{"id":6624,"date":"2010-08-16T17:41:35","date_gmt":"2010-08-16T21:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=6624"},"modified":"2010-08-16T17:41:35","modified_gmt":"2010-08-16T21:41:35","slug":"liberals-turning-on-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/6624\/liberals-turning-on-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberals Turning on Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Republic<\/em>\u2019s John Judis is out today with a feature-length article titled, \u201cThe Unnecessary Fall,\u201d<\/a> a blow-by-blow recounting of how Barack Obama missed his opportunity to define his presidency in populist terms.\u00a0 To Judis, the greatest betrayal of liberal America\u2019s would-be Messiah is the latter\u2019s failure to engage in confrontational politics.<\/p>\n

Why has the White House failed to convince the public that it is fighting effectively on its behalf? The principal culprit is clearly Barack Obama. He has a strange aversion to confrontational politics. His aversion is strange because he was schooled in it, working as a community organizer in the 1980s, under the tutelage of activists who subscribed to teachings of the radical Saul Alinsky. But, when Obama departed for Harvard Law School in 1988, he left Alinsky and adversarial tactics behind.<\/p>\n

The young lawyer who returned to Chicago and won a seat in the Illinois state Senate in 1996 practiced a very different style of politics. Obama\u2019s principal accomplishments in Springfield were bills restricting lobbying and requiring videotaping of confessions in potential death penalty cases. He was not a typical blue-collar, bread-and-butter Chicago Democrat, but the kind of good government liberal that represents the upscale districts of the city, seeing in politics a higher calling and ill at ease with (although not in open opposition to) the city\u2019s Democratic machine. He was also a post-racial politician who eschewed the hard-edged, angry rhetoric of Jesse Jackson. (That, too, is oddly reminiscent of Carter, who partly campaigned in 1976 as the white Southern antidote to George Wallace\u2019s angry racial populism.)<\/p>\n

Obama carried this outlook into the U.S. Senate, into his campaign for the presidency, and then, into the presidency itself. He is a cerebral, dispassionate, post-partisan; he wants to \u201cend the political strategy that has been based on division,\u201d to \u201cturn the page\u201d on the culture wars of the 1960s and the partisan battles of the 1990s. During the campaign, his aides jokingly referred to him as the \u201cblack Jesus.\u201d While he can tolerate and even brush aside conflict, he is reluctant to actively foment it. \u201cIn a time of crisis, we can\u2019t afford to govern out of anger,\u201d he declared in February 2009. During his campaign and his first year in office, he held to a blind faith in bipartisanship, even as the Republicans voted as a bloc against his legislation. He is, perhaps, ill-suited in these respects for an era of bruising political warfare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ignoring Judis\u2019 laughable attempt to paint Obama as a disappointed bipartisan, there\u2019s nothing special about this era that makes politics any more or less \u201cbruising.\u201d\u00a0 Leading is always tough.\u00a0 As Judis indicates, maybe Obama isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Republic\u2019s John Judis is out today with a feature-length article titled, \u201cThe Unnecessary Fall,\u201d a blow-by-blow recounting of how Barack Obama missed his opportunity to define his presidency in populist terms.\u00a0 To Judis, the greatest betrayal of liberal America\u2019s would-be Messiah is the latter\u2019s failure to engage in confrontational politics. Why has the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,1561,1319,739],"class_list":["post-6624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-barack-obama","tag-democrat-party","tag-leadership","tag-liberal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6624"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6625,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6624\/revisions\/6625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}