By Greg Sargent - December 19, 2008, 2:25PM
Glenn Greenwald has an
interesting post about the Rick Warren mess, which he uses as a jumping off point to argue that Barack Obama's "new" politics isn't really new at all.
Greenwald's basic point is that Obama's efforts to placate the right by picking Warren -- and the effort to get the left to scream that pundits have claimed was behind the decision -- isn't really different from the bait-the-left politics that Democrats have practiced for decades now. And they simply haven't worked.
As proof, he points out that Bill Clinton all but perfected the art of baiting the left and throwing cultural bones to the right, and all he got to show for it from Republicans was "hatred so undiluted that it led to endless investigations" and "accusations whose ugliness was boundless."
That's true. But there is an important way that Obama's politics is new, and the landscape is different from 1992 in key ways that give him an opening to use his own brand of politics to disarm the right and potentially clear the way for big progressive achievements.
Warning: I'm making this case at some length.
As this blog argued recently, one thing Obama's victory represented was a potential death blow to the 1960s-rooted cultural politics that has held sway for the last four decades of the 20th Century. It's telling that Obama defeated both of the leading practitioners of this brand of politics -- the Clinton machine, and the Rovians who hijacked the McCain campaign --
by explicitly running against politics as they practiced it.
Obama won the primary, and in the general election he succeeded in disarming the power of the right's narratives by employing not just a standard claim that he's above partisanship, but by making a new political argument: Only someone who had not gotten caught up in the cultural and political wars of the 1960s could achieve the sort of transformation of our politics that this historical moment demands.
It's true that in a narrow sense, efforts to placate the right by picking Warren doesn't represent a "new" politics, as Greenwald says. But the Warren mess aside, Obama is and has been making a larger argument than simply saying that partisanship is bad and that we need to unify.
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