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Edited on Sat Mar-01-08 05:10 PM by Pirate Smile
Obama's brilliant answer on liberalism by VirginiaDem
Wed Feb 27, 2008 at 10:21:39 AM PST
There was a moment last night, when Obama was given the opportunity to talk about liberalism. Now, the worst answer would've been to bash it. A better answer would've been to embrace it. The best answer?
To make liberal values more appealing and move them to the majority. And that's what he did. In one brief moment, Obama captured the essense of the power of his potential presidency -- to build a progressive majority by breaking down the "categories" and attracting voters to our positions.
VirginiaDem's diary :: ::
While pointing out the lack of real daylight between him and Senator Clinton on their positions, he notes that the categories at issue placed ethics oversight into the "liberal" category. On that, he said:
(Establishing an office of public integrity) was rejected . And according to the National Journal, that position is a liberal position. Now, I don't think that's a liberal position. I think there are a lot of Republicans and a lot of Independents who would like to make sure that ethic investigations are not conducted by the people who are potentially being investigated. So the categories don't make sense.
Some might accuse Obama of not keeping up the distinctions that helped us in 2006 regarding ethics. That would miss the point: Obama isn't saying that liberals are corrupt or that the Republicans party isn't steeped in a culture of corruption. Rather, he's talking about the need for ethics. And he's saying that this need for an ethical government shouldn't be compartmentalized in a "liberal" box. This value is one that all Americans should want. Effectively, he's taking this position and moving it into the mainstream.
In fact, he doesn't stop at ethics. Obama keeps going, explaining that these are not just stick-them-in-the-liberal-corner values. He explains his well-known appeal to independents and Republicans despite a voting record that adheres to our values more than any other Senator:
It's because people don't want to go back to those old categories of what's liberal and what's conservative. They want to see who is making sense, who's fighting for them, who's going to go after the special interests, who is going to champion the issues of health care and making college affordable, and making sure that we have a foreign policy that makes sense?
All of these are progressive goals and values. But in the heart of a Democratic primary -- when bashing Republicans and acting partisan is in anyone's best interest -- Obama continues to push our values out to the majority. It's a brilliant move: Democratic goals and values aren't just liberal. They are American goals and values: ethical government, availability of health care and college, a common sense foriegn policy, and more.
Listen to his speeches. He constantly talks about his core liberal philosophy in a way that's appealing to non-liberals. The Wall Street Journal picked up on this recently in an article highlighting his Reagan-like ability to attract his listeners to his positions:
More important for the race ahead, Mr. Obama has the unique ability to offer doctrinaire liberal positions in a way that avoids the stridency of many recent Democratic candidates. That he managed to do this in the days before the Iowa caucuses -- at a time when he might have been expected to be at his most liberal -- was quite striking.
His rhetorical gimmick is simple. When he addresses a contentious issue, Mr. Obama almost always begins his answer with a respectful nod in the direction of the view he is rejecting -- a line or two that suggests he understands or perhaps even sympathizes with the concerns of a conservative.
At Cornell College on Dec. 5, for example, a student asked Mr. Obama how his administration would view the Second Amendment. He replied: "There's a Supreme Court case that's going to be decided fairly soon about what the Second Amendment means. I taught Constitutional Law for 10 years, so I've got my opinion. And my opinion is that the Second Amendment is probably -- it is an individual right and not just a right of the militia. That's what I expect the Supreme Court to rule. I think that's a fair reading of the text of the Constitution. And so I respect the right of lawful gun owners to hunt, fish, protect their families."
Then came the pivot:
"Like all rights, though, they are constrained and bound by the needs of the community . . . So when I look at Chicago and 34 Chicago public school students gunned down in a single school year, then I don't think the Second Amendment prohibits us from taking action and making sure that, for example, ATF can share tracing information about illegal handguns that are used on the streets and track them to the gun dealers to find out -- what are you doing?"
In conclusion:
"There is a tradition of gun ownership in this country that can be respected that is not mutually exclusive with making sure that we are shutting down gun traffic that is killing kids on our streets. The argument I have with the NRA is not whether people have the right to bear arms. The problem is they believe any constraint or regulation whatsoever is something that they have to beat back. And I don't think that's how most lawful firearms owners think."
In the end, Mr. Obama is simply campaigning for office in the same way he says he would operate if he were elected. "We're not looking for a chief operating officer when we select a president," he said during a question and answer session at Google headquarters back in December.
"What we're looking for is somebody who will chart a course and say: Here is where America needs to go -- here is how to solve our energy crisis, here's how we need to revamp our education system -- and then gather the talent together and then mobilize that talent to achieve that goal. And to inspire a sense of hope and possibility."
Like Ronald Reagan did.
In this example, Obama used a different move. He opens the skeptical gun owner's garage door by acknowledging some validity in their basic argument and assuaging their basic fears, and then he drives in a moving truck full of progressive gun control policies that would make the NRA implode. By the end, he and most gun owners are on the "liberal" side of the debate, and the NRA is on the other.
(Full disclosure: the author of this piece is Stephen Haynes, a neo-con who promoted the al Qaeda-Iraq links and the biographer for Dick Cheney. However, this article isn't praising Obama as one of their own. Rather, in echoing the Democratic establishments reaction to Reagan, the entire article reads more like a warning to the GOP about failing "to take him very seriously" and highlights how McCain is copying Clinton's mistakes. Condescending phrases like "rhetorical gimmick" and "doctrinaire liberal positions" betray the author's movites.)
But there's more than just rhetorical devices. It's takes more than words (as Obama himself acknolwedged last night) to pass universal health care or get the NRA to stand down. Talking like this will help in the long run to move people to our side, but it also take activity. So, as a legislator, he's well known for taking what might be a "liberal" bills and attracting Republicans to get them passed. In Illinois, he made videotaping confessions (to prevent police abuse) into a mainstream position that was supported by both advocacy groups and the police, and the bill passed unanimously. He did the same with passing the state's first earned-income tax credit for the working poor and the first ethics and campaign finance law in over two decades.
And as a Senator, we've now got enacted laws on ethical transparency (Obama-Coburn) and bankrtupcy reform for charitable giving (Obama-Hatch) and better Katrina relief oversight (Obama-Coburn) and improved nuclear non-proliferation (Obama-Hagel) and weapons stockpile destruction (Obama-Lugar). A pending bill sponsored by Obama that shows his ability is the Global Poverty Act, which just passed the Senate Foriegn Affairs Committee:
A bill to require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.
The Act's supporters are mostly Democrats. But it's not only Democrats that support this bill, as Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) praised its passage and Spenser Baucus (R-AL) co-sponsored a companion bill in the House. Dick Lugar (R-IN) is also a co-sponsor, as are a few other House Republicans. If fighting global poverty is to move into the political mainstream, it'll help to have these and other Republicans on board.
We've criticized Democrats for years on triangulation: moving themselves to the middle. What I love about Obama is that he does the reverse: moving the middle to our values. Whether it's in explaining his positions or getting them passed as laws, he is attracting independents and Republicans to our party and our beliefs through both words and action. And the end effect will be an ascendant, mainstream progressive party that enacts its values into laws -- and the final banishment of backward conservatism to the wilderness.
It's one thing to just fight for our values and goals. It's quite another to also achieve them for the long term.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/27/113430/088/759/465029
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