The New Moderate
I’m getting sort of tired of the endless discussion of whether Barack Obama is a wholesome liberal or an evil centrist, but I have to say something about one aspect of this story:
“Barack Obama has never made any bones about it: He is a moderate,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a moderate public policy think tank. “People who ignored that did so at their peril.”
Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. Which is fine, because Third Way isn’t really a “public policy think tank” at all, it’s a messaging and political tactics outfit. But Barack Obama’s policy proposals aren’t like that. At all. Nor do personnel on his policy teams — including the more ideologically moderate members — stand for anything that’s remotely as weak a brew as the stuff Third Way puts out. And yet, Third Way loves Barack Obama and says he’s a moderate just like them. Which is great. But everyone needs to see that these things are moving in two directions simultaneously. At the very same time Obama is disappointing progressive supporters on a number of fronts, he’s also bringing moderates on board for things that are way more ambitious than anything they were endorsing two or three years ago.
39 Responses to “The New Moderate”
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December 19th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Obama is a liberal with some quirks that shape his handling of ideological differences.
December 19th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
I think the advancement of the DLC/third way meme will provide Obama with political cover (and partial inoculation from misguided spin by the punditocracy) when he proposes the kind of comprehensive/universal health care reform that liberals/progressives have been seeking for more than a generation.
December 19th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
If people want to define universal healthcare, EFCA, civil unions, etc. as “moderate” that’s A-OK with me.
December 19th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Rhetoric aside, he is a liberal whose principle “quirk” involves listening to others’ ideas, arguments, and concerns before deciding what to do. Fancy that.
December 19th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
“People who ignored that did so at their peril.”
Sounds dangerous.
Usually, when things are that uncertain, we require waving red flags, blinking lights, sirens, and the like.
December 19th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Third Way isn’t really a “public policy think tank” at all, it’s a messaging and political tactics outfit
Yeah, I have to say that the right’s soldiers at least know their roles– the hacks, the ‘intellectuals’, the rabble-rousers, the smarmy shills, the funders, and so on– and aren’t particularly apologetic or even that dishonest about them within the movement itself. Democrats, though, are pretty embarrassingly prone to the most self-aggrandizing (and horribly transparent) spins on even the smallest political successes. Like I’ve said before, it’s often like a bunch of tenure-greedy associate professors climbing over each other at a department function.
December 19th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I don’t know anyone who “ignored” the fact that Obama was never the Marxist that the McCain campaign was claiming he was. We just didn’t have a progressive candidate in the general election. So you take what you can get, I suppose– but I resent being painted as naive.
December 19th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Usually, when things are that uncertain, we require waving red flags, blinking lights, sirens, and the like.
Shhh! You’re just encouraging them to break out the animated GIFs.
December 19th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
It’s like that tempest in a teapot a week or two back about that Obama guy who was telling progressives to sit down and shut up.
If Obama wants to use our brickbats as cover so nobody notices as he moves the Overton window way to the left of where it was just a year or two ago, I’m totally good with that.
December 19th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
I’ve never had an opinion on whether Obama was a liberal or whether he would do any good on domestic policy issues.
What I complain about is that in foreign policy he’s “Bush Lite” – or worse – and there is NOTHING about his foreign policy which is “liberal” or “progressive”.
If you’re going to keep the same old, same old war games going on – and trust me, this has an impact on the economy and the culture, if Irag didn’t prove that to you – then Obama is not going to be moving the country left even if he institutes universal health care for real.
December 19th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Obama’s not moving any windows – that was W. with two failed wars, a drowned city and a historic financial collapse
December 20th, 2008 at 8:10 am
In an era where George W. Bush is being granted the power to nationalize banks and craft automaker industrial policy I think one should reconsider the center and what it means to be moderate.
December 20th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
To add to what Matt said, Clintonian Third Way policy on government regulations in the 90s (and Democrats going along with it under Bush) helped get us into this economic mess. Not to mention their views on labor and the social safety net.
On trade I’ve become more Third Wayish, and believe the issue has been blown out of proportion, but there is no doubt that the Third Way view on free trade neglects the serious negative impact it has on the working poor and middle class.
December 22nd, 2008 at 5:17 am
Matt, Big Brother (AKA Jennifer Palmieri) is watching you! Stikc to the party line!
December 22nd, 2008 at 8:02 am
This post, and Ms. Palmieri’s response, raise many weighty questions, none of which interest me.
I’m here to address the internet meme that I feel certain has just been spawned, but whose composition I can’t quite figure out. Per Edge of the American West, one leading candidate has to be mockery of “hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit,” but that seems too wordy for a good meme. Maybe it works as an abbreviation: HTIB?
And what ought be the focus of this internet tradition? I don’t know anything about Third Way, but Yglesias seems to think it’s a pretty lame organization, and Palmieri seems to think it’s an incredibly lame organization. Should mockery of Third way become the new Internet tradition? Maybe the proper abbreviation is 3WHTIB. As in, “That mealy-mouthed loser Joe Lieberman is just engaging in more 3WTHIB.”
I see that reportedly Palmieri aspires to a job in government PR. Will the new meme memorialize Palmieri’s remarkably counterproductive PR strategy?
I dunno. But our duty is clear. We have been called upon to mercilessly mock everyone associated with this debacle except Yglesias, who hasn’t yet humiliated himself (though there’s still time for that).
December 22nd, 2008 at 9:49 am
Is this what they mean by “inside the beltway”?
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:16 am
Just wanted to give this post another hit and comment for greater visibility, since Jennifer Palmieri decided to put CAPAF’s credibility on the line.
I like the sound of “Third Way represents hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit“.
December 22nd, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Oh man are you going to get the slam down for this. What were you thinking?
Oh wait. Nevermind I’m a little late on this.
December 22nd, 2008 at 1:16 pm
If Jennifer P. wants to work in P.R. then this little stunt was a mega-fail.
December 22nd, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I like 3WHTIB. I think we should adopt it. (The acronym, not the POV.)
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Gherald put his/her finger on it:
The older I get the less comfortable I am with the liberal worldview as a panacea. There are lots of smart people in the world, some of whom subscribe to different points of view than me, and whose points are often just as valid as mine.
That however, does not suggest that as a process I should continually split the difference with them to try to find common solutions, it means listening openly to when they might have a stronger case and I the weaker one, or vice versa, or figure out that we’re both wrong.
For example, liberals hated welfare reform (and many still do), but like the DLC, I’d call it necessary on moral grounds as well as tactical ones (creating a pool of permanently unemployed, dependent people is neither good for them nor for the rest of society). On the other hand, unlike the DLC, I think financial deregulation as a premise was and is a uniformly a disaster. It’s almost certain that the regulations needed to be restructured to be less prescriptive and more general, which would permit regulating derivatives according to risk rather than specific form and shut down the lucrative and ludicrous reg-arb business most i-banks run, but that’s hardly a case for Greenspan’s deregulation-always approach, it’s a case of keeping the spirit and strength of the regulation and making it less burdensome and better.
The Third Way and DLC appear to have had the goal of trying to re-orient the Democrats away from FDR-based big government and let the market work when it can – generally laudable, and probably a political necessity for Democrats. But their difference-splitting method of doing so just begged the Republicans to move the goalposts.
Obama’s approach by contrast really seems to be to keep an open mind and listen. That’s a recipe for good policy “liberal” or otherwise.
December 23rd, 2008 at 10:41 am
Obama never was and never will be a Liberal. The whole discussion surrounding this is horse puke.
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
I am disappointed that this meme didn’t game more traction. I was really hoping that googling “hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit” would go straight to thirdway.org by now.
Oh well. Lots of memes in the sea.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:36 am
Obama is neither a “wholesome liberal or an evil centrist”. And by the way, when you have alleged Democrats feeling they have to wear a flag pin you must realize that the “center” is well on the conservative side of the aisle. But no, Obama is a neo-con in very thin disguise. He’s just a fresh happy face for window dressing on the continuation of basically the same Cheneyite policies.
If you don’t believe me look at his cabinet choices and things he said on the campaign trail even. Look who he has been taking advice from since day one of his campaign. Look at what promises he’s gone back on already and he hasn’t even been inaugurated yet.
Nobody who isn’t completely handled by the “powers that be” (Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission etc., basically the big business bourgeosie ruling class) is going to be able to go from thinking about running for the Senate to being president of the U.S. in under five years. Nobody. If he wasn’t a puppet of the establishment for continuation of their policies he would still be a junior senator from Illinois that nobody heard of. If that.
Four years from now when you still have perpetual war and still live in a police state that taps your phones and investigates what library books you check out and can whisk you away in the middle of the night to be tortured based on your being designated on a whim as an “enemy combatant” you will realize what I mean.
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