Too Good for PoliticsIs Barack Obama just another high-toned liberal doomed to failure?

Remarks from the Fray:

Sounds good to me. "Identity politics" and partisanship have been on the rise for over a decade, and have done more harm than good to the country.

The economic pragmatism of Roosevelt was right for that time, but its legacy has necessarily moderated itself as our economy has stabilized. You work the political machine when you need to, as a matter of policy emergency.

Granted, I think we have a foreign policy emergency at hand, and we need to give the right-wingers the boot. But global strategy and international politics is a different creature than domestic politics. Foreign policy falls mostly within the exclusive realm of the president\state dept., where personal ideology guides policy.

But domestically, there is no such crisis that requires us to abandon plans for a better future for short-term realpolitik.

The looming Domestic problem of our time is the "red-state-blue-state" situation that is our country. It might seem idealistic to envision an attempt to move beyond it, but lets just stop and think for a moment - how scarily pathetic is it that we have more or less resigned ourselves to the idea of a bifurcated America as being the norm? Are we really ok with this for the next few decades? I'm not.

Foreign policy-wise, almost any democratic contender will do. Domestically, its a different story. Hillary offers a Do-Over of the 90's (not the worst thing), and Edwards is peddling protectionism and populism. Obama is certainly trying to sell an idea, more so than a policy. I'm not put off by this optimistic vagueness. In fact, I think this might be the first time in a very long time that we actually had some breathing space here at home to reexamine ourselves socially, and stop playing politics like its 1999.

--jwschmidt

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I don't think the "Stevensonian" approach is doomed to failure. I think Antonio Villaraigosa's successful campaign for Mayor of Los Angeles was a prime example. He came across as the enlightened voice of reason, selling himself as a positive figure, a pragmatist and moderate. This contrasts with his previous campaign, which he lost to James Hahn, where Villaraigosa campaigned as a real street-fighter, as a progressive/liberal standard-bearer, and alienated the white voters of the Valley as well as the Black voters in the city. The parallel of a nonwhite politician selling a positive, warm message, achieving success in a diverse electorate, has often occurred to me while watching Obama.

--araucaniad

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Republicans have dominated Presidential elections since Ronald Reagan not only by building upon their smaller base but also by appealing to many moderates, independents, and even conservative Democrats. They have not done so, for the most part, by promising different things to different people but rather by their success at universalizing a few basic themes and hammering at them consistently. They did not sell tax breaks to the affluent while attempting to skirt the issue with blue-collar voters. Instead, they insisted that tax breaks were a positive for upper, middle, and lower class voters.

This is why so many voters feel they naturally understand where Republican Presidential candidates stand, whereas they express first bewilderment and later frustration by the ongoing attempts of Democratic Presidential candidates to first explain and later clarify and still later re-clarify where they stand on specific issues. The Dems get so dredged down in voluminous detail that they never create a broad image – something even the most ignorant and apathetic voters can recognize and point at in a polling booth.

Obama's problem is not that his high-level talk is too naïve or theoretical but that it clashes when he attempts, in traditional Democratic fashion, to contrast it with his manifestos of policy specifics for every conceivable subject. He needs to grab hold of no more than three or four issues, boil them down to single sentences – along with his solutions for them – and then drive home those points over and over again in his speeches. If he would make that adjustment, then he will complement high-level, common good populism of his tone rather than chafing against it.

Greenberg seems to forget the biggest Mugwump of modern times. Ronald Reagan had his pet theories (e.g. supply-side economics) and specific goals (e.g. much like JFK, the destruction of the threat of Soviet communism). Yet the thing that endeared him to so many while causing his critics to curse him as coated with Teflon was his consistent optimism about the greatness of America and its continued bright future.

Reagan obviously did not always practice what he preached in terms of high moral standards for democracy and less intrusive government (e.g. remember Iran-Contra?). So the difference between winners and losers in the race for President seems to me to be not so much between those who appreciate the subtle complexities of real life versus high-minded exhortation. Instead, it is more between those who can keep that complexity out of their campaigning in order to provide a simple and consistent message versus those who cannot.

Republicans excel at this approach. They worry about making their actions jive with their rhetoric after they are elected, which when you come down to it is the ultimate in pragmatism. That does not mean Obama's style is guaranteed to ensure a victory over the forces of Bush next November but it does suggest to me that he has the best chance of going toe-to-toe with the GOP challenger, whoever that turns out to be, in this department.

--TheBell

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(11/17)