NOVANEWS
By Kevin Drum
Andrew Sullivan has a longish cover story in Newsweek arguing that both conservatives and liberals attack Barack Obama in dumb ways. Conservatives are convinced he’s a fire-breathing socialist out to destroy capitalism and appease our foreign enemies at every turn. This is little short of deranged, and Sullivan does a nice job of taking it apart.
Likewise, the progressive base convinced itself early on that Obama was a committed leftist and has since excoriated him for selling out now that he’s in office. But I agree with Sullivan: Obama simply never sold himself that way. He was, from Day One, a pragmatic, cautious, mainstream Democrat, and anyone watching the 2008 campaign with both eyes open should have understood that. He may be less liberal
than a lot of us would like, but anyone who’s disappointed because he turned out not to be the second coming of FDR was just deluding themselves from the start.
But Sullivan loses me here:
By misunderstanding Obama’s strategy and temperament and persistence, by grandstanding on one issue after another, by projecting unrealistic fantasies onto a candidate who never pledged a liberal revolution, [liberals] have failed to notice that from the very beginning, Obama was playing a long game. He did this with his own party over health-care reform. He has done it with the Republicans over the debt. He has done it with the Israeli government over stopping the settlements on the West Bank—and with the Iranian regime, by not playing into their hands during the Green Revolution, even as they gunned innocents down in the streets. Nothing in his first term—including the complicated multiyear rollout of universal health care—can be understood if you do not realize that Obama was always planning for eight years, not four.