Enemy of the Good

Written by: Tom Bearse on Jul 6, 2008 10:51 PM EDT

I suppose what we have are lines, the lines we will walk up to but refuse to cross. In the often unseemly world of politics, they shift in order to make the necessary trade-offs between personal integrity and the practical reality of Machiavellian strategies for success, or they harden and such trade-offs are rejected in favor of principled defeat.

They’re everywhere, expressed in the sentiments of bloggers here and at other sites. They stretch from the cold and lonely vigil over the cyclic presidential campaigns of Dennis Kucinich, to the euphoric band wagon jumping for the political Everyman, Barack Obama. It’s a riddle that needed solving when confronted in 2000, for example, with the decision of whether to throw away a vote on a third party candidate or, worse, take a vote from Al Gore, for the specific purpose of expressing your exasperation with two party politics, and give it to Ralph Nader. From this misguided calculus was formed the presidency of George Bush. It’s hard to appreciate the political idealism implicit in such a voting decision with results so horrible.

I listen to complaints about Obama, whose conciliatory and unorthodox resort to bipartisanship is often regarded as a simple kind of centrist politics, as if putting together a coalition of loyal Democratic voters, third party strays, independent thinkers, and disenchanted Republican moderates automatically rendered him and his left-of-center voting record a living statistical average of the voting tendencies of this diverse group.

The fatuous quality of this thinking is graphically revealed by a cursory review of the mainstream media, derided by hyperbolic harpies on the right as liberal mouthpieces, prating on about what a liberal firebrand Obama is compared with the moderate centrist, John McCain, a politician who rubs elbows with the press and forges legislation with such noteworthy liberal lawmakers as Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold. It’s as if the liberal policies of these senators could rub off on and contaminate the Republican standard bearer, wholly without regard for his own voting record, harsh foreign policy rhetoric, and repeated repudiations of formerly held views regarding tax cuts, off-shore drilling, and the torture of enemy combatants.

Do the same complaints about conciliation get directed at Kennedy and Feingold for the unpalatable bills they cosponsor with a person like McCain, whom these same critics vilify as a phony, two-faced Republican hack? No. Still, lines must be drawn, and while Obama is increasingly positioning himself in a way that will attract curious, suspicious, and uninformed voters, who sometimes venture with caution across the center of the political spectrum, the voices of ideologically pure liberals, the ones who pine for Kucinich’s hopeless but existentially satisfying crusades, are being raised. I’ve heard them before.

Similar criticisms were leveled at presidential candidate Howard Dean over his support for gun rights regulation by the states; his opposition to gay marriage; his willingness to grant tax breaks to large insurers and relax environmental protection standards for corporate farming operations in Vermont; his failure to support single-payer healthcare coverage; his support of NAFTA; his support for Israel; his overtures toward religious believers; even, incredibly, his support for war against Iraq in the form of the Biden-Lugar Amendment to the Iraq authorization bill in Congress. To his followers, Dean was taking on the DLC proponents in his party. To his detractors, he was the DLC. Of course, like Obama, Dean was called an out-of-the mainstream liberal by the conventional media, just like he was called a pandering, establishment Democrat by his left-leaning critics.

All of which I find fascinating because now, when we are on the verge of seeing Dean’s political progeny, Barack Obama, pick up the fallen standard of the 2004 Dean candidacy and use it to organize the most successful and compelling grassroots campaign in the history of American politics, the lines are becoming apparent. Opposing telecom immunity is not regarded as the principled stand that leading a filibuster and voting against the FISA compromise in the Senate is. Leaving Iraq is not sufficient opposition to the U.S. occupation as setting and keeping a timetable without regard to the security situation in that country, once the preset time for leaving comes to pass, would be.

Would Howard Dean have done the same thing as a nominee? Some people who drew the line in 2004 apparently thought so, following the same line of attack against him that Kucinich used. Dean didn’t support single-payer healthcare coverage and Kucinich did. Kucinich called out Dean for supporting an increase in the social security retirement age. Dean thought it necessary to stay in Iraq once the President committed troops there, while Kucinich demanded that the troops be withdrawn and replaced by U.N. peacekeepers.

I wonder how it is that for some ardent Dean supporters then, no lines between Kucinich and Dean were drawn on the basis of the candidates’ respective views, in a way that they are drawn regarding Obama’s views now. It’s possible to hypothesize that perhaps ideological purity is one thing and ideological consistency another.

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