Leaving the left
I continue to find Booman at Booman Tribune to be one of the better commentators on Obama. It's a strange blog, because most of his readers seem to be anti-Obama, while he is pro- and has always been so. I'm not sure why these people continue to read his blog, unless they just like to argue with him. (This in contrast to Al Giordano's The Field -- my other favorite pro-Obama blog -- where almost all the commenters are as pro-Obama as Giordano is.)
I continue to be very happy that Obama is my president. Booman has a good post today called "Obama's Co-Opting Strategy" that highlights one of the things I anticipated liking about Obama's presidency and that is working out just as I hoped: "For impatient and frustrated progressives, my advice is to keep things in perspective. FDR got a lot done with a Big Tent party, too. But his Big Tent included, as its biggest part, the segregationist South. Obama's Big Tent includes main street Republicans and foreign policy realists. I'll take that trade in a heartbeat, even if it means I have a less pure party than I might like."
To put it in a less regional way, I always thought that Obama's rhetoric about there being "no red states, no blue states, only the United States" was a way of isolating the wingnuts. It was a way of saying to moderate Republicans that we can work together and persuading them to stop giving cover to the lunatics in their own party. This is a big deal, to my mind. We basically saw those lunatics undermine Clinton's presidency and then drive the country off the cliff under Bush. Anything that lessens their power makes the world a better, safer place for everyone.
It started during the presidential campaign, but it has only gotten stronger during Obama's presidency: I find most of the critique of him coming from the left to be a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Which is to say, I suppose, that it has no strategic political value; it has nothing to say about how power is actually exercised effectively in the United States of America in the year 2009. I find that I trust his political instincts more than almost all of his critics'. This is in sharp contrast to how I felt about Bill Clinton, whom I despised as a DINO. Now I feel completely out of step with the leftist critique of Obama, and I can only assume that I have become more conservative in the past eight years. I don't think I'm a leftist any more. I think I have become a mere liberal. Ah well, I was raised in a liberal Republican household, so perhaps it was inevitable that I would backslide.
I continue to be very happy that Obama is my president. Booman has a good post today called "Obama's Co-Opting Strategy" that highlights one of the things I anticipated liking about Obama's presidency and that is working out just as I hoped: "For impatient and frustrated progressives, my advice is to keep things in perspective. FDR got a lot done with a Big Tent party, too. But his Big Tent included, as its biggest part, the segregationist South. Obama's Big Tent includes main street Republicans and foreign policy realists. I'll take that trade in a heartbeat, even if it means I have a less pure party than I might like."
To put it in a less regional way, I always thought that Obama's rhetoric about there being "no red states, no blue states, only the United States" was a way of isolating the wingnuts. It was a way of saying to moderate Republicans that we can work together and persuading them to stop giving cover to the lunatics in their own party. This is a big deal, to my mind. We basically saw those lunatics undermine Clinton's presidency and then drive the country off the cliff under Bush. Anything that lessens their power makes the world a better, safer place for everyone.
It started during the presidential campaign, but it has only gotten stronger during Obama's presidency: I find most of the critique of him coming from the left to be a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Which is to say, I suppose, that it has no strategic political value; it has nothing to say about how power is actually exercised effectively in the United States of America in the year 2009. I find that I trust his political instincts more than almost all of his critics'. This is in sharp contrast to how I felt about Bill Clinton, whom I despised as a DINO. Now I feel completely out of step with the leftist critique of Obama, and I can only assume that I have become more conservative in the past eight years. I don't think I'm a leftist any more. I think I have become a mere liberal. Ah well, I was raised in a liberal Republican household, so perhaps it was inevitable that I would backslide.