Washington — Six weeks before taking office, President-elect Barack Obama can already boast one striking accomplishment: persuading partisan, ideological adversaries to see him in a less partisan, less ideological light.
The reappraisal runs deeper than Mr. Obama’s photo-op pleasantries with Senator John McCain. Derided during the campaign as a purveyor of “socialism” who was guilty of “palling around with terrorists,” he has since won praise from conservatives for retaining Robert Gates as defense secretary, for naming Gen. James L. Jones as his national security adviser and for selecting the moderate Timothy F. Geithner, who helped draw up the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout plan, as his Treasury secretary.
Karl Rove has called Mr. Obama’s economic team “reassuring,” and other Bush alumni agree. “Obama is doing something marvelously right,” Michael Gerson, President Bush’s onetime senior speechwriter, wrote in The Washington Post. “He is disappointing the ideologues.”
More remarkably, Mr. Obama has reaped those plaudits without seeming to abandon his commitment to the same policies that conservatives routinely attacked during the campaign — his pledge to expand health care coverage, to withdraw troops from Iraq and to increase government spending on infrastructure and alternative energy projects. On the contrary, Mr. Obama has indicated that he will follow his belief in activist government with an economic stimulus package much larger than what he proposed in the campaign. And there has been, so far, very little grumbling from conservatives.
All this raises the question: can Mr. Obama indeed be forging the new style of politics he invoked so often during the election — one that transcends the partisan divisions that have marked recent administrations? If so, what will he replace it with, a bipartisan style of governance that splits the differences between competing ideological camps, or a “post-partisan” politics that narrows gaps between red and blue or even renders them irrelevant?
Actually, insiders in Mr. Obama’s emerging team foresee a third option: a series of left-leaning programs that draw on Americans’ desire for action and also on Mr. Obama’s moderate, even conservative, temperament, to hurdle the ideological obstacles that have lately paralyzed Washington.
Not that Mr. Obama is the first president-elect to offer soothing words. “We are all Republicans, we are all Democrats,” Jefferson declared in his Inaugural Address in 1801, before the modern party system had taken root.
Later presidents have said much the same thing. But time and again, ideological divisions have thwarted the promise of nonideological problem-solving. President John F. Kennedy offered such a forecast in 1962. The most pressing issues of the moment were “technical problems, administrative problems,” Mr. Kennedy said. “They are very sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.”
But Mr. Kennedy’s proposals on civil rights, among other issues, met with strong resistance from Congressional conservatives, and not long after that, baby boom upheavals created the legacy of ideological bitterness that Mr. Obama now seeks to overcome. Since then ideology and partisanship have become more dominant in American politics. In all three presidential elections of the 21st century, voters have split along clear ideological lines.
Last month’s exit polls showed Mr. Obama winning the votes of just one in 10 Republicans and one in 5 conservatives. Some hot-button issues that Mr. Obama has yet to touch during the transition — abortion policy and judicial appointments, for example — could still inflame the culture wars.
But the tone of political discussion in recent weeks suggests several reasons to expect something new.
There are, to begin with, the transition appointments, which have not only pleased critics on the right but also lowered the overall temperature of the political discussion. Representative Melissa Bean, like Mr. Obama an Illinois Democrat, said that Mr. Obama’s centrist appointments had caused the news media to lavish less attention on the “lunatic fringe” in Washington.
Beyond this, Mr. Obama has persuaded some conservatives, at least for now, that he really is open to their ideas. Meeting with the nation’s governors in Philadelphia last week, he pointedly and publicly reached out to the Republican executives. “As long as he’s smart and he listens and he sets a big table, we have a chance to do business,” said Bernadette Budde of the Business-Industry Political Action Committee, an influential voice for corporate America in Washington.
There is also the boost Mr. Obama has received from the Republicans’ disarray. “I don’t think there is such a thing as post-partisan or post-ideological politics, but there is such a thing as one side being so shell-shocked and/or incompetent that it is incapable of presenting an alternative vision,” said Dan Mitchell, a conservative economic analyst at the Cato Institute.
Thus, while some Republicans still call for a return to tax cuts and smaller government, others seem impatient with conservative “first principles.” One example is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, who favors new federal spending on infrastructure and last week urged lawmakers to “get off of their rigid ideologies.”
This is not surprising from a governor who has declared a “fiscal emergency” in California. But the economic downturn is breeding other defections from the ranks of ideological purists. The former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has said the financial crisis caused him to re-examine his free market views. Martin Feldstein, a top economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, now advocates big federal spending. Mr. Bush himself proposed a $700 billion bailout for financial institutions.
Mr. Obama is the beneficiary, not the agent, of these changes. “The center has moved,” said Robert Borosage of the liberal Campaign for America’s Future. As a result, said Peter Wehner, a onetime deputy to Mr. Rove who is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “Obama has more latitude when it comes to the role of government in the economy.”
Mr. Wehner’s hopes for Mr. Obama are pinned, to some extent, on hints Mr. Obama has dropped that he will forgo tax increases on affluent Americans. But that is precisely the kind of shift that worries a very different but also ideologically inflected group: Obama backers on the progressive left, particularly the legions who embraced his campaign on the Internet. “I don’t want him to split the difference,” says Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the influential Web site DailyKos.
Mr. Borosage, for his part, frets that Mr. Geithner at Treasury may not support sufficiently rigorous regulation of financial institutions.
All these pressures are likely to increase even as Mr. Obama tries to maintain the good will he has accumulated across an unusually broad swath of the political spectrum.
“By combining reform with the big goals, the public will stick with him and Capitol Hill will stick with him,” said John Podesta, who is directing Mr. Obama’s transition team.
This goal eluded another president, Bill Clinton, who also saw himself as a post-ideological leader. But some veterans of that administration believe that Mr. Obama may fare better. “It is quite possible to see him as liberal and having an activist agenda, but being a type of leader who does not polarize partisans and finds ways of bringing people together to work on the things where they can find common ground,” said Stanley B. Greenberg, a pollster in Mr. Clinton’s White House. “With this type of leader, the pent-up demand for action on the economy, health care and energy allows us to reach a series of big moments where many Republicans join the process and perhaps proposals pass with overwhelming majorities.”
In the end, however, the possibilities for a politics that breaks traditional patterns may depend less on Mr. Obama’s talents than on widespread weariness with the dogma of ideologues — of the left and the right.
“I would like to see us enter a post-ideological era in which policies are based on pragmatic considerations rather than conformity to a set of preconceptions rooted in a rapidly vanishing past,” Judge Richard Posner, appointed by Mr. Reagan to the federal appeals court in 1981, wrote in a recent blog posting. He preceded that wish with this: “I would be happy to see conservatism exit from the political scene — provided it takes liberalism with it.”http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc
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