Rachel Maddow calls it “Talk Me Down,” which is as apt a phrase for the current progressive agita as any. This bit of indigestion, of course, comes from progressives’ high hopes for an Obama administration, from the expectation that he would be the liberal caricature crafted by the McCain campaign (only one of many caricatures tossed out there by the GOP).
The weeks since the election have seen a kind of schizophrenia on the left, with many of us — me included — bemoaning the president-elect’s choices for various cabinet posts and the lack of any movement progressives.
At the same time, the evidence is out there — at least on economic matters — that the Obama administration may just be the most progressive in memory. Consider this post from Robert Borosage at the Campaign for America’s Future:
Last weekend, pragmatic centrist Obama called for a bold recovery plan, grounded on strategic public investment rather than tax cuts to “help save or create” 2.5 million jobs, “while rebuilding our infrastructure, improving our schools, reducing our dependence on oil and saving billions of dollars.” Elements that would include a “massive effort” to make federal buildings energy efficient, the “largest investment in roads and bridges since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s, “the most sweeping” program to upgrade and repair the nation’s schools; and a new push to extend broadband to every corner of the country. While refusing to talk numbers, Obama pledged to “do what’s required to jolt this economy back into shape,” with anonymous advisers suggesting $500 billion to $700 billion as a possible price tag.
In scope and substance, Obama’s plan tracks the elements of the Main Street Recovery Program, released by the Campaign for America’s Future, and endorsed by more than 100 union, citizen action, women’s, environmental and other progressive groups, and some 120 progressive economists.
And, yet, there he is hanging with Lawrence Summers, which is OK by Borosage, so long as centrists like Summers and others to his right understand today’s changed reality — the center did not hold and had to move to the left, meaning that those of us once decried as being out of touch and on the fringe have become acceptable, if not mainstream, and it is Bill O’Reilly and his clones that are rightly viewed as working the lunatic fringe.
As Borosage says,
Welcome to the new center: post-partisan progressivism. “We’re all Keynesians now,” Richard Nixon once famously announced. And now the catastrophic failures of conservatism have set the stage for a new era of progressive reform. The election gave Obama a mandate and a majority for progressive reform: an end to the war in Iraq, health care for all, investment in new energy and education. He doesn’t seem to have backed off on any of his major commitments yet. And the economic crisis is forcing an ever bolder response, driving the entire “center” to the left.
Hank Kalet 