Obama Alienates Left Wing of Democratic Party
12.17.07 -- 6:04 AM
Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency has revived. Until recently Hillary Clinton had a commanding lead in the polls and was starting to seem unstoppable. But Mr Obama has pulled ahead in Iowa and level in New Hampshire, the states that vote first in the primaries. He is gaining ground again nationally.
The television debates, in which he performed poorly, are behind him. What matters now is the ability to move a crowd and the energy of campaign staff on the ground. On the first, Mr Obama has no equal in this contest. On the second, he has no grounds for complaint. He is back in the race.
But here is an odd thing: the Democratic party’s progressive base has mixed feelings about this revival. What is their problem, one wonders? What could be more exciting or more transformative, from their point of view, than this candidate?
Mr Obama is a clever, reflective and engaging man; he has dedicated his impressive intellect to a liberal political vision; he has a voting record in the Senate that puts him well to the left of Mrs Clinton; he makes, nonetheless, a strong appeal to the centre; he carries none of the baggage of the Clinton dynasty; and, in a country still riven by race, he just happens to be black. What’s not to like?
The main answer is not differences over policy – though it is true that Mr Obama’s positions in the campaign have tended to be in the centre, at least compared with his Senate voting record.
Progressives have objected especially to his statements on Social Security and healthcare. Mr Obama has drawn attention to demographic pressures on the financing of Social Security (the system will eventually tip into deficit) and says he would deal with this by raising taxes on the better off. The left is not opposed to higher taxes on the rich – not by any means – but it sees financial pressure on Social Security as a conservative talking point. Liberals argue, as well, that the system is anyway not “in crisis” and, in fact, they are right about that.
Some combination of higher taxes and lower benefits is going to be needed and the sooner the changes are made the easier this will be. But ensuring the system’s fiscal integrity calls for no great upheaval. (The same is not true of Medicare: in that case, talk of an impending fiscal crisis is apt.) At any rate, liberals say, stirring up anxiety about Social Security only plays into the conservatives’ hands. Democrats should just not go there.
The quarrel over healthcare turns on mandates. Reform plans put forward by Mrs Clinton and John Edwards make health insurance compulsory: there would be penalties for those who lacked private insurance and who failed to enrol in a generously subsidised public alternative. This is necessary, both candidates argue, to achieve universal coverage.
Mr Obama’s plan has no individual mandate. He says that a mixture of subsidies and official outreach will draw people in and achieve near-universal coverage – and that mandates fail, in any case, to make coverage fully universal, because they are difficult to enforce.
Again, both sides have a point. Neither approach would achieve fully universal coverage, as Mr Obama argues, but a system with a mandate is likely to get closer to that goal, and get there faster, than one without. Mr Obama probably erred – on the politics, at least – in adopting the milder position. But this, like the falling out over Social Security, is no more than a quarrel over details. Both disputes turn on petty differences among essentially like-minded liberals, or so you would suppose. No future president will be able to impose a blueprint: everything will have to be negotiated with Congress.
Too little is at stake in these nit-picking disagreements to account for the progressives’ tepid feelings for Mr Obama.
The real reason for the strained relations lies elsewhere. Mr Obama is organising his campaign around what he calls a new – more consensual, more pragmatic – style of politics. This is his big idea, just as Mrs Clinton’s (improbable as it might seem) is depth of experience. This new tone is something many Americans appear to want and, after the bitterness and division of recent years, well they should.
But progressives have been under the Republicans’ hammer too long. Rapprochement is the last thing they want. What they want is their turn. They come not to work with Republicans, but to bury them. If Mr Obama believes he can come to useful compromises with those people, many liberal activists believe, he is either far too innocent for this kind of work or a traitor in the making.
A parallel springs to mind: Tony Blair’s love-hate relationship with Britain’s old Labour party. The country’s class-warriors never liked their most successful leader for decades and in the end you could say their fears were realised: he was indeed, as a cover of The Economist once put it, “the strangest Tory ever sold”. On the other hand, you cannot capture the centre without appealing to the centre.
Mr Blair often used the hard left’s barely veiled hostility as a means to entrench his power – for example, picking fights with the unions to prove his muscular pragmatism whenever his popularity flagged. The Obama campaign may be weighing the same strategy, for use if not now then after his hoped-for victory in the primaries. Angry progressives are as repellent to the centre that Mr Obama aims to recruit as the Republican fundamentalists at the other extreme. If the centre counts – and there lies the gamble – then the squirmings of the Democratic base are an asset to be exploited.
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