Obama is probably several steps leagues ahead of all of us. Some are falling way back, weeping in frustration, declaring that they voted for him and he's about to betray us all. Others are struggling to keep up. Mark Schmitt may be closer to the truth of Barack Obama and his political smarts than most of us. Keep in mind Obama's baptism by fire in Chicago politics.
His appeal to unity is not as soft or aloof as it may seem. What's
most interesting about it is that he's calling for an engagement with
ideological conservatism itself, rather than with powerful interests.
There's a real difference between calling for bipartisanship, as
Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain do, and calling for a mutual
attempt to understand and respect the conservative worldview, as Obama
does in The Audacity of Hope. At a time when conservatism is
discredited, as a result of its alliance with the least-principled gang
ever, Obama is calling it out and attempting to separate it from the
narrow economic interests it has served. This is not just a standard
accommodation to power and interest; it's an attempt to reground
politics on questions of first principle -- in a way that will end to
liberalism's advantage. And if the rules of the primary have changed,
it's a strategy that just might work as well in the primaries as in the
general election, avoiding that awkward turn in March or April that the
standard rules require.
A call for unity and common ground can be a mark of naïvete about
power or the grasping last bid of a failing candidate. But it can also
be a profoundly smart political act, one very conscious of power,
defining the scope of conflict in a way that defines us broadly and them
narrowly. I'm willing to bet that an old Chicago community organizer
has no naïvete about power and understands exactly why the rules have
to change.
Schmitt writes that Obama is taking on "an engagement with
ideological conservatism itself, rather than with powerful interests." I wonder whether in fact he's getting between conservatives and the powerful interests they serve. Then there's something significantly different about Obama's source of support -- an extraordinarily powerful and daunting (for conservatives) source of support. Al Giordano puts his finger on it:
Obama can do this in a way that prior presidents in the age of
expensive television advertising could not do precisely because his
campaign supporters established a primacy of small donors making him
not dependent on corporate sector contributions for his reelection
campaign in 2012. He is in a position of unprecedented strength, as
long as his small donors continue to see his presidency as important to
them. He can afford to blow off the "influence donor" machines without
harming his political prospects.
Now, as Giordano says, it's about time for Democratic members of Congress to blow off influence donor machines in favor of crowds of small donors.
