TW: Few can accuse Obama of timidly entering his presidency (the few who do are almost all on the left). Is he a hard core liberal? Nope, he is a pragmatist whose believes in action whilst paying attention to things like fairness, empathy and the long-term implications of his policies. I think Obama has done about as well as anyone could hope at this very early stage of his presidency. He is moving with initiative on many fronts but doing so in a methodical manner. I really do not think the Republicans have figured him out at all. Step back and ponder where we are today policy wise versus last November. Obama is merely getting started but he has started fast.
From George Packer at New Yorker:
"...the dominant characteristic of his Presidency is clear: activist government, on every front. It’s harder to make out the contours of the philosophy at the core of this dazzling blur of action. Given the early and ample track record, there’s surprisingly little agreement over the nature of Obamaism. Obama’s signature projects defy grouping under a single heading, and, as a result, he has been criticized for inconsistency.
...To liberals such as Robert Kuttner, of the American Prospect, and Paul Krugman, of the Times, these self-imposed limitations are unnecessary concessions to a free-market ideology that has been thoroughly discredited. In this reading, Obama lacks the courage of his activist impulses, and his hesitations will play right into the hands of his enemies. The usual reply to such criticism is that Obama is basically a pragmatist, who will do what he thinks can work. But pragmatism is a description of a temperament, not an explanation of a world view.
What underlies so many of Obama’s decisions is an attachment to the institutions that hold up American society, a desire to make them function better rather than remake them altogether. Allowing the auto industry to die would create social havoc in communities around the country, and anything less than de-facto government control seems inadequate. So the President has risked a good deal of his political capital on the largest federal intervention in a sector of the economy since at least 1952, when President Truman seized the steel industry to avert a strike during wartime...Obama may not see a similar need to put the government in charge of the big banks, but he has also shown that he has no taste for such a disruption of the system—even if it were politically possible, and perhaps even if it were the most direct route back to financial health.
In his budget message to Congress, Obama invoked the value of fairness, but his budget proposals don’t create government programs—such as guaranteed-income measures or large numbers of relief jobs—that would establish equality from the top down. Instead, Obama seems to recognize that nothing has shredded the civic fabric in recent years more than the harsh inequalities of finance capitalism and the market ideology of a generation of American politics. This is not the rigid mentality of an engineer of human souls; it’s the attitude of a community organizer.
It’s also a pretty good description of what used to pass for conservatism—a sense that social relations and institutions are fragile things, and that, while government can’t create wealth or impose equality, at moments like this it has to establish a new equilibrium between individuals and huge economic forces, so that society doesn’t crumble. But modern conservatism has grown into exactly the opposite of its origins, in Burke’s respect for tradition and Madison’s promotion of countervailing checks on concentrations of power. Instead, like any revolutionary creed, it is abstract, hard-edged, and indifferent to experience and existing conditions.
Most of the remaining congressional Republicans seem content to adhere to this creed, and to allow banks, car companies, and homeowners to be crushed under the invisible foot of the market—all that matters is the consistent application of principle. Last week, the House Republicans released a shadow budget that would repeal much of the stimulus package and impose a domestic-spending freeze in the middle of what some economists are beginning to call a depression. While claiming to be fiscally responsible, it would also create new optional tax brackets and cut or eliminate taxes of every kind, from capital gains to the estate and alternative minimum taxes, tilting the benefits sharply toward—you guessed it—the wealthy.
...[the shrieking from the Right by the likes of Beck, Limbaugh, Bachmann et al.]... is what the historian Richard Hofstadter has called “the paranoid style in American politics.” In the world of intelligence, it’s known as mirror-imaging: in this case, seeing in an enemy’s mental structure a reflection of one’s own feverish simplifications. Conservatives will not be able to understand the elusive nature of Obamaism and counter its formidable appeal until they remove the impediment of their own insular, rigid ideology."
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/04/13/090413taco_talk_packer
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