[A-List] The 'Principled Left' Obama Needs

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The 'Principled Left' Obama Needs

Katrina vanden Heuvel
August 15, 2010
http://www.thenation.com/blog/154046/principled-left-obama-needs

When Barack Obama embarked on what most political
insiders saw as an audacious campaign for the
presidency, the question was whether a newly-elected
senator from Illinois could entice Democrats to consider
a contender other than a former first lady who proposed
to be the first woman president and a former nominee for
vice president who was saying important things about the
growing economic divide in America. What ultimately won
him the Democratic nomination in 2008 was a decision by
the principled left--professional and amateur--that the
one leading candidate who had expressed blunt opposition
to the war in Iraq before it began had shown better
judgment than Hillary Clinton or John Edwards.

So it was that an exercise in political purism by the
broad left put Obama on the path to the presidency. Now
that Obama is president, however, his press secretary
derides the "professional left" for being too pure in
its demands on the White House. In point of fact, Robert
Gibbs is wrong; at the most critical point in President
Obama's tenure so far--when Congress was deciding how to
vote on a health-care bill that Republicans predicted
would be his "Waterloo"--the most left-wing members of
Congress and their allies (professional and amateur)
across America rallied to support a measure that was
deeply disappointing to many of them.

But that is not enough for Gibbs.

It is staggeringly simplistic for Gibbs to blame the
"professional left" for the slew of troubles this White
House currently confronts as much as seems to have. The
left isn't responsible for the administration’s
insufficient response to the economic and social
challenges the financial crisis has posed. The left
isn't responsible for a dysfunctional system that allows
the minority party to obstruct with impunity--and
special interests and big corporate money to dictate
legislative policy.  Nor is the left responsible for the
fact that a majority of Americans no longer believe the
Afghanistan war is worth fighting.

As historian Michael Kazin likes to say, "If the left
were not somewhat unhappy with Barack Obama, it would
not be much of a left." Maybe Gibbs needs a history
lesson on the relationship of the left to presidential
administrations. Both FDR and LBJ, for example, had to
respond to insurgencies on their left--labor and civil-
rights movements--and in so doing were pushed to adopt
bold progressive reforms.

Of course, these are different times, for America and
its left. Ruth Marcus makes a credible point when she
suggests that some on the left blame Obama for the
failure to enact sweeping transformative reforms in less
than two years. Blaming Obama is simplistic. After all,
didn't the left--old and new--typically use a power
structure analysis to explain the limits of democracy in
the U.S.? How is it, then, that it hoped Obama would
override all that, and do so in less than two years?

The left I know and am a part of is not some monolithic
entity. There are debates and divisions. I am of the
school that believes the system is rigged against
progressive change, and that great periods of change--
the New Deal and the Great Society--took place after
years of effort and many setbacks. I also believe that
we on the left need to be as clear-eyed, tough and
pragmatic about Obama as he and his team are about us.
Playing what I call the betrayal sweepstakes--a
ceaseless denunciation of the administration's failures
and missteps--doesn't get us very far. It promotes
disappointment, disempowerment and despair, which is
just what our adversaries on the right seek.

As someone who would like to see Obama's presidency
succeed, I think he needs a left that engages in the
same blending of principle and pragmatism that convinced
progressive Democrats to choose him over Clinton and
Edwards. The history of progressive change in our
country leads me to believe that the left would be wise
to avoid falling into either of two extremes--
reflexively defensive or reflexively critical.

In the last 18 months, the left has learned the hard way
that it needs to be more independent of the White House
to realize the change we’re seeking. There's now more
energy being devoted to organizing, less to complaining.
There is savvy organizing underway around specific
issues--corporate power, filibuster reform, Medicare-
for-all at the state level, stronger consumer
protection--and the development of active, broad-based
coalitions around those reforms that, as our history
teaches us, is pretty much the only way things change in
our system.

Gibbs might want to consider what the left is griping
about. Why didn't Obama use his presidential pulpit and
brilliant speaking skills to change the debate and
explain that what we need to fear is joblessness--not
deficits? Couldn't he have picked a cabinet with a real
team of rivals? Gibbs should stop lashing out and start
a more productive conversation with a constituency which
was, after all, at the core of the coalition that
brought his boss to the White House.

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