that Americans were choosing between “more” or “less” government, “big” or “small” government.
He cast the choice differently. “Our government should work for us, not against us,” he would say. “It should help us, not hurt us.” Obama ran as a progressive, not a conservative, but also as a pragmatist, not an ideologue. That combination will define his presidency.
For some reason, however, the conventional-wisdom crowd — what David Sirota calls the “sail-trimmers, bet-hedgers, and expectation-downplayers” — continues to resist the notion that we have witnessed a political transformation. The “Punditburo,” he says, began “taking to newspaper columns and the airwaves” well before the election in a pre-emptive strike to maintain the fiction that “America remains more conservative than it has ever been.”
Once Tuesday delivered a huge progressive landslide, that pre-election hysteria has turned into a full-on panic – suggesting that even the most arrogant let-them-eat-cakers inside the Beltway are genuinely afraid that there has been a paradigm shift in American politics – one that threatens the current Establishment’s very relevance and authority. And so the Mandate Manipulation Unit has gone into a reactive overdrive with everyone around Obama (and aspiring for a White House job) delivering a “nothing to see here, folks!” message. That’s right, after “the most important election of our lifetime” we should expect to see nothing exponentially different from our government come 2009.
There are two sides to Obama — as Dionne notes and as I’ve written before. He has very strong progressive/liberal instincts but also can be pragmatic to a fault and overly cautious. How he governs — which part of his political personality wins — will come down to who shouts the loudest, the “Mandate Maniuplation Unit” or the progressive grassroots.
What is different than in the recent past, as Sirota says, is that
the progressive movement that worked closely with Obama now has its own capacity to counter the mandate manipulators and crystallize the real message of the 2008 campaign. Indeed, this is a new and critical development. From the Campaign for America’s Future, to labor unions, to the Progressive States Network, to Public Citizen, to blogs, to high-profile congressional spokespeople, we have our own collective microphone and infrastructure.
But we need to use it. I agree with Barack Obama that he needs to reach out to Republicans and include them in the discussion, but I don’t think that he can let them — or the rightwing of his own party — dictate how he governs.
This debate over whether the election represents a mandate gets back to something that Matt Yglesias wrote last week. Obama, he said before the election was
running on a platform that promises universal preschool, dramatic cuts in carbon emissions and investments in clean energy infrastructure, health insurance that would be affordable for all, comprehensive immigration reform, substantial labor law reform, large new spending on K-12 initiatives, and tax reform to make the federal code much more progressive overall. Is it as left-wing as what John Edwards ran on in the primaries in 2008? No. But it’s much more robustly progressive than what John Kerry offered in 2004, what Al Gore offered in 2000, or what Bill Clinton offered in 1996, and somewhat more ambitious than the Clinton ‘92 program.
It would be, he says, “the most dramatic shift in national policy since the high tide of the Great Society.” He admits that it’s unlikely that Obama will be successful in making everything happen. But ceding the argument to the right and allowing it to paint the nation as more conservative than it is can only lead to abject failure. A “key element” in teh right wing’s efforts to stymie Obama and the progressives “will be the effort to argue … that, eh, he didn’t really run on a bold progressive agenda.”
Under the circumstances, I think it’s important to argue that, yes, he in fact did run on strong progressive agenda and members of congress need to hear that if he wins, that signifies the political viability of a strong progressive agenda.
That’s essentially the point Sirota is making, as well, in arguing the mandate question. Why is it important? he asks:
Simply put, because it sets the parameters of the political debate for the next four years. How the mandate is depicted – and distorted – impacts what the next president will have the political capital to do, and not do. Political capital, after all, is really an intangible matter of perception. If the president is perceived to have an electoral mandate for far-reaching change, then he will have a lot of capital to reach for that change (especially if we successfully pressure him). But if the president is perceived to have an electoral mandate merely for small-bore incrementalism (as the Mandate Manipulators always insist), then he will be under enormous pressure to reach only for incremental reform.
This is why conservatives were so adamant about claiming a mandate in 1980 and in 2004 – they understood its critical connection to policy. This is also why Establishment voices are so adamant about downplaying a mandate today – because the empirical data from the election suggests that 2008 provided an overwhelmingly anti-Establishment mandate on everything from financial regulation, to trade, to health care to the Iraq War. If that mandate is permitted to be recognized, acknowledged and appreciated in the public debate, it might force significant policy change on those issues. That’s the kind of change we all voted for this week – but as Obama himself said in his victory speech, “This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change.” Helping Obama turn that chance into something more is now our charge in the months ahead.
Hank Kalet 