The Return Of Lincoln 1860
Posted on Wed Nov 18, 2009 at 09:59:23 AM EST
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Digby cites Rick Pearlstein:
Question: Has Obama succeeded on his promise of being a “post-partisan” President?
Rick Perlstein: Well, the problem with Obama’s post-partisan agenda is that he came into it, he came into his presidency at a time when millions of Americans, perhaps even tens of millions of Americans don’t consider a Democratic president legitimate, don’t consider liberalism legitimate, don’t consider the idea of the state forming new programs to help people legitimate. So, he’s in a situation a lot like Abraham Lincoln faced in 1860 when you had millions of Americans who didn’t even consider what was going in Washington to have anything to do with them. [. . .] If people say that you're illegitimate and your liberal agenda is extremist socialist destroying the America that we all grew up with, you have to be willing to say, “This is unreasonable. This is extreme.” And if you aren’t able to say, “This is unreasonable and this is extreme,” then you're granting your opposition an undue influence. You’re basically negotiating with the unnegotiatable. And as Abraham Lincoln said quite eloquently in his 1860 speech at Cooper Union, you can’t win that way.
(Emphasis supplied.) Lincoln 1860 was a theme Digby and I discussed a lot in 2003 and 2004, long before the emergence of Barack Obama, so these themes are not new to us. However, my first post at Talk Left applies the thinking to Obama. Digby recapitulates the point well:
[I]t remains to be seen if Obama has the will to blast past these barriers and take the win with an extremely hostile opposition getting ever more radical in deeply stressful times. We just don't know yet. [. . .]
But that doesn't mean he doesn't also see the value of placing his political adversaries in the role of unreasonable extremists. His administration has done that with some success, I would say (and a lot of help from the crazies) but they haven't yet explicitly positioned their policy positions as the reasonable, mainstream alternative and I think it's because they are flummoxed without any bipartisan support. The political establishment can't see anything being "reasonable" if the Republicans are rejecting it.
He needs to say it anyway, as Perlstein prescribes. I would predict that citizens in the middle are well prepared to see total obstructionism as an unreasonable position, even if the Villagers see it as a sign of liberal extremism. After all, to them all partisanship is a sign of liberal extremism.
(Emphasis supplied.) The center of the debate about Mark Schmitt's Theory of Change was precisely that Obama never defined change in policy terms. It was very much "Obama= Change" disconnected from any actual policy change. Of course in the general election, Obama defined change negatively - to wit, he defined McCain as Bush and himself as Not Bush. This was effective politically and given the magnitude of the financial crisis and his electoral win, it was enough to create a mandate for policy change.
The problem is Obama has squandered that mandate for transformational change. His change agenda was simply too timid for the problems and for the political and policy opportunity. And he could well sink his Presidency because of his timidity on the economic situation. But he can still define change in terms of policy and by defining his policy opponents as extreme -- the way Lincoln did in 1860.
Speaking for me only
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