Sunday, July 06, 2008
Opinion

Moving to the middle is for losers

 

By Arianna Huffington

Last Friday afternoon, the guests taking part in Sunday's roundtable discussion on "This Week" had a pre-show call with George Stephanopoulos. One of the topics he raised was Obama's perceived move to the center, and what it means. Thus began my weekend obsession. If you were within shouting distance of me, odds are we talked about it. I talked about it over lunch with HuffPost's D.C. team, over dinner with friends, with the doorman at the hotel and with the driver on the way to the airport.

Running to the middle in an attempt to attract undecided swing voters didn't work for Al Gore in 2000. It didn't work for John Kerry in 2004. And it didn't work when Mark Penn (obsessed with his "microtrends" and missing the megatrend) convinced Hillary Clinton to do it in 2008.
This is how David Axelrod put it at the end of February, contrasting the tired Washington model of "I'll do these things for you" with Obama's "Let's do these things together": "This has been the premise of Barack's politics all his life, going back to his days as a community organizer," Axelrod told me. "He has really lived and breathed it, which is why it comes across so authentically. Of course, the time also has to be right for the man and the moment to come together. And, after all the country has been through over the last seven years, the times are definitely right for the message that the only way to get real change is to activate the American people to demand it."
Throughout the primary, Obama referred to himself as an "unlikely candidate." Which he certainly was—and still is. And one of the things that turned him from "unlikely" upstart to presidential frontrunner is his ability to expand the electorate by convincing unlikely voters—some of the 83 million eligible voters who didn't turn out in 2004—to engage in the system.

So why start playing to the political fence sitters—staking out newly nuanced positions on FISA, gun control laws, expansion of the death penalty, and NAFTA?

In an interview with Nina Easton in Fortune Magazine, Obama was asked about having called NAFTA "a big mistake" and "devastating." Obama's reply: "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified."

Overheated? So when he was campaigning in the Midwest, many parts of which have been, yes, devastated by economic changes since the passage of NAFTA, and he pledged to make use of a six-month opt-out clause in the trade agreement, that was "overheated"? Or was that one "amplified"?

Because if that's the case, it would be helpful going forward if Obama would let us know which of his powerful rhetoric is "overheated" and/or "amplified," so voters will know not to get their hopes too high.

"What's stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics-- the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems. ... The time for that politics is over. It's time to turn the page."
That was Barack Obama in February of 2007, announcing his run for the White House. "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington," he said that day, "but I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change."

Was that just "overheated and amplified" rhetoric?

The Obama brand has always been about inspiration, a new kind of politics, the audacity of hope, and "change we can believe in." I like that brand. More importantly, voters—especially unlikely voters—like that brand.

Pulling it off the shelf and replacing it with a political product geared to pleasing America's vacillating swing voters—the ones who will be most susceptible to the fear-mongering avalanche that has already begin—would be a fatal blunder.

Realpolitik is one thing. Realstupidpolitik is quite another. SP