Obama's Constitution: the passive virtues writ large.

AuthorEpstein, Richard A.
PositionSymposium: Conservative and Libertarian Reactions to the Obama Administration

THE FADING OBAMA MYSTIQUE

There is little doubt today about Barack Obama's political orientation. He is a man of the Left. Yet in the fall of 2008, during the height of the Presidential Election, there were endless debates as to whether Obama counted as a political moderate who understood that it was necessary to govern from the center or whether he a strong left-of-center politician who had mastered the lesson that radical politicians had to present themselves in a way that went against type. The standard political economy story that had some currency at the time was that he would turn out to be a moderate on the grounds that all presidential nominees move to court the median voter. That impression was reinforced by his choice of advisors, many of whom like Lawrence Summers, were retooled Clintonites who were thought to be on the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. And most powerfully, that image was reinforced by his evident rhetorical elegance, his nice blue ties and his calm demeanor. Taken together, his presentation of self was an effective means to disarm those critics who insisted that his politics put him, as his voting record suggested, to the left of center of the American legal system.

It is this studied ambiguity that makes Obama so hard to read. It is instructive that in the fall of 2008 many people asked whether Obama counted as a socialist--a question that needed (and still needs) a nuanced answer. Obama did not, and does not believe, in the government ownership over the means of production. What he believes in is the extensive regulation by government of the private firms that are responsible for production, which may be achieved by any and all methods that are available to a President and the Congress: taxes, mandates, regulations, subsidies. The hard question is just how far he is prepared to push on these levers of government power. Well, that debate is over. As one centrist democrat put it to me, ruefully, "we were both wrong. Obama is surely to the left of where I thought he would be. But then again he is to the left of where you thought he would be as well." I am not quite sure that the last half of this observation is true, but without question he has sought to move the ratio of public to private expenditures and influence harder and faster on more issues than any president in recent years. He is in favor of market liberalization on issues like medical marijuana and stem cell research, but otherwise his mindset is quite clear. The defects that we have in the current situation all stem from too little government regulation not from too much. He sees the health care system as one in which private insurance markets have failed; the global warming issue as one in which massive restrictions on emissions are needed; the labor markets as suffering from declining real income because of a want of effective union organization; financial markets as failing because of greedy bankers and weak and divided oversight. And so on down the line.

Sadly his rhetoric has become more strident and less coherent since the Democratic Party lost the Senate seat in Massachusetts, in what counts as one of the most stunning reversals in political fortune ever in the United States. Rather than mend his ways, bashing the banks has become the current fixation, in the hope that the antagonism toward Wall Street will allow him to pick up Republican support for showing that he is made of sterner stuff, even if that means saddling the banks with a set of punitive regulations and taxes, which will only further set back the economy.

But, it will be asked, how deep are his convictions? On this point, the issue is complicated to say the least. It is common knowledge today that Obama now faces deep resentment from the left-wing of the Democratic Party that is, if anything, further to the left than he is. The issue, which at one time was confined to blogs on the Left, has now become grist for the mainstream press. To many of these people he is an ineffective compromiser, under the unprincipled spell of Rahm Emanuel, who does not see the imperative need to take over the healthcare system root and branch and, for all I know, nationalize the banks as well. Obama's realist side makes one appreciate just how difficult it is to govern from the center, when the dispersion of political sentiment in the nation are greater than they have ever been. My own sense is that Obama does not disagree in principle with these critiques, but senses, however vaguely, that he cannot possibly win reelection if he caters to exclusively his own political base. So his strategy has been to engage in a go-slow attitude that seeks to buy off some of his major opponents--the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry--with well-timed, but inelegant compromises. For the purists in his party, that willingness of compromise with the devil counts as a form of political treason. For a working politician, it counts as first step in political survival.

Yet note that this is a debate about tactics, and not about principles. There is a question of whether Obama has any principles. To the response that he does not, I can only say that I think that his political instincts are deep, and are consistent with the arc of his life. The origins of his belief system date back long before he took up golf. His views I think were formed during his college and law school years. They were strengthened by his years in Chicago, where Obama never worked in any trade or business, but was always a political organizer who learned to form, when appropriate, alliances with business figures. His stint at the University of Chicago Law School only strengthened his earlier tendencies. Obama taught one portion of constitutional law (race, due process and equal protection) for many years. His...

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