[rad-green] Barack Obama, conservative -- Washington Post

*https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/22/barack-obama-conservative/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/22/barack-obama-conservative/>WASHINGTON
POST          NOVEMBER 22, 2019Barack Obama, conservativeThe left and the
right still misunderstand his politics.*
[image: image.png]
*Sean Gallup/Getty Images*

*By David Swerdlick*

The Democrats who want to be president can’t quite figure out how to talk
about the most popular figure in their party. Former president Barack Obama
casts a long shadow over the 2020 primary campaign: Preserving Obama’s
legacy is the heart of former vice president Joe Biden’s pitch to voters —
which has allowed his rivals to mark him as complacent. More left-leaning
candidates, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), say the next president
needs to do more to push for health-care reforms and combat income
inequality — but lately, she’s struggling to sell her proposals. Onetime
Obama Cabinet secretary Julián Castro has ripped his former boss’s record
on immigration and deportation. Meanwhile, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete
Buttigieg raced to have a reporter correct a story that misquoted him
citing “failures of the Obama era.” Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) said in
Wednesday’s debate that it’s crucial to “rebuild the Obama coalition”
because “that’s the last time we won.” Picking and choosing which parts of
Obama’s tenure to embrace, and how firmly to embrace them, has become a
delicate game in the primary season.

And now Obama himself is working to cool down what he sees as an overheated
political climate. In October, at a panel discussion for his foundation, he
warned against the pitfalls of “woke” cancel culture, telling a gathering
of young activists that “if all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re
probably not going to get that far.” This month, at a gathering of
influential Democrats, he cautioned the 2020 contenders against pushing too
far, too fast on policy: “This is still a country that is less
revolutionary than it is interested in improvement.”

Given the political climate, it’s no surprise to see the party’s base
clamoring for something dramatic. But the contrast between Obama’s steady
approach and the seeming radicalism of his Democratic heirs can’t just be
chalked up to changing times. It’s because the former president, going back
at least to his 2004 Senate race, hasn’t really occupied the left side of
the ideological spectrum. He wasn’t a Republican, obviously: He never
professed a desire to starve the federal government, and he opposed the
Iraq War, which the GOP overwhelmingly supported. But to the dismay of many
on the left, and to the continuing disbelief of many on the right, Obama
never dramatically departed from the approach of presidents who came before
him.That remark helps explain why so many of the candidates’ proposals seem
so far to the left of Obama. The former president was skeptical of sweeping
change, bullish on markets, sanguine about the use of military force, high
on individual responsibility and faithful to a set of old-school personal
values. Compare that with proposals from his would-be successors:
Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal, free college, a wealth tax, universal
basic income.

There’s a simple reason: Barack Obama is a conservative.

Obama’s perspectives don’t line up with every position now seen as
right-of-center: He joined the Paris climate accords, he signed the
Dodd-Frank financial regulations, and he’s pro-choice. He flip-flopped to
supporting same-sex marriage, highlighting the significance of marriage.

But his constant search for consensus, for ways to bring Blue America and
Red America together, sometimes led him to policies that used Republican
means to achieve more liberal ends. The underlying concept for his
signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, with its individual
mandate, was devised by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and first
implemented at the state level by Mitt Romney, then the Republican governor
of Massachusetts. Obama wanted to protect Americans from the effects of a
prolonged recession, so he agreed, in one of his defining votes as a
senator, to a bailout of banks — and as president, he prioritized recovery
over punishing bankers for their role in the financial crisis. In his first
inaugural address, he affirmed the power of the free market “to generate
wealth and expand freedom.”

Until the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012, Obama studiously avoided any push for
gun control. Indeed, in his first term, he signed laws that loosened
restrictions on bringing firearms to national parks and on Amtrak. Though
cast as a “dithering” peacenik who led “from behind,” he stuck with his
thesis that the imperative “to end the war in Iraq is to be able to get
more troops into Afghanistan,” and he prosecuted a drone war in Somalia,
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.

Obama’s approach to politics was marked by a circumspection that went even
deeper than policies. To be conservative, as philosopher Michael Oakeshott,
a movement hero, once put it, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to
prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the
possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the
sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present
laughter to utopian bliss.” The former president channeled the sentiment
faithfully when he said recently that “the average American doesn’t think
that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”

He believes, fundamentally, that the American model works — even if it
hasn’t been allowed to work for everyone. In some cases, the government
should help expand the American Dream to individuals and communities to
whom access has been denied. In others, Americans can achieve the dream if
only they have the will to surmount obstacles on their own. His second
inaugural address was a thoroughly conservative document, underscoring
equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome. Republican
former House speaker Newt Gingrich praised it at the time, saying,
“Ninety-five percent of the speech I thought was classically American,
emphasizing hard work, emphasizing self-reliance, emphasizing doing things
together.”

In his first year in office, Obama gave a back-to-school address that
Republicans panned in advance as big-brotherism, even though its central
idea turned out to be: “At the end of the day, the circumstances of your
life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have,
what you’ve got going on at home — none of that is an excuse for neglecting
your homework or having a bad attitude in school.”

He once argued that in certain circumstances, government programs created
welfare dependency, saying that “as somebody who worked in low-income
neighborhoods, I’ve seen it, where people weren’t encouraged to work,
weren’t encouraged to upgrade their skills, were just getting a check, and
over time, their motivation started to diminish.”

In remarks commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington,
Obama went out of his way to lecture that, after the civil rights era,
“what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all
Americans to work hard and get ahead, was too often framed as a mere desire
for government support, as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if
poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others
was reason to give up on yourself.” You’d never hear that sentiment
expressed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for whom structural inequality
explains nearly every American ill.

Obama cast himself as a role model for young black men and repeatedly
stressed that not all inequities in American society are attributable to
discrimination, racial or otherwise. This posture helped earn him currency
with the black electorate (in particular, older black voters), which votes
overwhelmingly for Democrats but skews moderate to conservative on several
issues.

He embraced respectability politics as a way to signal how conventional it
was to have a first family of color: the many Norman Rockwell-worthy
photo-ops, such as the 2009 portrait by Annie Leibovitz, a study in
wholesome family living; their annual vacations on Martha’s Vineyard,
summer haven of the black elite; dialing back his storied “cool,” as when
he displayed his stiff dance moves during an appearance on “Ellen,” laying
claim to the mantle of the everyman dad. Asked what he thought about Kanye
West interrupting Taylor Swift’s 2009 MTV Video Music Awards acceptance
speech to shower praise on Beyoncé, Obama offered no mitigating analysis,
saying simply, “He’s a jackass.”

Obama called out racism in the criminal justice system. He met with Black
Lives Matter activists, and his Justice Department used consent decrees to
rein in police departments. For this, right-wing media often portrayed him
as a cop-hater; former Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke, a Fox News
fixture, called him “the most anti-cop president I have ever seen.” But the
president routinely extolled law enforcement, including at the 2015
convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, when he
said: “I reject any narrative that seeks to divide police and communities
that they serve. I reject a story line that says when it comes to public
safety, there’s an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ ” After George Zimmerman’s acquittal,
Obama — who said that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago” —
defended the system, saying “we are a nation of laws, and a jury has
spoken.”

For most of his presidency, Obama governed with a Republican Congress
dedicated to preventing his reelection and thwarting his agenda. Most
efforts entailed compromise. Still, he made bargains that the rhetoric of
current Democratic candidates would seem to foreclose. In 2010, Obama and
Republicans traded a two-year extension of former president George W.
Bush’s tax cuts, along with a payroll tax holiday and an extension of
unemployment benefits, that paved the way for the repeal of “don’t ask,
don’t tell.” He later agreed to the Budget Control Act of 2011, known as
“sequestration,” which brought down year-to-year deficits by slashing
federal spending in exchange for GOP votes to raise the debt ceiling.

Obama was a believer in big government, but his views showed many
similarities to those of Republican presidents like Theodore Roosevelt, who
fought corporate monopolies and later led the Progressive Party; Dwight D.
Eisenhower, who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Federal Aid
Highway Act, creating the interstate highway system; and establishment
archetype George H.W. Bush, a veteran of Congress, the United Nations and
the CIA who broke his “no new taxes” pledge, rescued savings and loans, and
declared an import ban on semiautomatic rifles.

Obama did advance priorities that progressives cheered: He tripled the
number of women on the Supreme Court. He announced rules imposing limits on
oil and gas emissions and an aggressive plan limiting coal-fired power
plant emissions. He supported anti-discrimination protections for LGBT
employees and introduced rules that protected some young undocumented
immigrants from deportation. (He achieved many of these policies through
executive fiat, meaning they could be — or have already been — easily
reversed.) But none of these changes revolutionized governance or
structurally reordered American life. None of them were meant to.

The difficulty Democratic candidates have in grappling with Obama reflects
the dissonance he’s generated for a decade: The center-left adores him, but
to the far left, he’s a sellout. He’s being rethought on the center-right,
but he remains the bete noire of the far right, which morphed from the
(putatively) government-hating tea party wing to a strongman-loving core.

It’s largely due to an enduring misunderstanding of what Obama represented.
Notwithstanding the “Change we can believe in” slogan that propelled his
rise, his aim was never to turn things upside down. Favoring “the familiar
to the unknown,” as Oakeshott wrote, was Obama’s disposition and also his
political project: expanding traditional priorities — the familiar American
Dream, not a reconceived one — to Americans for whom they had been denied.
That meant building, gradually and at times almost reverently, on his
predecessors’ foundation.

That has forced Democrats to sort out who they are — and how to fuse
Obama’s appeal with an agenda that reaches further than he ever tried, or
intended, to go.

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