Centrism is Obama’s Curse, Not Cure
Looks like the honeymoon is almost over. The latest CBS News poll shows that President Obama’s approval rating has steadily slipped since the beginning of the year, with his disapproval rating going up five points since July. On health care, the verdict on his performance is more negative than positive, almost the exact inverse of what it used to be. While we should not read too much into one particular poll, it is difficult to deny that Obama has started to do less and less well with the electorate that had such high hopes and intense faith in him at the onset of 2009. Unsurprisingly, his political rivals are elated with the news, declaring that he is reaping what he sowed – namely, the seeds of a radical socialist agenda.
Kevin McCullough from FOX News blames the left and its “plan to radicalize, nationalize, and federalize America”. Peter Roff, writing for U.S. News and World Report, speculates that “by pushing a hard left agenda that includes a cap and trade energy tax, an increased role for government in the healthcare sector, higher taxes and more spending, Obama and the Democrats are losing the middle.” David Brooks used the NYT to criticize Obama for supporting “one policy after another that increases spending and centralizes power in Washington”. Meanwhile, Michael Goldfarb with The Weekly Standard pinpoints cap-and-trade as the bridge too far. From the far right to moderates like Brooks, then, it would appear that (a) Obama is in deep trouble and (b) the only way to save his sinking ship is to abandon the liberal leadership in Congress (the unpopular Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid) and move more towards the middle. After all, he has to keep the moderates in his own party on his side, and that means appeasing Blue Dogs at every opportunity, right?
Wrong. On all counts.
Not only is Obama not in deep trouble, Democrats aren’t either. Most people still approve over how Obama has handled the economy and Afghanistan; health care dominates the political news right now and this August poll unsurprisingly is more a report card on that debate rather than on Obama’s overall job performance – which, keep in mind, is not even the first year of his first term. On top of all that, Republicans have yet to launch a successful counterattack, much less produced a leader who could, somewhere down the road, mount a real challenge for the White House. If anything, those who were on the GOP short list for leading the anti-Obama have been busy making sure their names are crossed off. And its not just winning personalities that are in short supply; it’s winning policies. How many people can articulate the Republican proposal for reforming health care? How would they manage Afghanistan and Iraq? What would a Republican budget look like? Yes, the right has managed to make some political hay on health care, but only because Obama went into the argument half-hearted and already willing to water down what he was prepared to accept. If Obama and Democrats had set the narrative and gone after health care all guns blazing, less keen to back down and compromise, they could have stood a better chance against the conservative backlash. Instead of coming hard, they allowed the other side to do it, with the resulting “death panels” and “government takeover in the wings” nonsense being thrown along with the kitchen sink. Yet at the end of the day it is still just conservatives playing politics to spin an important issue. They have not by their own efforts generated interest in an issue or a plan they have to fix it.
Still, none of this changes the fact that Obama’s numbers are dropping and no one really believes the Republicans will be out of power forever. So was there really some wisdom to those advising Obama to move to the center? Unfortunately, there is nothing to be found in tendentious editorials and blog posts other than political outsiders wishing they were on the inside. Conservatives complain that Obama has centralized power, but in reality most of the major banks and corporations we bailed out with federal money remain independent – with CEOs giving themselves bonuses paid for by the taxpayer. Obama has also distanced himself from the “public option”, making a government-run health care program unlikely. Then there’s the charge that Obama is opposed to “personal choice”. Again, when it comes to health care, Obama does not support a universal health care system in which everyone would receive the same care, without regard to income or any other factor. He is fully in favor of health care companies choosing to insure healthy, wealthy people over poor people with pre-existing conditions. Finally, what about the out-of-control spending? Obama sticks by his stimulus bill (which was woefully insufficient according to many liberals and economists and, in the case of Paul Krugman, liberal economists) but when it comes to health care he supports “deficit-neutral” reform and goes on at length at every opportunity about the need to control the deficit. On most issues, Obama has gone the milquetoast, moderate route – and in many others, he has not deviated from Bush at all. Extraordinary rendition, the employment of immoral mercenaries, the obfuscation of detainee abuse, needless loss of life in Afghanistan and Pakistan… Far from being radical, Obama has done quite a bit to satisfy those who predicted the new boss would be the same as the old boss.
So if Obama really isn’t too far out there, alienating people, why are these right-wing pundits saying he is? Because, regardless of what the facts are, they want Obama to be a socialist revolutionary. They want him to fail and, more than that, they want the history books to say that Obama tried to move the United States to the left and that the United States resisted – establishing a myth that left-wing politics cannot succeed in this country. The same thing happened when Clinton tried to reform health care and back then it worked. It’ll probably work again. Obama should have realized from the outset that the right would not be interested in a substantive discourse. Hopefully, as his Administration continues, he realizes that playing to the middle is still playing it wrong to his enemies, and he would far better to try and do some things advocated by those on the left.
