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Shocking Discoveries

That is what Stanley Kurtz would like you to think he has found in Obama’s career in Chicago politics, but for the most part his article simply fills in the edges of an image of the candidate that is quite familiar to those of us who have been following the campaign for any length of time.  There […]

That is what Stanley Kurtz would like you to think he has found in Obama’s career in Chicago politics, but for the most part his article simply fills in the edges of an image of the candidate that is quite familiar to those of us who have been following the campaign for any length of time.  There are some interesting details, but coming on the heels of Lizza’s profile the entire story has a bit of a redundant feel about it.  The angle of the article–that Obama has supported racial preferences and quotas, opposed racial profiling and fought against harsher penalties for juvenile offenders, among other things–is not really news, and it is obviously not news that his electoral strategy for years has been to combine support from the black community and progressives.  Concerning the latter, it hardly comes as news that Obama plotted his Senate primary electoral strategy in exactly the same way he ran his presidential primary strategy, since these are the constituencies to which he has appealed during his entire career.  There is a certain breathless quality to the piece, as if Kurtz believes what he has found reveals an Obama that has escaped notice until now: “Obama is, in fact, a left-winger!”  Well, yes.  As Obama might say, if you are surprised by any of this you haven’t been paying attention.  

Appearing at the end of the week when Obama addressed some hecklers in Florida by stressing how relatively outspoken he has been on matters concerning the black community, a lot of the story seems quite superfluous.  For instance, Kurtz details Obama’s support for a bill banning racial profiling, but Obama just this week highlighted his position on this, he clearly supports a federal ban on his own campaign site and makes a point of mentioning his past opposition to racial profiling in the same section of the site.  Of course, it’s entirely reasonable and correct to reject Obama’s views and find fault with the legislation he backed, but the entire story seems to be an exercise in “revealing” things about Obama that he’s quite happy to tell everyone about as it is.  Yes, Obama is wrong on this question as far as conservatives are concerned, but what did anyone expect?

Kurtz also makes a number of contrasts that don’t really show what he thinks they show.  For example, Kurtz writes:

Biographical treatments of Obama tend to stress the tenuous nature of his black identity-his upbringing by whites, his elite education, his home in Chicago’s highly integrated Hyde Park, personal tensions with black legislators, and questions about whether Obama is “black enough” to represent African Americans. These concerns over Obama’s racial identity are overblown. On race-related issues Obama has stood shoulder to shoulder with Chicago’s African-American politicians for years. 

Kurtz seems to miss entirely that it was to some significant degree because his position in the community and his identity were tenuous that he adopted conventional positions on government contract quotas and all the rest.  These other claims aren’t overblown–they help explain the difficulty he had in entering Chicago politics and the positions he had to take to make it here.  He couldn’t afford to do otherwise.  Kurtz does seem to recognize this later when he writes:

To the extent that Obama can be accused of having shaky “black credentials,” that very accusation pushes him to practice race-conscious politics all the more energetically.

But, of course, the point is that he could be and was accused of shaky credentials, most especially during his attempt to oust Bobby Rush in the House primary.  Not surprisingly, many of the episodes Kurtz uses to document Obama’s “race-conscious politics” come from the post-2000 period, but more remarkably Kurtz avoids discussing how Rush explicitly attacked Obama for his weaker ties to the community and how Rush used his mixed-race background against him.  Naturally, the episodes Kurtz mentions weren’t limited only to the post-2000 period, because Obama’s position in the black community had always been relatively weak and the 2000 primary revealed how weak it was.  Obviously, to shore up that position and to build the support that Obama would later use in his run for the Senate, Obama was not going to turn against policies that are fairly popular among the people he represented.  Besides, even Hyde Park liberals typically support the things mentioned in the story because they are liberals.  Imagine someone writing an “expose” that Mike Huckabee has supported home-schooling and covenant marriage, and then imagine the bemused, yawning reaction from conservatives to get some sense of how old most of this “news” is.   

Meanwhile, the admission that Obama made during the Senate primary that he was from the liberal wing of the party isn’t new information, since most profiles that have discussed that campaign include this detail, and it is made all the less remarkable by the fact that Obama declared that he was “no doubt progressive” in order to push back against the claim that he was “moving to the center.”  Of course, progressives have reason to doubt that claim, especially in the wake of the FISA bill, but it isn’t as if he is always reluctant to identify himself with the left.  It’s true that he usually eschews the liberal label these days, but then so do a lot of progressives, since progressive has become the preferred term for many on the left.  Oh, yes, and Obama also supports social welfare legislation–who could have guessed?        

As much of a critic of Obama as I have been, I find this objection to him absolutely ridiculous:

In other words, Obama is bipartisan so long as that means asking Republicans to take incremental steps toward his own broader goals.

Well, yeah, that’s usually what both sides in a legislature are trying to do–take incremental steps toward their own goals!  The worrisome thing about Obama’s attitude towards bipartisanship is not that he tries to advance his agenda incrementally (you might as well complain that he tries to win elections or likes to get good press), but that he seems to be so oriented towards consensus-building and belonging to a consensus position that he values bipartisanship almost as an end in itself and seems to believe that the problem in Washington is that there is too little of this accursed collaboration in general rather than too much of it being used for the wrong things.   

Finally, I don’t think the following claim is entirely true:

When it comes to compromising with the other side, however, Obama says “take a hike.”

It depends.  It is not simply a question of whether he will or won’t compromise with the “other side.”  What matters is whether taking a certain position will expose him to significant political risk and confrontation.  If it does, he will avoid it.  If working with the “other side” allows him to avoid political risk, he will be glad to do that, too, as his flip on the FISA bill reminds us.  In the end, Lizza’s assessment of Obama’s career holds up much better:

Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.  

That he accommodates himself to existing institutions to advance a broadly progressive domestic agenda is also no surprise to anyone who has looked at his policy proposals or heard what he says.

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