Views » June 24, 2008 » Web Only

What Progressives Can Learn from Obama

By Ken Brociner

One of the trademarks of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has been his commitment to a new style of politics. Last year, in answering a question about negative campaigning and ad hominem attacks on opponents, he said: “My preference going forward is that we have to be careful not to slip into playing the game as it is customarily played.”

Obviously Obama’s pledge to take the high road is nothing new or original. In fact, it has become standard fare – even if only a small percentage of politicians come close to making good on these promises.

Yet despite the intensity of his drawn-out battle with Hillary Clinton and his current showdown with John McCain, the consensus view among longtime politicos is that Obama has, for the most part, run an unusually fair-minded and positive campaign.

Obama’s commitment to a different brand of politics represents more than a mere preference for taking the high road in the rough-and-tumble world of political combat. The Illinois senator has, in fact, developed what amounts to an alternative philosophical outlook toward politics. And it is a perspective that, I believe, too many progressives have been ignoring at their own peril.

One of the most striking features of Obama’s approach has been his near refusal to attack the motives of his political opponents. As he made clear in The Audacity of Hope, Obama doesn’t just believe this policy to be tactically sound; he also feels that most of his opponents are truly well-intentioned.

“Even when talking to those colleagues [in the Senate] with whom I most deeply disagreed,” he wrote, “I was usually struck by their basic sincerity – their desire to get things right and leave the country better and stronger; their desire to represent their constituents and their values as faithfully as circumstances would allow.”

Obama bemoans the fact that politics has become ” …a contest not just between competing policy visions, but between good and evil… In this Manichean struggle, compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged.”

Of course, this kind of talk has raised some legitimate concerns within progressive circles. At what point, some wonder, might Obama’s attitude become overly bipartisan or too prone towards compromise? Clearly, should he be elected president, progressives will need to closely monitor these potential pitfalls.

But rather than cynically dismiss Obama’s statements as being naïve or just another form of political gamesmanship, progressives ought to seriously ponder what he is saying.

Compare Obama’s approach with the predominant tone and rhetorical style of much of the progressive media. Glance at the most popular progressive websites, magazines and blogs on any given day and notice how we consistently characterize those with whom we disagree – be they liberal Democrats who lack “courage,” Democratic Leadership Council-types who we routinely refer to as being, in effect, “corporate lackeys,” or neocons who we describe as “warmongers.”

Instead of vigorously critiquing ideologies, policies, priorities and values that we disagree with, we routinely assign consciously malevolent motives to our political adversaries. It’s as if we progressives cannot even fathom the possibility that politically engaged people who have sharply different views than ours might also sincerely believe they are working to make the world a better place.

The most prominent recent example of this tendency was the full-page ad that MoveOn placed in the New York Times last fall, in which General David Petraeus, then commanding general of the multinational forces in Iraq, was mockingly referred to as “General Betray US.”

Whatever MoveOn’s intent, the extraordinarily unfortunate choice of the word “betray” was widely – and understandably – interpreted as accusing Petraeus of consciously and deliberately “betraying” the United States.

Not only did the ad put a serious dent in MoveOn’s image, it backfired by undermining congressional efforts to set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

While the “Betray US” ad was an extreme example, the sad reality is that the progressive media is now rife with writers who seem to demonize practically anyone who dares to see things differently than they do.

These days, no one fits this description better than David Sirota.

In the world according to Sirota, there is no such thing as having an honest difference of opinion. For instance, instead of allowing for the fact that Barack Obama might actually believe what he has been saying in regard to his economic policies, Sirota proclaimed in a column earlier this year that “though Obama is certainly less industry-owned than Clinton,” he nonetheless does accept “hush money” from Wall Street that is “contingent on candidates silencing their populist rhetoric.”

As for Clinton’s true motives, Sirota had this to say earlier this month, in a Campaign For America’s Future blog post: “Clintonism [is] a brand of politics that is about trying to appease Big Money while pretending to serve ordinary people.”

Unfortunately Sirota’s dogmatic style is more the rule than the exception within many media oulets on the left. In fact, if you only read or tuned into progressive media, you would likely come away believing the world is made up of good guys wearing white hats and bad guys wearing black hats who delight in bringing misery and oppression to the entire world.

Although I have strongly identified with the progressive movement’s political agenda throughout my nearly forty years of activism, I am often downright embarrassed by how one-dimensional and superficial our “analysis” of the world is. We progressives like to think of ourselves as “truth tellers” committed to depicting the world as it really is. Yet we too often present a cartoonish version of reality, rather than an accurate account of what is happening and – more to the point – why it is happening.

In September 2005, Obama issued a direct appeal to progressives urging a more fair-minded approach to political criticism and analysis. He sent an essay to Daily Kos titled “Tone, Truth and the Democratic Party,” in which he voiced frustration with the over-the-top criticism and attacks many progressives were directing toward those Democrats who, at times, deviated from the standard progressive position on one issue or another.

In his essay, Obama wrote: “… I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.”

We need not be uncritical admirers of Barack Obama to realize that his desire to transcend old political habits has profound meaning not only for American politics as a whole, but for progressives who are committed to fundamentally changing our country’s policies and priorities.

• Help In These Times publish more articles like this. Donate today!
• Subscribe today and save 46% off the newsstand price!
• Or win a subscription to In These Times by taking this short survey!

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  I tend to agree with Mr. Brociner. The ad hominem attacks have become the natural way to do things. There is no way to assign which side “started it” but both the right and left have become ugly. As left as I am, there used to be a time that I would be willing to listen to the rights’ point of view. I can’t even take a few minutes anymore. Maybe the rise of right wing talk radio has been the instigation for the equal response from the left, but more than likely it’s simply the dumbing down of America. Our TV culture needs conflict for “entertaining drama” and name calling is conflict.

  Not that this stuff wasn’t going on even back in the days of our earliest elections, but TV needs it to gain viewers and thus to gain advertisers. I’m so amazed to see any of the cable news channels bring on their guests for one or two minute debates, and think the audience is gaining some sort of insight. But of course they don’t think that, they want us to get riled up enough to sit through the four or five minutes of commercials until the next useless mini-debate. True debate has been replaced by show debate.

  But what is the answer? Force everyone to learn proper debate? Maybe, it’s time for hosts to be trained in formal debate and required to conduct it properly. Maybe it’s time for guests to be penalized with silence if they break formal debate rules. Nah, it will never happen, just a personal fantasy. And of course formal debate wouldn’t address columnists and talk radio/TV that don’t do anything but spout opinion ad hominem ad nauseum.

  There is a possible solution. Bring back the fairness doctrine they used to have for TV/radio.

  Posted by Jon B on Jun 24, 2008 at 2:02 PM

  Yo Ken -

  You withdrew from our excellent discussion on a previous thread, to our mutual detriment, but I am intrigued by some of your comments here. 

  I note that democratic political entities that encourage discussion and dissent tend to have fierce internal conflicts before they go out and stomp whomever and whatever needs to be stomped.  Israel is the leading practitioner of this dynamic, with the United States as a distant but capable second.  This process, often thought of as inefficient, is actually a key component of successful democracies throughout the world.  I therefore think the current fierce discussions within your “Progressive” ranks and in the overall electoral process are entirely beneficial and healthful for our democracy.  The distillation of personalities and policies in the electoral process will result in a high-proof democratic result.

  This is in marked contrast to the non-democracies, where the winner of internal debates eliminates his opponents, and then proceeds to eliminate the populace: Stalin, Mao, the Kims, Pol Pot, Saddam, and Mugabe are prime examples. 

  ... I am often downright embarrassed by how one-dimensional and superficial our “analysis” of the world is. We progressives like to think of ourselves as “truth tellers” committed to depicting the world as it really is. Yet we too often present a cartoonish version of reality, rather than an accurate account of what is happening and – more to the point – why it is happening.

  I accept this as a true statement of your beliefs and objectives; that makes you a very lonely individual.  But this discussion is about Senator Obama.

  On the one hand, Obama seeks to unify.  On the other hand, as you say, Progressives need “to closely monitor ... potential pitfalls”, such as compromises by Obama.  And on the left foot, Obama is the far-most Leftist since George McGovern. 

  I do not see how these positions can be reconciled.  Do you expect everyone, Left and Right, to unite and rally around Obama?  Can Obama achieve unity without some compromised middle position between his followers’ far-Left natural inclinations and everyone else?  Do you think everyone will roll over for Obama, and if they did what would that do to the fierce debate we need to validate our democracy?

  Posted by scorp on Jun 25, 2008 at 6:12 AM

  As a radical progressive I got a good laugh from Ken Brociner’s essay. Ken, you haven’t presented anything that progressives can learn from Obama. Obama says “we have to be careful not to slip into playing the game as it is customarily played,” and then he goes to AIPAC and plays the game completely customarily and his flip-flop cave-in on Telecom Imunity is completely customary politics, just to name two examples.

  Ken, in case you didn’t notice, Petraeus did betray the USA, and Sirota is right that Obama is keeping hush on important issues. Ken, Obama is the best choice among what the two party machines have to offer, but after observing Obama’s first two weeks as the nominee and his rush to the center, only uncritical admirers of Barack Obama can still believe he has a genuine desire to transcend old political habits.

  As you can see I’m not at all enamored by Barack Obama’s candidacy. His speech at AIPAC the day after achieving the nomination was an abomination and supreme display of pandering at its worst. Self-styled progressives like Ken Brociner leave me wondering if there is a political label that Democratic centrists won’t try to usurp?

  Brociner discusses issues of political campaigning style and does not provide any examples of the “alternative philosophical outlook” that Obama is supposed to have developed. So it appears that this alternative philosophical outlook only extends to trying to be a “nice guy” campaigner.

  The underlying difference is whether we are talking policies and principles or merely vague political rhetoric.?

  The problem that progressives have with Obama is not as Broiner alleges that we don’t trust his motivations, it is that we don’t trust his politics. So far he appears to be nothing more than a better window dressing on the Democratic Party. Brociner wants us to believe that every political “enemy” be they vanilla liberal Democrat or rabid neo-con really sincerely believes “they are working to make the world a better place.” So? Perhaps Brociner’s view is the problem. What are we to make of people who believe they are working to make the world a better place but who are doing so in a manner that makes it worse? Okay, assuming George Bush and Dick Cheney really wanted to make the world a better place by lying to the public and illegally invading and occupying Iraq, how does that “new philosophy” help us?

  Assuming that Barack Obama really wants to make the world a better place when he goes to AIPAC and kisses their shoes regurgitating their false talking points right back to them, while Israel contiues its illegal and inhumane appartheid occupation and blocade of Palestine, how does that express a new “philosophical outlook” in political policy or principles?

  It is not progressives who have a one-dimensional analysis, it is Brociner who is presenting a cartoonish version of reality by erasing the facts from the picture.

  Obama is the one who is adding to the dishonest tone to the election when he supports an assault on the Constitution and calls it a good deal for the people. The fundamental dishonesty to the Democratic Party is that Obama is conceding that he has no argument against the Republicans on national security.  He can’t say Telecom Immunity has NOTHING to do with national security.  And on top of that,  Obama’s basic message is even though George Bush has the power now, don’t worry when Obama is president he will exercise it responsibility. That is not a new philosophy of government; that is the oldest political scam in the world. What Obama needs to learn from progressives is to quit the political con game and keep it real.

  Posted by Gregory Wonderwheel on Jun 25, 2008 at 6:21 PM

  You can’t have a critical mass for change if you don’t have a mass of criticism about what needs to be changed.

  Posted by Gregory Wonderwheel on Jun 25, 2008 at 6:27 PM

  Gregory Wonderwheel : ‘... Self-styled progressives like Ken Brociner leave me wondering if there is a political label that Democratic centrists won’t try to usurp? ....’

  “Left” and “leftist”.

  The reason Obama, the Clintons, McCain and so forth can be polite with each other is that they are all basically on the same page.  If leftists want to complain about what is wrong with their world view and politics, they have to use words like “war”, “imperialism”, “repression”, “class” and so forth—not at all nice.  But the only thing the Left has is its truth.  We certainly don’t have power.  If we give up truth we have nothing.

  Posted by anarcissie on Jun 25, 2008 at 7:22 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 16 posts.

Also by Ken Brociner

• Progressive Blind Spots
  Since its formation in 1997, the Campaign for America's Future (CAF) has been… morePosted on June 30, 2009
• Israel and the Klein Doctrine
  The recent meeting between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu… morePosted on May 31, 2009
• The Cuban Revolution and the American Left
  For countless leftists who came of age politically sometime between the late 1950s… morePosted on April 28, 2009
• Israel, Gaza and the Left
  One of the left's most significant ideological failings in recent years has been… morePosted on February 22, 2009
• Moving Forward Without Dogma
  Despite the severity of the current economic crisis, the morale of the progressive… morePosted on January 25, 2009