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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, […]

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?

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