Obama the non-ideological pragmatist

When Sen. Barack Obama won the Iowa Caucus in January 2008, a Daily Kos
blogger announced that Obama had the “ability to finally bring together
that lasting progressive majority that many of us have been … dreaming
of all these years.” Obama took 53 percent of the popular vote in the
general election that November.

Some liberals believed that a lasting progressive majority had been constructed and that the nation’s first African-American president was its visionary architect. Even conservatives, in a fit of self-flagellation, affirmed it: progressivism reigned; conservatism had imploded.

{mosads}One year has passed since those heady days of progressive prognosticating. After a series of high-profile government actions, ranging from bank and auto bailouts to a partisan split on healthcare reform, these forecasts have been replaced by the concern that Democrats stand on the verge of a major repudiation. Other worrisome signs have produced a flurry of articles about Obama’s fall and the difficult climate for the politics of progressivism. Public opinion polls show anger toward Washington is still a potent force, while healthcare reform — potentially liberalism’s most far-reaching achievement since Medicare — is still unfinished.

Historical and cultural forces pre-dating 2008 partially explain the soaring hopes of progressives in January 2009. Over the past several decades, one common conviction was that liberalism would eventually be revived as America’s dominant political ideology. Liberal historians had argued that history moved in cycles and that progressivism would inevitably make a comeback. “The lesson Mr. Schlesinger means to teach us … is the mutability of politics,” political theorist Benjamin Barber explained in his New York Times book review of Arthur Schlesinger’s The Cycles of American History, published in 1986. “Liberalism is not dead but languishing at the perigee of its historical cycle.”

Other books stoked liberal hopes, with titles such as The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, suggesting that liberalism ultimately would be resurrected. Political analysts argued that shifting demographics meant that a progressive coalition would upend Reagan’s anti-statist Revolution as well.

Well-regarded authors John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued in an American Prospect article that the 2006 midterm elections marked a “return to political and demographic trends that were leading to a Democratic and center-left majority in the United States.” Then there were the edited volumes of essays about liberalism’s potentially rosy future.

Ranging from The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics (1997) to Liberalism for a New Century (2007), these smart volumes included worthy analysis and an assumption that fresh ideas and strategies would possibly birth a new era of resurgent government activism. Obama’s presidential campaign brought these hopes to unprecedented heights in modern times.

Coming of age politically in the 1990s, Obama seemed poised to repair the divisions that had long plagued the modern Democratic Party. The old internecine Democratic warfare had been swept aside by Obama’s candidacy, especially after the party united after the divisive primary. This feuding had deep roots in the immediate past.

Democratic centrists formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s 49-state, 1984 reelection sweep. The DLC had sought to re-establish Democrats as the defender of traditional values and middle-class economic concerns. Numerous liberals took umbrage at the DLC’s stated mission.

“Democrats for the leisure class” is how the Rev. Jesse Jackson described the organization. Such battles pitted a social-justice-oriented left against a “values”-oriented centrist faction and “raged … for many years” after the DLC’s founding, historian James Patterson has said. President Bill Clinton enacted welfare reform, promoted deficit-reduction as his economic centerpiece, and declared an end to “the era of big government” in his 1996 State of the Union address. Some progressives felt frustrated and disappointed by the end of Clinton’s presidency.

Against that backdrop, Obama’s broad-based electoral coalition — combined with his impressive skills on the stump and victories in Indiana, North Carolina and other “red” states — raised the prospect that he had united Democrats of all ideological stripes and stitched together a lasting progressive electoral majority. These predictions feel strained and premature from the vantage point of January 2010.

Thus far, Obama has championed a highly ambitious domestic agenda, starting with healthcare reform and running through issues such as cap-and-trade, education reform and new financial regulations. He’s also fairly non-ideological, a pragmatic first-term president who is interested in enacting major reforms even if his liberal base attacks him for his alleged timidity.

It’s also the case that American politics remains a highly fluid field and that contingency is still a potent factor in Obama’s America. If the commentary of January 2009 now sounds over-the-top one year later, then today’s forecasting of Democratic debacles also carries with it a whiff of the same sort of pundit hyperventilating. As much as we might want immediate answers about the future of American politics, it remains an opaque and highly volatile enterprise. Subterranean forces and events are still hidden beneath the surface of American life. Their long-term political implications may only become apparent with the passage of time.

Dallek is a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, which promotes bipartisan solutions on issues such as climate change, deficit reduction, national security and healthcare reform.