It drew considerable attention last week when President Barack Obama waited until a day after the annual anti-abortion March for Life in Washington to reverse the so-called “Mexico City” or “gag-rule” executive order that banned U.S. funding for any groups that promote or provide abortion services overseas. Even among intense right-to-lifers, this was regarded as a shrewd move by Obama that denied to the January 22 marchers a much-needed focal point for their protests.
I think they’d better get used to it. While there’s no reason to think that Obama has or will changed his strongly pro-choice views, he’s also made it clear that he doesn’t want his presidency, and particularly the first phases of his presidency, to become overshadowed by culture-war issues like abortion. Indeed, some observers, like Peter Beinart, believe the Obama presidency will signal the end of this latest, sexuality-centered phase of the culture wars.
Whether or not that happy development materalizes, the Cultural Right has some real problems. On the gay rights/gay marriage front, generational change virtually guarantees an eventual defeat for the Right. And on abortion, serious right-to-lifers know their window of opportunity to overturn abortion rights via the Supreme Court closed, perhaps for a long time, with Obama’s election.
Given the impossibility of a constitutional amendment to restrict abortion, that leaves them with the bleak prospect of going back to the long-term drawing board, and gnawing away at the right to choose through narrow and symbolic statutes and/or harrassment (legislative and otherwise) of abortion providers.
Not surprisingly, anti-abortionists are trying to keep morale up by rattling hobgoblins–conjuring up threats of radical “pro-abortion” activity that must be fought immediately, which is more satisfying than the thankless and almost certainly futile task of trying to convince a majority of Americans that abortions should be outlawed. (It’s the same impulse that leads conservatives generally to manufacture the bizarre “fairness doctrine” conspiracy theory.) The preferred hobgoblin of the right-to-life movement is the Freedom of Choice Act, a bill that President Obama cosponsored as a senator, and that doesn’t appear to be very high on the administration’s list of initatives.
The basic idea of FOCA has always been to codify Roe v. Wade as a federal statute, so that if Roe is ever overturned there will be a national pro-choice policy instead of a crazy-quilt of 50 state laws, some of them highly restrictive or even prohibitory. Activists on both side of the abortion barricades, of course, naturally tend to dramatize more immediate, short-term developments, so FOCA has gradually come to be viewed through the prism of its possible impact on non-fundamental but symbolic issues like so-called “partial-birth” abortion bans, and the variety of harrassing techniques states have devised over the years, such as waiting periods and parental or spousal notification laws. (Any FOCA provisions that actually conflict with current law would, of course, almost certainly be eliminated before it could pass both Houses of Congress). Accordingly, anti-abortion leaders disengenously talk about FOCA as though it represented a vast expansion of abortion rights, and use Obama’s cosponsorship of the bill as Exhibit A in their scare-the-troops case that the new President wakes up every morning wondering what more he can do to promote what the National Right To Life Committee calls “Obama’s Abortion Agenda.”
The latest skirmish in the abortion cold war involves the inclusion of language in the House version of the economic stimulus package that allows states to provide contraceptive services to Medicaid beneficiaries. Republicans are complaining that it illustrates Democratic efforts to toss stuff into the package that has nothing to do with the economy, but there’s no question they are also trying to get the Cultural Right (some of whose shock troops oppose contraception generally, while others think many contraceptives are actually abortifacients) engaged in the stimulus battle.
But like Lucy removing the football each year as Charlie Brown approaches it, it looks like Obama will deny conservatives a clear target, by urging House Democrats to remove the family planning language from the stimulus bill and moving it as separate legislation.
In the absence of an realistic strategy for achieving their real goals, anti-abortionists can be expected to continue efforts to paint Obama, Democrats, and pro-choice Americans as aggressive radicals who won’t stop til infanticide and euthanasia are legal and widely practiced. But it’s beginning to look like Barack Obama won’t be an easy president to invidiously stereotype.

Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com post “Obama: More Political Capital Than Reagan?” compares President Obama’s approval and disapprovall ratings with those of other recent Presidents shortly after their respective inaugurations. Obama tops all but JFK, as Silver explains:

Obama’s initial approval rating, indeed, is the highest of any president since Kennedy. His initial disapproval rating, meanwhile, is about half that of his two most recent predecessors, although higher than that of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, and G.H.W. Bush, all of whom began with disapproval in the single digits.

Silver goes on to favorably compare Obama’s numbers with those of President Reagan, including a 68 percent initial approval rating for Obama, compared to 51 percent for Reagan. He notes also that Obama’s political capital is strengthened by his 65 seat advantage in US House seats “controlled” over Reagan, and a six seat advantage in the Senate, even though Reagan had a slightly larger margin of victory (Reagan’s 9.7 percent, and 7.3 percent for Obama). Silver adds:

Reagan won considerably more electoral votes in 1980 than Obama did in 2008. As measured in percentage terms, his margin of victory over Jimmy Carter was larger than that of Obama over John McCain. On the other hand, Obama won a lot more popular votes than Reagan did. He also won a higher percentage of the popular vote, and his margin of victory was larger than Reagan’s in absolute (rather than percentage) terms.

It’s an interesting comparison, especially for Dems who can remember how Reagan steamrolled Congress and cut the legs off the trade union movement. Silver wonders whether Obama’s “post-partisan rhetoric” is a factor in his high approval numbers, and if the debate over the stimulus will undercut Obama’s leverage in the polls. No doubt many progressives are wondering if the comparison suggests that Obama’s tax cut proposals are conceding more than necessary, and if he could invest substantially more in job-creating infrastructure upgrades.
At the same time, Obama’s advisors, many of them Clinton Administration veterans, remember the political debacle that ocurred when the First Lady led the campaign for a big package of health care reforms. Overreaching can be as damaging as timidity.
But I would contend that Obama also has a potent secret weapon that argues for a more aggressive reform agenda: the “movement” that elected him. More than any President, perhaps ever, Obama has awakened a genuine grassroots movement, with record numbers of citizens involved in his campaign at the street level. But can he convert these campaign workers into lobbyists for a strong reform agenda? It’s never really been tried on the massive scale I’m envisioning here.
Certainly the Obama campaign has mastered the new tools of political organizing to an unprecedented extent, and he can reconnect with his activist base within minutes of launching a lobbying campaign. Think of FDR’s fireside chats, in streaming video on millions of monitors across the nation, 24-7. Think of TR’s bully pulpit on electronic steroids. Think of MLK’s call to his troops to “make politics a crusade” answered en masse by a new generation of citizen lobbyists. Sure, it would take a lot of commitment and energy to make it work. But given all that is at stake, the real shame would be in not trying.

There was a little incident late last week that’s been bugging me, because it nicely illustrates the problem folks have with the very different contexts in which the word “bipartisanship” is used. You may well have seen the story in Politico in which President Obama, after listening to congressional Republicans complain about the size and structure of the economic stimulus package, seemed to have tartly put them in their place by reminding them that “I won” the election.
Before you could say “Aha,” observers from both left and right drew attention to this alleged slip-of-the-mask that some hoped or feared showed Obama’s real attitude towards bipartisanship.
Said Chris Bowers at OpenLeft:

Good. This is the sort of language that disarms Republicans, and there won’t ever be a better time to adopt it. I would perfer if he talked like this in the open, but President Obama still deserves credit for this. Here’s to hoping that this signals the end of watering down the stimulus in order to appease Republicans for aesthetic purposes, and the start to a new era where we just don’t give a damn what Republican leaders think.

You can read a similar take at the influential conservative site Red State:

Bipartisanship under unified Democratic rule means this: Congress writes the bill, and Democrats ask Barack Obama to rope in some Republicans without having to make any changes. And why should they back a bill that they had no hand in writing? Because he won.
And this from the people who accused Bush of refusing to take Democratic input and compromise!

Well, maybe that’s where the partisan debate is ultimately heading. But for the sake of accuracy, it’s worth noting that the context of Obama’s “I won” remark wasn’t a general call for GOP input, but a specific Republican demand that Obama replace the refundable tax credits of his “Make Work Pay” plan with across-the-board and unrefundable income tax rate cuts, as an account in the New York Times of the meeting in question makes clearer:

At issue is Mr. Obama’s proposal that his tax breaks for low- and middle-income workers, including his centerpiece “Making Work Pay” tax credit, be refundable — that is, that the benefits also go to workers who earn too little to pay income taxes but who pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. Republicans generally oppose giving such refunds to people who pay no income taxes.
“We just have a difference here, and I’m president,” Mr. Obama said to Mr. [Eric] Cantor, according to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who was at the meeting.
Mr. Emanuel said that Mr. Obama was being lighthearted and that lawmakers of both parties had laughed.
Mr. Cantor, in an interview later, had a similar recollection. He said the president had told him, “You’re correct, there’s a philosophical difference, but I won, so we’re going to prevail on that.”

In other words, congressional Republicans were trying to revive a debate that was fully litigated during the presidential campaign. The “Make Work Pay” credit was the centerpiece of Obama’s tax plan, and the argument that refundable income tax credits for working Americans who pay high and regressive payroll taxes is actually “welfare” became a shrill and frequent talking point for the McCain-Palin campaign, not to mention every right-wing gabber on the planet. It should also be remembered that the same tired argument against refundable tax credits was once repudiated by both George W. Bush and John McCain when it was advanced by Tom DeLay.
So of course the President wasn’t going to consider for a moment going along with this Republican “suggestion,” which reflected not only a “philosophical difference” between progressives and conservatives, but a subject that has truly been resolved after extended public debate and an election.
The idea that this represented some sort of crossing of the Rubicon by Obama, who has finally recognized (or revealed, depending on your point of view) the futility of bipartisanship in every sense of the word, just isn’t supported by what actually happened.
If, on the other hand, congressional Republicans persist in making their primary “input” a series of recommendations that Obama and Democrats admit the folly of their thinking and turn their backs on everything they were elected to do, then they should be allowed to howl in the political wildnerness at a safe distance, and “bipartisanship” should be limited to such rank-and-file Republicans out across the country as might be convinced to leave them behind.

As the stories about the Bush family’s move to a new house in an upscale neighborhood in Dallas, Texas begin to fade from the headlines, there is one fact that should not be allowed to pass without mention. It’s now increasingly clear that the Bush family is going to simply dump and abandon the so-called “ranch” in Crawford. No keeping it around for sentiment’s sake, not even for occasional week-end escapes from the big city. Nope, they are just going to sell it off and walk away.
But, wait a minute. Didn’t the hard-working, rural values embodied in that “ranch” play a critical part in shaping Bush’s character? That’s certainly what the video shown at the 2000 Republican convention said. Weren’t all those afternoons Bush spent “clearing brush” at the “ranch” the dramatic visible evidence of his continuing authenticity and spiritual bond with the “real” America even while in office? That’s certainly the spin Bush’s press people trotted out again and again during the course of his presidency. Remember all those press events with photographers dutifully snapping the pictures of Bush wiping his forehead with his work gloves to underscore his continuing ties to the rich Texas land and to all sons of toil?
But now we’re all supposed to just quietly accept that – oh yeah – it was actually all just a complete fraud and a scam. Progressive journalists did point out from the very beginning that the so-called “ranch” had been purchased in 1999, right before the Bush campaign got started and therefore had absolutely no role in shaping Bush’s character. They also noted that there were just 4 or 5 lonely looking cows around, far too few to have any practical or commercial function. Without any real cattle ranching or agriculture actually being practiced, there was really no reason to ever clear away any brush. Some independent journalists even had the temerity to note that the bales of straw lying around so authentically (presumably to feed the nonexistent herds of cattle) were artfully placed to conceal the condensers for the central air conditioning system.
As an article in the Texas Observer noted:

In 1999, using profits from the sale of the Texas Rangers, Bush purchased 1,583 acres near Waco, Texas, that he calls a ranch, despite the fact that it lacks any livestock other than four or five cows, hardly enough for a stampede or a cattle drive. In fact, according to Revolution of Hope, the 2007 autobiography of Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, Bush is a “windshield cowboy,” more comfortable roaming the prairie by Mustang than by mustang, and terrified of horses.

Most Americans, however, never got a hint of all this. For eight years the American mainstream media dutifully went along with the fraud, writing fawning captions for picture after picture of Bush with the jeans and work gloves and the sunset in the distance. No one in the official press corps had the guts to put down their foot and say plainly:

This is total bullshit. This so-called “ranch” is nothing but a stage-set designed for photo-ops. It’s no more authentic than the phony villages and collective farms to which the Soviets used to take western observers, to show them the happy, satisfied Soviet workers. We are being treated like sheep, morons and children and we’re all going along with it without a peep.

Yes, yes. I know. I did get the memo. The Obama approach is look forward and not back. But that memo applies to how Democrats should treat ordinary folks and their elected representatives. There’s nothing in the memo about giving the mainstream media a free pass for acting like PR auxiliaries to Karl Rove.
And it’s important because the Republican PR machine will be back before we even turn around. In 2010 there will be new “ranches” and fabricated biographies and Hollywood stage sets designed to portray Republicans as “real folks” and “sharing the values” of the “real America”.
But this time Democrats should be ready. We should issue a not- so- polite warning. People in the media who are too lazy, weak or submissive to stand up and challenge cynical PR manipulation when its shoved in their faces should be prepared to be treated by Democrats with the contempt and condescension that they will so very richly deserve. Allowing oneself to be manipulated by the powerful hasn’t somehow become OK in the internet age, just because a degree in journalism costs more than it used to and the private job market sucks. There used to be something called journalistic integrity. There used to be something called shame.

I’m liking the latest fund-raising email I got from the DSCC. (See full text after the jump) Instead of a dreary old politician begging for money, it comes from a top actor, Morgan Freeman, with a thoughtful appeal, based on a sober recognition that,

…We’ve only taken the first step. As President Obama said on election night, “This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change.” In many ways, our work didn’t end at the ballot box, it began there….That is precisely why we need your support – not just on the eve of an election, not just when the airwaves are crammed with negativity, and not just when the sense of urgency is palpable.
We also need your support now, at the beginning of a long journey together to reclaim and rebuild the American dream. It will be a difficult slog measured in months and years — but the journey will be worth it if, in the end, we are able to say that we have left a better country and a safer world for our children.

Freeman goes on to ask for a “click here” contribution to the DSCC. The wise oracle of many a good film, Freeman has to be the perfect choice to make the pitch for long-haul party-building. You can almost hear his mellifluous baritone working the room.
Freeman’s letter got me thinking that now, while hopes are at an all-time high, really is the time for the Democratic Party to aggressively recruit celebrities for fund-raising promos. And it’s not just about money. It’s also a great time to get celebrities and other public figures on record as supporting the Democrats as the party of hope. Despite all of the GOP whining about Democrats and Hollywood, I’m struck by how little we have used performing artists to raise consciousness and funds directly for party-building, as opposed to supporting candidates. There’s never been a better time, while Obama rides the high tide of popular good will. No doubt many celebrities who may have been a little reluctant to “out” themselves as partisan Democrats are more comfortable with the idea now.
Freeman may be in a minority in his profession, in that he gets it that Obama isn’t going to be able to pass much legislation without a few more Democratic Senators, or at least that a couple more senators could make a huge difference in America’s future. But there must be others. Let’s not miss the opportunity for a full court press in recruiting them. It’s not likely that we will see a better time.
And speaking of a full-court press, think about how limp the Democratic effort to tap the appeal of professional athletes has been. Obama’s cred ought to provide unprecedented leverage for promos from the top NBA super-stars, with professional football all-pros and baseball all-stars not far behind. Who better to get the attention — and support — of millions of young people?
I’m not saying here that celebrities are the key to success in long-haul political organizing. But in this culture particularly, they do command a lot of attention, and Dems would be negligent if they don’t make the most of it.
In The Shawshank Redemption, Freeman’s character, Red, tells Andy (Tim Robbins), “Hope? Let me tell you something, my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing.” Very true. But when it is backed up by organized action, hope can also be a powerful force for positive change.

Read more…

It was just a little joke. But it also lead to a teachable moment for those seeking insights into Obama’s style of presidential leadership.
Asked by the President to administer the oath of office to incomming senior staff members yesterday, Vice President Biden cracked wise “Am I doing this again? Oh! For the senior staff. My memory’s not as good as Justice Roberts’ … Chief Justice Roberts.”
Most politicians would have responded with a collegial chuckle or at least a little grin. President Obama’s reaction, however, could fairly be described as chilly (see here) . No smile, just a pat on the back urging his wayward veep to get back on point. Obama’s unspoken message was “this is the peoples’ business, Joe. Put a lid on it.”
Suffice it to say that the era of frat boy humor in the white house is over. It was a little incident, but what impressed me about it was how it revealed Obama’s sense of propriety. He is always alert to what is going on around him, and smartly avoids unnecessary controversy. Had he responded in a more typical way, yukking it up with Biden, some reporter might have twisted it into a ‘President Disses Chief Justice’ distraction du jour.
Obama is not a stiff. He knows when to relax and have a little fun, as was indicated by his question to the crowd at one of the inaugural parties, “Have I got a good-lookin’ wife?”
It’s not a put-down of Biden, who has impressive qualifications to assume the presidency if need be, a major reason why Obama chose him as his running mate. The other being that President Obama clearly values his expertise, particularly on foreign policy and wants him near. It’s just a very different style of leadership. The incident suggests that our new president has a seriousness about his responsibilities, large and small, that hasn’t been seen in the white house for many a year, which should be a great asset for getting things done.

While Democrats have been celebrating the Obama inaurguration this week, Republicans are entering the final home stretch of the campaign for chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, which will be decided next week.
Stu Rothenberg breaks down the race for RealClearPolitics today, and says it’s too close to call, though incumbent Mike Duncan remains the front-runner. Reading between the lines of this and other analyses, it’s pretty clear that Duncan would win in a walk if it weren’t for the realization that re-electing an incumbent party chair after the 2008 fiasco might send a sign of bizarre complacency.
Another problem for Republicans is that of the five candidates for the post, the only two with any sort of public profile outside GOP circles–Michael Steele and Ken Blackwell–both happen to be African-Americans. At a time when Republicans desparately want to signal an openness to new constituencies–without, however, changing their ideology–rejecting Steele and Blackwell in favor of a failed incumbent, or of Southern White Guys like Katon Dawson (who recently had to resign from an all-white country club) or Chip Saltsman (he of “Barack the Magic Negro” fame) wouldn’t look real good.

There’s no question that the single most dramatic step taken by Barack Obama since his inauguration on Tuesday was the series of executive orders banning use of torture by federal agencies (including the CIA), eliminating the CIA’s secret “black sites,” and setting into motion the eliimination of the Gitmo prison and the legal limbo it represents.
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball have a good summary of the orders at Newsweek, along with an account of the internal debate that led up to it. And Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic explains some of the “hard cases”–particularly Yemeni and Chinese prisoners–that will complicate the closure of Gitmo.
If you actually want to read the four executive orders involved, Salon has usefully posted them here.

In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act. It’s a valuable law which preserves all manner of official communication for posterity.
But it was written at a time when people still delivered interoffice memos in those funny manila envelopes that get closed with a piece of string.
Email had been invented seven years earlier in a project funded by the Department of Defense, but it’s hard to imagine that the authors of the Presidential Records Act could have foreseen a government which put instant, electronic communication into widespread use. To ask anyone at the time to imagine the sprawling, interconnected world of the Internet as it is today would have been laughable.
And yet this 1978 law still dictates how the executive branch does business.
During the election, the Obama campaign was deeply immersed in the world of the Internet, and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the brilliance of the external online strategy. But much less has been made of how well Obama for America as an organization used the Web internally.
Staffers used online tools to share documents, built wikis to train volunteers, used Facebook to build get to know each other. And throughout it all, the staff — from David Axlerod on down — maintained a continuous conversation through instant messenger.
It now looks, however, like that practice will be put to an end.
Citing both the requirements of the Presidential Records Act and security concerns, lawyers for the incoming administration have told staffers that they will not be able to use instant messenger in the White House. They will forgo the use of an official Facebook account as a tool to communicate with supporters. They won’t be allowed to bring in USB drives to take work home. Access to many websites will be restricted. And in many cases, the computers at their desks will be dated and running old Windows software.
The end result of these regulations and hurdles is a bubble that separates the White House staff from the outside world — they’ll get less input from critics and allies both — and the loss of these tools makes those who have come to rely on them less efficient and less flexible. By making it difficult to adopt new technology, our laws will serve to stifle creativity in government, where right now we need it most.
But there’s hope. President Obama gets to keep his Blackberry.
He asked for it, the Transition team bought into the idea, the NSA approved a model, and then the lawyers came around.
Obama needs a Blackberry for the same reasons his staff needs IM, and the White House found a way to make it work.
Now, someone should stand up to make the same argument for updating the rest of government’s communication tools. And once that’s done, Congress should be lobbied to rewrite the Presidential Records Act to reflect the reality of how professionals do business in 2009.
Governing is hard enough without asking those who commit to it to forgo anything that makes them better at their jobs.

The one sure thing about Barack Obama’s inaugural address is that it increased tensions within the progressive coalition about his taste for “bipartisanship” (or “post-partisanship,” if you prefer). Despite passages in the speech that were a very direct repudiation of the Bush administration, and a few strikingly progressive flourishes (e.g., the shout-out to religious “unbelievers”), the overall tenor continued his long rhetorical preoccupation with embracing values usually considered conservative as well as liberal, and deriding the partisan fights in Washington (this time in the Pauline phrase “childish things”).
As has almost always been the case with Obama, observers have reached very different conclusions when listening to him in the inaugural speech and in other recent utterances. Some conservatives profess themselves as pleased or even charmed by his invocation of “conservative” values like hard work, personal and mutual responsibility, sacrifice and discipline, even as they (typically) warn he may not really believe in them. Some progressives continue to be alarmed by his post-partisan talk, and even more (notably both Marie Coco and Michael Crowley in separate pieces today) suggest it’s a habit that will soon expire in the partisan exigencies of Washington. A few have divined somewhat less conventional ideological leanings in Obama; both Alan Wolfe and E.J. Dionne have noted the communitarian vein that runs deep through Obama’s rhetoric.
My own take is based on my ten-plus-years of facilitating a leadership training program for elected officials called “Values-Based Messaging” under the auspices of the Democratic Leadership Council. Unlike some of the other elements of the DLC’s agenda over the years, this training was never controversial, and has been very popular with a wide array of state and local Democrats from across the ideological spectrum, often as a party unity exercise in state legislative caucuses. To make a long story short, its central insight is that progressives in politics and government can and should build the largest possible audience for our more partisan policy goals and individual programs by embracing broadly-shared values that we often take for granted, but don’t articulate, making us vulnerable to the kinds of conservative stereotypes that have been so effective in the past.
This larger audience may begin to shrink once bold policy goals and detailed programs are advanced. But it definitely helps, and just as importantly, roots progressive programs in values and goals the public understands, while subtly undermining the invidious belief that Democrats represent government, rather than bending government to the popular will. It’s a simple way to occupy the political high ground and expose the narrow values base of the Right.
Whatever you think of this or that speech, Barack Obama is clearly a master of values-based messaging. And the inaugural address did not simply embrace broadly shared values beyond those usually emphasized by progressives; he went out of his way to argue that values often placed in opposition to each other are both reconcilable and essential (e.g., liberty and security, and public-sector activism and “free” markets). This may sound dangerously like Third Wayism to many progressives, but if reflects the fact that big majorities of the American people do in fact embrace such “contradictory” values, and do not want to see them vanquished or ignored.
This is probably why the public gave very positive ratings to the inaugural address and the accompanying events, even as most pundits panned it. And more generally, it is why Obama’s speechifying–so often criticized as “vague” or “abstract” by the punditocracy– resonates well with the public. There’s a time for ten-point platforms in political communications, but it’s essential to open the door to listeners by convincing them you live in the same “vague” and “abstract” moral universe that they inhabit.
Obama’s inaugural address, like all his speeches, did move into the territory of big policy goals as well as values, and on this front, he has some enormous advantages. Recent events have made reviving the economy an overriding policy goal for virtually all Americans, which is why Obama’s “ideas” for a stimulus package are gaining such strong popular support even as the details remain hazy to most people. But the inevitable drop-off of public support for those details will likely be smaller than would otherwise be the case thanks to Obama’s determination to set the table so carefully with communications about values and big goals.
Moreover, Obama’s second-order policy goals–such as achieving universal health coverage and radically changing the energy system–are very popular with the public across party lines, and the fact that many, and probably a majority, of Republican politicians and conservative gabbers don’t support those goals creates a tremendous partisan opportunity for Obama and Democrats moving forward. Indeed, the past Democratic tendency to talk about, say, health care, in terms of specific proposals like a Patient’s Bill of Rights and a prescription drug benefit has long enabled Republicans to blur partisan differences and disguise their own reactionary radicalism on health care.
Even the big policy goal that Obama occasionally mentions to the consternation of many progressives–“entitlement reform”–has, at the abstract level–a lot of public support. And the common assumption that Obama is playing on conservative turf by mentioning the subject probably sells him short, and reflects the age-old Democratic habit of conceding whole areas of public policy to the opposition. If, say, he can make Social Security more progressive, while folding Medicare into a universal health system, he will have taken away a common conservtive talking point without conceding anything.
This is why I’ve argued that Obama’s meta-political strategy, and the underpinning of his rhetoric about partisanship, represents “grassroots bipartisanship”–an effort to build public support for a progressive agenda beyond the current ranks of the Democratic rank-and-file, crafted as a thoroughgoing reform of Washington, not simply as a expulsion of the hated GOP. You can call it “pragmatism” or “centrism” or “post-partisanship” if you like, but it mainly represents a sensible approach to the preeminently appropriate task of tearing down the old partisan paradigm and rebuilding a new one that can command an enduring majority in support of a progressive agenda. It should at least be given a fighting chance.