Centrist not Leftist
There’s a lot of growing frustration on the part of progressives that there isn’t a single hardline leftist in any of Obama’s cabinet positions. I know this comes as some surprise to McCain voters who see Barack Obama and his former primary nemesis Hillary Clinton as harbingers of Marxism in America, but the reality is that the American left is very displeased with these choices.
Here’s what the left doesn’t get — the country, though not “center right” as the Republicans believe, is neither conservative or liberal: it’s centrist. People take and pick their viewpoints from a variety of sources and don’t necessarily view two policy positions as incompatible if one rises from leftist thought and the other rises from conservative thought. There is general disgust with hardline ideological positions, as many Americans just aren’t that ideological.
George W. Bush governed from the hard right. Iraq, Katrina, Social Security privatization, purging the Justice Department of Democrats, Terry Schiavo, etc. were all extremely partisan, hardline conservative positions. And Bush failed because of them — his support collapsed because he governed from an ideological position and not a fact-based position. People who normally didn’t care about such things started to think of him as a right wing nutjob. And that was that. But just because they dislike a rightwing nutjob, doesn’t mean they won’t also dislike a leftwing nutjob. I think most ordinary people think that hardline positions of any stripe are bullshit.
Obama is smart. He knows that the only way he can govern successfully and gain consensus is from the center. Anyone who read either of his books should understand this. That’s why he’s got sensible centrist picks, and not a single avatar of the left among them. This may be disappointing to my fellow progressives, but we need to suck it up and accept that we’ve got a competent team of people at the helm at last. Change may happen, but it will be moderate change. Such moderation may seem radical to Americans in the center after eight years of Bush, but progressives are just going to have to accept what we can get. The Republicans didn’t accept what was realistic, and now they’re out in the wilderness after six years of overreach. If we want to stay in the majority, Democrats are going to have to learn to provide sensible progressive solutions and not try to radically change the country as the Republicans did.
By James DiBenedetto, November 24, 2008 @ 9:16 am
I just wanted to comment on one small aspect of this post – you mention the Terry Schiavo case as something that the Bush Administration handled in a partisan, hard-right manner.
Maybe.
But I blogged a lot about that case back when it was in the news, and, while the left may have managed to paint it as “right wing nutjobs” trying to force their pro-life views on society, a horrible precedent was set.
The result of that case, in the end, was this: without any written insturctions or other normally legally binding proof, if a person is no longer able to speak for themselves, they can be put to sleep if their spouse says “they’d have wanted it that way.”
What it means is this: if you’re the next-of-kin for someone who is incapacitated, and it becomes too expensive, or inconvenient, or depressing to continue to take care of them, you can have them killed, with the blessing of law and society, as long as you use the magic words “it’s what they said they wanted.”
We were already headed that way, and it’s going to become a bigger topic as Boomers get old and infirm and their care is placed in the hands of children who may not want to see their inheritances spent on increasingly expensive medical care that is only “prolonging the inevitable.”
I think that there will come a day when a lot of the people who supported Michael Schiavo and made political points against Republicans over this case, will regret having done so, when they find themselves unable to speak up on their own behalf, and some relative decides to end THEIR suffering, whether or not that’s what they want.
But it will be far too late by then, and they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.
By James DiBenedetto, November 24, 2008 @ 9:20 am
Sorry for ranting.
As I said, I blogged extensively about this at the time. And aside from the larger political issues, Michael Schiavo was a really evil human being.
He was possibly responsible for putting his wife in a coma in the first place, and his refusal to get her proper care early on arguably doomed her. He had her pets put to sleep, had her jewelry melted down to make a new ring for himself, and took up with another woman and had two kids by her while supposedly “caring” for his wife.
He was a despicable human being, and it boggles my mind that he got one iota of public sympathy, or that his side of the issue won in the court of public opinion.
That case really shook my faith in the American people.