Crossing the Imaginary Aisle
It's hard to believe it's been over a year, but this whole Democratic primary process has really been draggin on for a while! Amazingly, in retrospect, Obama has emerged from unknown-quantity status to being the real-deal frontrunner, making Hillary look petty, shrill, and dour in the process.Interestingly, Hillary was heralded (and derided) throughout 2007 for being the inevitable nominee for the Democratic party. Today Andrew Sullivan notes the prescience he displayed in his post of May 24, 2007 -- nine months ago! -- in which he said, after visiting an Obama event in DC as an observer:
Look at the polls and forget ideology for a moment. What do Americans really want right now? Change. Who best offers them a chance to turn the page cleanly on an era most want to forget? It isn't Clinton, God help us. Edwards is so 2004. McCain is a throwback. Romney makes plastic look real. Rudy does offer something new for Republicans - the abortion-friendly, cross-dressing Jack Bauer. But no one captures the sheer, pent-up desire for a new start more effectively than Obama."Romney makes plastic look real." "Cross-dressing Jack Bauer"! Hahah.
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From the content and structure of Obama's pitch to the base, it's also clear to me that whatever illusions I had about his small-c conservatism, he's a big government liberal with - for a liberal - the most attractive persona and best-developed arguments since JFK.
The kicker is that Sullivan, who is a (Bush-disillusioned) conservative, is now a supporter of Obama despite the early misgivings he related in his post above. And you know what? I really think that's not delusion, or cultishness, as some people might have it. It's simply a belief that bargaining and bipartisanship and agreeability -- and, yes, inspiration -- have a place in government.
So how does Obama manage to reach across the proverbial aisle without actually picking his butt off the far-left wing of the Senate chamber? Well, some ideas transcend easy categorization, and Obama nailed that message in the Cleveland debate last night. Here's his explanation of what the National Journal deemed to be his über-liberal voting record:
"I supported an office of public integrity, an independent office that would be able to monitor ethics investigations in the Senate, because I thought it was important for the public to know that if there were any ethical violations in the Senate, that they weren't being investigated by the Senators themselves, but there was somebody independent who would do it. This is something that I've tried to push as part of my ethics package.It's because people don't want to go back to those old categories of what's liberal and what's conservative. They want to see who is making sense.
"It was rejected. And according to the National Journal, that position is a liberal position.
"Now, I don't think that's a liberal position. I think there are a lot of Republicans and a lot of Independents who would like to make sure that ethics investigations are not conducted by the people who are potentially being investigated. So the categories don't make sense.
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"It's because people don't want to go back to those old categories of what's liberal and what's conservative. They want to see who is making sense... "
Emma Lazarus' 1883 poem, "The New Colossus," affirms that the Statue of Liberty is indeed a "Mother of Exiles"; that underdogs and misfits are the spirit of the country. 