One of the fascinating things about Leon Wieseltier’s impassioned plea for Barack Obama to openly embrace the cause of liberalism is that nowhere in his column does he for a moment question the legitimacy of Obama’s claim to the honor. The first time I read the piece, I did not even notice this feature. Perhaps that is because both Wieseltier and I take it for granted that Obama has embarked on the most aggressively liberal program since at least Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society if not Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. You can see this in how Weiseltier frames the events of the past month, but I initially missed it because I was struck by something else.
The most discouraging surprise of Barack Obama’s early days in office, days of emergency, was the new administration’s shirking of clarity, its reluctance to attach the grandeur of its initiatives to the grandeur of liberalism. Instead the president’s distaste for division, and his Chicago practicality, set the tone. How came it to be that in the aftermath of the greatest liberal victory in our lifetime John Boehner held the stage?
On my first reading, I missed (because I took it for granted) the part about ‘the greatest liberal victory in our lifetime’ and focused, instead, on his curious observation that John Boehner had somehow stolen the limelight. The latter point strikes me as simply fatuous. John Boehner’s role in the stimulus is already forgotten and it mattered little even at the time. Whatever action there was took place in the Senate, not the House.
I was taken aback by Weiseltier’s mode of criticism both because I found it to be faulty and because I’ve grown accustomed to the main line of attack against Obama coming from liberals that question the legitimacy of his liberalism, not those that take it for granted.
Both lines of attack share one common component though, and that is a heartfelt desire to see Obama mouth the words of a proud, partisan, liberal progressive politician. Weiseltier explains his position emphatically:
I want the president to tell the American people that, contrary to what they have been taught for many years, government is a jewel of human association and an heirloom of human reason; that government, though it may do ill, does good; that a lot of the good that government does only it can do; that the size of government must be fitted to the size of its tasks, and so, for a polity such as ours, big government is the only government; that strong government comports well with strong freedom, unless Madison was wrong; that a government based on rights cannot exclude from its concern the adversities of the people who confer upon it its legitimacy, or consign their remediation to the charitable moods of a preferred and decadent few; that Ronald Reagan, when he proclaimed categorically, without exception or complication, that “government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem,” was a fool; and that nobody was ever rescued, or enlarged, by being left alone. For all its grotesqueness, American government is a beautiful thing.
That is a wonderfully articulate expression of liberal beliefs but why is it so necessary for Barack Obama to make that argument? Or, more accurately, why do so many liberals feel that it is disappointing that Obama does not? To my ears, this desire is so strong that it causes people not to hear it when Obama expresses some of these exact points. After all, Obama has said that ‘doing nothing is not an option’ and that the government can and must do big things and do them well. He has made a rather pointed case that Republican ideas have been tried and found wanting, and that they will not be a part of the solution now. Obama explains in language ordinary blokes can understand why monetary policy has reached the limits of its effectiveness and government spending is the only tool left in the box. But rather than claim this giant unprecedented government spending as his own, or as the natural expression of liberal belief, he correctly argues that it is a policy necessitated by circumstances, as economists of all political persuasions readily acknowledge. In other words, we all know that this is what we must do, so why make it into something vindicating and political?
President Obama is a liberal, yes, but we’re all liberals now (as opposed to socialists, as Newsweek would have it). We’re all liberals but the Dittoheads and the dead-enders on the Cable Business shows. The situation we find ourselves in is what settled a thirty-year argument in our favor. How much salesmanship is required from our president to convince the nation that the dead parrot of Reagan Republicanism is indeed discredited and dead? Isn’t that something for opinion makers and historians to discuss?
Obama doesn’t need to feed liberals red meat and he doesn’t need to convince the people of what they can so easily see with their own eyes. We’re a liberal country again. The president should concentrate on explaining why his policies are necessary and will benefit the country, and leave the ‘I-told-you-so’s’ to people like me and Leon.