Watching the ideological wings of both parties is always entertaining — but the hue and cry going up as the far left discovers Obama to be non-ideological is likely to be loud and painful.
We hear a lot about how people want change in Washington. It’s assumed by the Village media to mean that everybody is just desperate to stop fighting and get along — comity, compromise and good feeling between good friends. I’m sure there are people who feel this way, first among them Washington wags and hostesses, who love a big bipartisan guest list.
But there is just as much reason to believe that the change voters want is actually an end to the back scratching and glad handing that characterizes the bipartisan symbiosis between the political and corporate world and the incumbent protection racket that makes it possible. Nothing illustrates that corruption better than this FISA fight.
Digby makes the same mistake quite a number of lefties made in 2006. In a two-party system, wins do not equate to mandates for ideological platforms. People are beyond tired of the partisanship and fighting, and the suggestion that bipartisan symbiosis is the primary catalyst for “change” is almost funny when viewed through the polarized lens we’re all forcibly using nowadays.
Over at Buck Naked Politics, Damozel writes:
Obama promised capital-C Change. Too many people didn’t pay any attention to the small print. I thought he made it clear — and certainly anyone who looked at his circle of advisers would have noticed — that the sort of Change he was talking about wasn’t by any means a progressive uprising against the right wing principles Bush established, but a bipartisan reach-across-the-aisles-all-working-together centrism aimed at everyone working together. It’s who he is.
Yes — and what a relief that is.
Early on, I wrote that the ideological left wing of the Democratic party was utterly clueless about Obama, and that they were in for some major disappointments. The good news for the general election, of course, is that he apparently recognizes this and is moving to his natural center sooner rather than later.
I fully expect the cacophony to be deafening when Obama starts acknowledging (and adjusting his rhetoric to) the changing conditions in Iraq. Like the campaign financing, the situation on the ground necessitates a pragmatist rather than an ideologue.
It is what it is, and the hard liners will get over it. Or not. But meanwhile, independents and moderates like Polimom can breathe a massive sigh of relief that the bizarre plunge off the populist pander-cliff in Ohio was just that.
For the next little while, though, Polimom recommends earplugs.
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