Triangulating In The New Millenium
by digby
Greg Sargent says that the White House isn't triangulating in the Clinton mode because he's trying to navigate the shoals of DC politics to get the best deal he can, whereas Clinton really was an ideological centrist and his triangulation was done with the express purpose of advancing a centrist solution.
It's an interesting theory, but I'm not sure I believe it. After all, Obama is the guy who wrote this, in his book The Audacity of Hope:
"It was Bill Clinton that recognized the categories of conservative and liberal played to Republican advantage and were inadequate to address our problems. Clinton's third way... tapped into the pragmatic, nonideological attitude of Americans."
Even if his heart is in the right place, I'm not sure why I should care. The issue before us is whether or not he is being strategically and tactically astute by using his left as foils, which he has been doing to some extent since the beginning and shows every indication that he will do it going forward. (Most presidents look for ways to position themselves in "the center" in the second half of their first term, so he's not unusual in that.) I see very little difference in what he's doing and what Clinton did. The difference is in the political environment, particularly among his activist supporters, many of whom didn't realize that they were electing someone who had announced quite openly that he believed the "categories of conservative and liberal were inadequate to address our problems."
The base was in a very different place in 1992. Clinton ran as a New Democrat promising to end the "braindead politics of the past," much like Obama. The idea at the time was rather technical however, at least in part --- that you can use modern market based processes to achieve liberal goals. Now certainly there was a political desire to neutralize social issues, particularly about being soft on crime and changing the "incentives" in social welfare, which sort of defined DLCism of the 90s. But essentially Clinton was saying to liberals, "I'm with you on the goals, but we need to shed the old labels and try a different way of getting there." At least that's what I think liberals heard, whether or not it was true. Regardless, throughout the Clinton years, for the most part, there was a belief in his good intentions -- and he was actually pretty clever (more clever than Obama) in sending the liberal dogwhistle and telling the folks that he was on their side. (Taylor Branch's Clinton biography says that Clinton really was a liberal who was backed into the compromises and changing his priorities, just like Obama. But who really knows?)
Liberals were a defeated force in that decade and were willing to try this new thing to see if it might work. (We were all pragmatists then.) I know that I was open to seeing how the experiment would come out, and at the time, when the economy picked up and happy days were here again, we thought it might have worked. It's very hard to argue with prosperity. (And then there was the modern conservative movement hitting congress like a gale force, which was like nothing we'd ever seen before ...)
When Bush came in and blew a hole in the hard won balanced budget by giving tax cuts to millionaires, it was finally irrefutable to even the die-hards that it had all been a fools game and that the DLC experiment was a failure. It was clear that the Republicans had become ideologically bankrupt political terrorists and the Democrats had basically done their dirty work for them.
Barack Obama, however, has never agreed with that. Indeed, Sargent is right that he primarily sells himself as a conciliator and a bipartisan deal maker who is doing the best he can in a hostile situation. But then Clinton did too. In fact, all Democrats have thought that since the 1980s. The problem for Obama is that unlike Clinton, the experiment in "pragmatic, non-ideological" politics in the age of GOP nihilism has already been tried. And it failed. (They may have had a nice party for a while, but the hangover is one for the books.) He's living in the past and liberals are trying to drag him into the present.
I should add that I also don't buy that Obama isn't drawn to centrist "New Democrat" solutions on the merits. His health care plan was very much a New Dem proposal, particularly since he put no muscle behind the one non-New Dem element in the program and helped the conservatives (serving as proxy for the GOP) in his own party use it to triangulate against the base in the final legislation. His stimulus program was half tax cuts. His economic advisors are mostly centrists and he has seemed to place a huge amount of faith in business to take the lead in fixing the economy. He may think he's "a pragmatic, non-ideological" politician but what he is in practice is a centrist. And the center is not where it used to be.
And that's why liberals and progressives are so frustrated. It's not just that they object to centrism on an ideological basis, which they do. It's that in this age of GOP political terrorism, centrists are effectively allies of the right wing. They foolishly thought that in a time of major economic crisis, discredited centrist and conservative ideology, a large congressional majority and a Democrat in the White House you might see just a little bit more of a push for real liberal policies. And unlike the "pragmatic" activist base of the 1990s which was sort of watching from the sidelines to see if this New Democrat thing might work and give us liberal solutions without the "baggage" of government, today's activist base has no such illusions.
Update: Read this article by James Galbraith
.