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The Sanctification of the Status Quo

The cable-TV loudmouths who dismissed Obama right off the bat were unfair in certain particulars. But, on the question of whether Obama, if elected, would be more liberal or more conservative than his campaign rhetoric indicated, they arrived at a more accurate assessment than those of us who pored over his speeches, parsed his interviews […]

The cable-TV loudmouths who dismissed Obama right off the bat were unfair in certain particulars. But, on the question of whether Obama, if elected, would be more liberal or more conservative than his campaign rhetoric indicated, they arrived at a more accurate assessment than those of us who pored over his speeches, parsed his interviews and read his first book. ~Christopher Caldwell

It is this kind of claim that makes me distrust the rest of what Caldwell has to say. I was one of those people who pored over his speeches and parsed his interviews, and that was how I came to my assessment of him as a rather dull, conventional center-left Democrat. In a Culture11 article that has since vanished into the ether, I wrote this:

An apt description of what the next President will actually represent was penned, in a different context, by columnist Robert Samuelson, who once described Obama as the “sanctification of the status quo.” Though his lifelong search for stability and rootedness are frequently lost in the polemics and panegyrics about his life, close study of his biography reveals a desire for consensus and accommodation to structures already in place. Assimilation to the norms of the American cultural and political elite makes Obama seem alien mainly to those who feel great alienation from most national cultural and political institutions where Obama has thrived (i.e., conservatives), but the very elitism that they (correctly) perceive is also evidence of Obama’s aversion to challenging established norms and introducing radical change.

This will reassure most of his enemies as much as it disheartens many of his friends. If you have a high opinion of the Washington establishment and bipartisan consensus politics, Obama’s election should come as a relief. If you believe, as I do, that most of our policy failures stretching back beyond the last eight years are the product of a failed establishment and a bankrupt consensus, an Obama administration represents the perpetuation of a system that is fundamentally broken.

Two years ago, Republican partisans engaged in election-year misrepresentation were bound to get this wrong, but almost two years into Obama’s first term there is really no excuse for Caldwell’s misunderstanding. If one insists on mischaracterizing the legislation Obama has signed as being to the left of what he campaigned on, one will continually make the error that Obama governed from the left of his party and conclude that the “loudmouths” were right about him. In fact, almost every bill he signed was less to the liking of progressives than his original campaign positions. He hasn’t really been “more conservative” than his campaign rhetoric suggested. He has instead being more or less exactly what one should have expected given his campaign rhetoric and his political career.

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