There is an unfortunate sense of deja vu to the political discussion in Washington and on the cable shows that follow Washington these days. Thanks to an electoral rout that returned right-wing Republicans to the majority in the House of Representatives, the conventional wisdom folks have been talking up an Obama move-to-the-center.
The president, the argument goes, must forsake his lefty ideals and pivot toward more mainstream centrism. And the appearance last week of Bill Clinton at a presidential press conference only made the narrative seem that much more in vogue.
A piece in Sunday’s Week In Review in The New York Times — “If Bill Clinton Were President” — sought to understand the phenomenon, thought it failed to get very far below the surface because it accepted the traditional narrative of the Clinton presidency and made some assumptions about the Obama presidency that just don’t match with the facts.
Consider paragraph two:
Equally riveting and astonishing, Mr. Clinton’s blast-from-the-past performance in the White House briefing room on Friday afternoon reinforced the impression of political déjà vu, the sense that once again a Democratic president humbled by midterm elections was pivoting to the center at the expense of his own supporters.
The story does go on to acknowledge that Clinton was anything but a raging lefty, but the argument that for Democrats to be successful they must move to the center remained intact, despite the important realities represented by these two different, yet similar Democratic presidents.
Let’s take Clinton first, so that we are clear about what the expectations were for Clinton coming in. First, Clinton made several important moves during his 1992 campaign that made it clear that he occupied not the center, but the right wing of his own party: He called for an end to “welfare as we know it,” made a point of executing a mentally retarded inmate to demonstrate his pro-death penalty bonafides, made several veiled and overt rhetorical attacks on leaders of the African American community (and a minor hip-hop performer) to distance himself from the race issue, made it clear that he endorsed the prevailing free trade wisdom (with some ineffectual caveats) and generally ran against his party’s past as much as he did against the sitting Republican president.
It was an ugly showing, but it was effective. Bill Clinton was no progressive — and the policies he pursued during his first two years further reinforced this. Aside from his push for universal healthcare — which resulted in the monstrous, bureaucratic and unworkable “Hillarycare” proposal, one that endorsed HMOs and would have left the worst features of the system in place — he did little to endear himself to the left.
But, then, that has never stopped right-wing Republicans from demonizing Democrats as crazed longhair liberals.
When the GOP took over Congress, Clinton didn’t pivot as much as he accelerated his rightward push, his legacy ultimately being his dismantling of welfare and the banking/finance regulatory apparatus, the endorsement of bubble economics and a dysfunctional Washington political class.
Barack Obama, while no lefty either, was seen as a more traditional liberal, primarily because of his early history as a community organizer and some of the positions he had taken early in his career. Obama, like Clinton, showed a tendency to move right early in his career, to use his vast rhetorical skills to belittle his erstwhile political allies (read his over-praised Audacity of Hope, which fetishes bipartisanship at the expense of philosophy or ideology) and accept whatever compromise ended up on the table.
The signals were there during the campaign — his vote on telecom immunity, his moves to Hillary Clinton’s right on healthcare, etc. — and they have been born out during the first two years of his presidency. His healthcare triumph — his most notable liberal achievement — is really just a massive giveaway to the healthcare industry and was built not on sound progressive ideals but on the GOP’s alternative to Hillarycare. At every turn, he has allowed progressive priorities to be watered down (financial reregulation, his too-weak-by-half stimulus) or abandoned them altogether (state secrets, Guantanamo, torture). And, now, the tax cut plan.
This is not necessarily meant as a criticism of the Obama administration — or not only a criticism — but of the mainstream media’s propensity for simple shorthand: Democrat does not equal progressive or even liberal and Republican does not necessarily equal conservative. The simple shorthand buys into the mythology of a functioning left-right battle between two parties that allegedly cover all legitimate ranges of opinion in the country and is incredibly effective at marginalizing nontraditional voices and skewing debate to the right.
If Barack Obama, a corporate-backed and supporting Democrat who has endorsed the national security state and the death penalty, has shown an unwillingness to challenge the primacy of money and who seems more willing to thumb his nose at the more liberal wing of his own party than the absolute wack jobs in the other — if he is a lefty, then what does that make Bernie Sanders or the members of the House Progressive Caucus?
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