Ezra Klein hits on something that I’ve been thinking about.
The first year of the Obama presidency has been a long tutorial on the difference between liberal ends and liberal means. If I told you America has a president determined to pass large amounts of Keynesian stimulus spending (that’s particularly concentrated in impoverished areas), a near-universal health-care plan, and a bill addressing climate change, you’d say liberals had recaptured the White House. Ambitious liberals, even.
But though Obama’s program is quite liberal, he doesn’t seem to care much how it’s achieved. A public option would be nice, but if it’s not there, then that’s fine, too. Full auction of permits is a good idea, but if most get given away to corporations, then that’s how it goes. Infrastructure spending is good, but if tax cuts are the price of passage, then tax cuts there shall be. The best description of the administration’s ideology probably came from Rahm Emanuel when he said, “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success.”
You could imagine a lot of presidents more dogmatically liberal than Obama, but I wonder whether there are a lot of plausible hypotheticals in which they amass more liberal achievements than Obama. At the executive level, it might be the case that being too liberal is a liability to, well, liberalism.
I generally agree with all of this. But the last point is what I want to talk about. Where a president positions himself on the ideological scale actually matters quite a bit. If you alienate one part of the country (say, New England) then you’ll find that members of your party from that region are not too excited to work with you. By the time Bush left office, there were exactly zero Republican members of the House of Representatives from New England. In that case, at the executive level, it was the case that being too conservative was a liability to conservatism. Going from memory, I believe that there were five Democratic senators from the South who retired in 2002. The Democrats lost all five of those elections that November. Clearly the positions taken by the national Democratic Party had alienated the southern electorate in that time period.
The president must at least attempt to represent all the people. There will inevitably be some regional differences of opinion on policy, but a president stands to lose a lot if he becomes a divisive lightning-rod figure in large regions of the country. It makes sense to eschew liberal or conservative phrasing and appeal to common sense. I think the GOP’s strategy makes more sense if you think about it as an effort to prevent Obama from governing pragmatically and respectfully. They refuse to treat him as legitimate and reasonable in order to create a lightning-rod status for him in as much of the country as they can.
One lesson is that you gain nothing by trimming your progressive sails because the wingnuts will treat you like a Bolshevik regardless. But another lesson is that you lend credibility to those attacks if you don’t take pains to make them look ridiculous.
In any case, it’s not at all clear that a more overtly and aggressive progressive image in the Oval Office would result in more progressive outcomes over time. What matters most is what can pass through Congress. And a Democratic president that finds a way to pass things through Congress will be more progressive than one that cannot.