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Barack Anxiety Builds On The Left

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December 8, 2008

With each passing day, we see an increase of editorial essays with the same theme:  After winning the election, will Barack Obama abandon the liberal or progressive base of the Democratic Party?  Some of the more strident ideologues from the liberal side of the spectrum are becoming more vocal in expressing anxiety about where the Obama Administration might take us.  This distress results from the President-elect’s recent naming of Cabinet and other high-level appointees.

For example, On December 1, Katrina vanden Heuvel posted an article on The Nation website, expressing dismay over Obama’s decision to allow Robert Gates to continue serving as Secretary of Defense under the new administration.  The criticism she voiced about the new foreign policy / national security team exemplifies the perspective of many writers concerning the entire list of appointments disclosed by Obama so far:

For Obama, who’s said he wants to be challenged by his advisors, wouldn’t it have made sense to include at least one person on the foreign policy/national security team who would challenge him with some new and fresh thinking about security in the 21st century?  Isn’t the idea of a broader bandwidth of ideas also at the heart of this ballyhooed “team of rivals” stuff?

Commentator David Sirota has been quite vocal in articulating his disappointment over Obama’s cabinet picks.  Back on November 19, he had this to say on the Campaign for America’s Future website:

Look, I’m all for “inclusion” – but let’s also remember, the most comprehensive post-election poll shows that a whopping 70 percent of Americans want conservatives to bend to Obama’s agenda, not the other way around.  And so what about the other side of the “team?”  If “Team of Rivals” = “Bipartisanship,” shouldn’t there be some full-on progressives in some very powerful positions?  Wouldn’t that complete the “team” in “Team of Rivals” and the “bi” in “bipartisan?”  Or are we really not going to see a “team” nor “bipartisanship” – but merely lockstep corporatism/conservatism disguised with the latest happy sounding terms from the (David) Broder dictionary?

Robert Scheer voiced similar uncertainty about Obama’s appointments in a December 2 posting on the Truthdig website:

Yet, it all does hang on him.  Yes, Obama.  The superstar, and not that supporting cast of retreads from a failed past that have popped up in his administration in the making.  Now that we have the list of his top economic and foreign policy picks — mostly a collection of folks who wouldn’t know change if it slapped them upside the head — we’ve got to hope that it’s Obama who is using them, and not the other way around.

*   *   *

The problem with Obama’s national security team is not that he has picked hawks whom he cannot control; they are all professionals, who took the job expecting to go along with his game plan.  The danger here, as with his economic advisers, is only that Obama may stop being Obama, the agent of change who electrified a nation.

The analyses of Obama’s loyalty to the progressive base of the Democratic Party were not restricted to the liberal-oriented blogs.  John Harwood’s article in the December 6 New York Times provided us with a more optimistic view of what we might expect from the Obama Administration:

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.

Robert Creamer demonstrated a similarly positive outlook in his November 24 posting on the Campaign for America’s Future website:

Barack Obama will not govern from the “center right”, but he will govern from the “center”.  That’s not because he is “moving to the center”.  It’s because the center of American politics has changed.  It has moved where the American people are.  It once again resides in the traditional progressive center that has defined America’s promise since Thomas Jefferson penned its founding document over 200 years ago.

As we approach the initial days of the Obama Administration, it seems amusing to observe more squeamishness about our next President, coming from those on the political left than from those on the right.  The McCain campaign’s old theme:  “Who is Barack Obama?” seems to be lingering in the minds of many Obama supporters.  Saturday Night Live taught a lesson to all of the worriers, with the sketch:  “Obama Plays It Cool” .  Fear not, ye of leftist leanings!  Just stay cool.