The Myth Of “The Center”
It is more than a little remarkable that few have observed that Obama’s proposal to direct government funds to religious charities is as undesirable as Bush’s proposal. Viewed through a distorting lens of bringing religion back into the public square or using religion as a vehicle for political point-scoring, faith-based initiatives have always seemed appealing, but neither religious traditionalists nor strict church-state separationists want such a venture to succeed, and for good reason. The conservatives who saw the faith-based initiative idea as the welfare state’s co-optation of religious groups and as a threat to the independence of churches and charities have been vindicated with Obama’s embrace of the same takeover masked as a helping hand. There is no way that such power will not be abused to the detriment of religious conservative groups. The hard-line separationists must also be enjoying its success in showing the basic undesirability of such public-private cooperation in this particular area. Meanwhile, Obama wins plaudits for having moved to the “center” on this question, which is to say that he gets credit for adopting the left-of-center position that the Bush administration adopted seven years ago. That is ultimately what “the center” means: it is whatever the political class embraces.
In a recent column, Sullivan says of Obama’s newfound “centrism”:
His pledge of a fixed timetable for withdrawal was always going to be subject to empirical shifts on the ground in Iraq.
But then it is hardly a fixed timetable, now, is it? It’s like saying that there is a firm deadline, except that it can be adjusted depending on cirumstances. It’s a bit like saying that there is an absolute cut-off date, except that we allow for some leeway. It rather empties the word pledge of all meaning, doesn’t it? Without that, what does Obama actually offer that is worth supporting?
The analysis gets weaker from here:
And by conceding a “refinement” of his policy the day before the July 4 holiday, Obama avoided short-term attacks on his policy “flip-flop” while making a necessary adjustment.
But he didn’t avoid “short-term attacks.” The Sunday shows were filled with talk of Obama’s “refinement” in far from flattering terms. Perhaps he made a “necessary adjustment” according to a narrow, electoral calculation, but what he definitely did not do was to avoid attacks for “flip-flopping.” Indeed, the complaint against the MSM is that it has run with the story of Obama’s Iraq flip-flop without due regard for evidence. There may be some truth to this, but not nearly as much as his defenders would like.
Sullivan goes on:
And there’s a point to the successive shifts: Obama is slowly undermining every conceivable reason to vote for Republican candidate John McCain.
That would be clever, except that it is entirely misguided. The reason to vote for Obama, perhaps the only reason, is that he represents something significantly different from McCain in terms of policy. In the absence of that, Obama hasn’t got a lot to offer besides an interesting biography and the odd pretty speech.
This remark is hard to defend:
He cannot ignore the pressing need for good intelligence gained through wire-tapping after 9/11.
Someone will need to explain to me how someone can muster extraordinary moral outrage at immoral policies (e.g., torture), but can at the same time countenance manifestly illegal, unconstitutional ones. The latter are more corrosive to our system of government and the way that our government operates, because they are less obviously outrageous, yet collusion with illegal surveillance does not begin to compete with collusion with a torture regime in the Obama supporter’s reactions. If Obama had “moved to the center” away from his position condemning the Military Commissions Act, would we be hearing about how Obama was a shrewd, clever politician, or would we instead hear outraged cries about betrayal and lack of principle? Do Americans’ civil liberties matter less than opposition to torture? Some Obama supporters’ reactions would suggest that they are.
Update: Sullivan responds, but I think he has not understood my objection:
Er, yes: in my view, congressionally approved wire-tapping is morally preferable to torture and less constitutionally and legally corrosive. It is very difficult for me to understand a worldview in which it weren’t. My major concern with wiretapping was the executive branch’s unilateral and unaccountable power-grab.
So when two branches of the government collude in unconstitutional activities, that isn’t a power grab? More to the point, I am not saying that illegal wiretapping is morally worse than torture, but that both are illegal and abuses of power and only one seems to merit any outrage from Sullivan. His disproportionate reactions to these two outrageous things, even if they aren’t equally outrageous, are remarkable. The important point, which I may not have made as clearly as I should have was this: if Sullivan thinks supporting illegal wiretapping is a shrewd electoral “adjustment,” what cannot be justified in the name of such adjustments? What else could Obama “adjust” before shrewdness degenerates into simply cynical manipulation?
Well, this Obama supporter doesn’t think so. The FISA capitulation is a black mark on Obama’s campaign. I think the best argument in Obama’s defense is the one Nate Silver made: there is no value in throwing Nancy Pelosi under the bus and picking an intraparty fight over something that was going to pass anyway. He needs the Blue Dogs for things like health care reform and he has no reason to go around ticking them off and painting them as extremists or RINOs (which they are, but that’s neither here nor there). But again, that’s really the best I can do in his defense on that one.
Also, when you see religious traditionalists and separationists lining up together on these faith-based initiative issues, it’s always worth remembering that Madison – still the shrewdest political operative in American history – was a separationist precisely because intermingling is bad for both government and religion. An Obama presidency is going to lead to a lot of liberals arguing that the Bush administration’s tactics were only bad because it wasn’t our guys doing it. Embarrassing.
The limits of Sullivan’s moral imagination have always been the same as the limits of his indignation.
That’s why he can get worked up about one thing, but ignore other outrages, despite any possible oddity to it all. I still read his blog because it’s “important” (largely as a linkblog, but also so I’m prepared when I hear his arguments repeated in my social sphere), but I never expect to agree with him even when we’re behind the same issue.
I’m glad you went after this one, Daniel. I pretty much fell out of my chair when I read what Sullivan had said about FISA. He really does seem to have lost the ability to think with any clarity when it comes to Obama. A shame …
I agree with your critique of Sullivan whole-heartedly. One has to imagine that if Obama opposed the FISA legislation on consitutional grounds, Sullivan would be praising the senator’s “judgement” while criticizing McCain’s capitulation to neoconservatism.
Sullivan is in too deep to back out now. It’s mind-boggling to me how someone could simultaneously say that his/her heart is with Ron Paul while fervently championing the case for an Obama presidency. And HE is the judge of pragmatism???
After reading his response to your post, it’s clear to me he’s on the defensive. Once the Iraq withdrawal issue is essentially off the table (after Obama’s trip, the two parties will be essentially equal in their policy stances), there is no reason to vote for Obama. He will continue to increase the welfare state, continue our military and diplomatic foreign interventions, and he will show little regard to self-government. Change we can believe in!!!
I’ve apparently missed a long week of righteous Obama-bashing, but reading through this and other recent columns of yours, I don’t really see any substance here. In one column you admit that none of this represents any actual change in Obama’s position on withdrawal from Iraq, in that he always left cavaets about adjusting to a changing situation. Now this is seen as some kind of moral outrage. The idea that Obama is taking Iraq withdrawal off the table is absurd, he’s merely stating the obvious, that he will withdrawal as quickly as possible, taking into account the situation on the ground. Only an idiot would actually do anything differently. This is a long way from saying that there’s no different between his position and McCain’s. In fact, taking into account the situation on the ground could lead to a faster withdrawal, not a slower one.
In regard to FISA,.as I’ve already pointed out before, this is a meaningless vote that tells us very little about what Obama will do as President, except that he’s not the kind of guy who will shoot himself in the foot out of principle. What we do know is that as a senator he can’t stop this bill from passing with or without telecom immunity. As for violating the fourth amendment, if it does do that, there are court challenges that can be made, and as President Obama can change the law seeing as how he will have a compliant congress at his side. At the moment, it merely signals that he’s not trying to hamstring the efforts to fight terrorism and make pretty speeches about civil liberties that mean nothing in either the short or the long run. As mentioned before and ignored by you, Obama has for months said that as soon as he gets into office, he will ask his attorney general to investigate any lawbreaking by the previous administration, and prosecute if the case warrants it. This is the real way to curb government abuse of the law, not to go after private companies who were coerced by the government to assist them in breaking the law.
I find it strange that you feel free to declare Obama’s future actions as President already known and determined, and thus criticizable in advance. This is a wondrous crystal-ball you have that tells you the future with such accuracy, but I somehow am skeptical of your abilities. The idea that any President can put out a set of principles and actions during his campaign that he will then follow to a T is a naive fantasy. It’s not even a question of a candidate being duplicitous, it’s that even he doesn’t know how he’s going to respond to future situations. George Bush ran against nation-building in 2000, only to embark on the biggest nation-building exercise in our country’s history two years later. I doubt Obama or McCain will deviate in such an extreme fashion from his platform, but I also doubt either will adhere to it with strict purity either. Ron Paul for some reason is not on either party’s ballot, so if strict purity of principle is your thing, this has got to be a frustrating election. Of course, strict purity of principle never gets anything done, as Ron Paul amply shows. He can make strict promises about such things precisely because he will never have the responsibility of carrying out such policies.
The question of what Obama will actually do as President is a good one, but not actually answerable until he becomes President. Trying to read the tea leaves of very minor or functionally inconsequential shifts in emphasis in his campaigning as signifying incontrovertable corruption and equivalence to the Bush-McCain policy agenda is, well, just not serious. It makes for satisfying hissy fits from the purists, but doesn’t actually change anything real about his candidacy. Politics has always required that we vote and hope, without always knowing what we are voting for. On the other hand, I can understand you general frustration with Obama, in that however you look at him, he’s not Ron Paul, and if that is your prefered candidate, he’s going to fall way short of expectations.
[...] This is entirely right, and there is no time like the present to take up the task of building something better, of using the remarkably widespread frustration and outrage generated by the inanities of the Bush years to do something better than support a candidate whose agenda for “change” is as timid and insubstantial as Barack Obama’s. Indeed, as recent events have made quite clear, a professedly “centrist” and “post-partisan” politics like Obama’s – or, for that matter, John McCain’s – is the very worst sort of politicking to turn to in our present situation: for it is exactly the political “center” (which is to say, the class of positions overwhelmingly embraced by those at the center of the Great Political Machine) that has provided us most of the worst of the abuses of the Bush Era, and it is exactly that political center with which we identify ourselves when we choose to support a candidate who, though he may well be the “lesser of two evils”, nevertheless has a prestigious history of bowing to the demands of that cross-partisan establishment whenever it is deemed to be politically expedient. [...]
Did the Communists not have a theme “For the Party”?
FISA Laws
How sad, that 2/3s of our Government, does not know, or simply ignores the laws already in place. Using the laws that benefit them, and ignore the Citizens. Therefore, our Congress believes Bush is correct, and passes legislation that will harm Americans, including themselves. Do they really believe the law won’t apply to them also? This is why, you shouldn’t change the rules in mid-stream, & you cannot give full authority to one man—-the President. As you might notice they occasionally will push the wrong button
[...] exactly that. No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTMLallowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> [...]