In Response to Froggoddess; or, Why I'm Voting for Obama on Tuesday
I started posting this as a comment to Frog, and decided I actually need to post it publicly.
I usually agree with Paul Krugman. In this case, though, I think he's extremely wrong.
This democratic nomination, and this election, are not about policy.
Krugman is a policy wonk; I have friends who are politics wonks. The line against Obama goes: He's wishy-washy, namby-pamby, gives ground to the right on policy and isn't strong enough to stand up to their attack machine. In short: Politics must be bitterly partisan, at least right now. We can put that whole hope thing off until later.
A couple of points: Nobody's concrete policies as they currently exist will see the light of day. There'll be a whole bunch of legislative sausage-making before health care policy becomes law. Foreign policy will be reactive to the global situation in a year, which nobody has any idea about (except that it'll be just another iteration of decaying American empire). The current economic crisis will either be gone or will be deeper; either way, specific proposals about how to stimulate the economy will be hugely out of date.
Which means that, rather than deal with policy positions, you need to deal with (1) styles of decision making; and (2) styles of politicking.
I personally find Obama's decision-making style to be more compelling than Clinton's. That we can have a debate about. I find her to be technocratic, whereas Obama seems to me to be vaguer. Ultimately, the President is not a technocrat. If we were performing job interviews for the director of FEMA or the Secretary of State, I'd be more about competence and detail than "the vision thing." But the Presidency is not about technical details, as best I can tell. Orienting decision making towards larger concerns, leaving fields for action productively underdefined in order to magnetize policy in a certain direction, leaving the details to be worked out later? That's my kind of thought process for the human in the oval office.
(2) is connected, but a somewhat independent variable. Obama's politicking is incredible. I have a friend who hate his "unity schtick," because he's not partisan enough, but support him on policy. But in fact, his speechifying is the reason, the only reason, to really support him. Without any meaningful differences between Clinton and Obama (and I maintain that there aren't any on the level of generality that's relevant to a presidential election), Obama's ability to galvanize public emotion is the most important aspect of his candidacy.
Now, I've talked before on the blog about political emotion. It's become a truism that politics are emotional. For a lot of people, that's a bad thing. To some extent, people's negative reactions to Obama's remarkable emotional resonance (with a certain group of people) is influenced by the position that politics should be about rational policy debate, &c. (The extreme version of this is concluded by a reference to Hitler.)
That doesn't take into account the content of the emotion that's galvanizing people. For the first time in my lifetime, a politician has managed to magnetize the left's aspirational political emotions. This has required being "vague." Hope, or any political emotion for that matter, has to be oriented towards something (here, a veritable greatest hits of a kind of milquetoast Democratic Party politics [with the exception of foreign policy, which is a big exception]--I mean, hell, Hillary Clinton is on board for everything). But the hope also has to be open enough for people to be able to project themselves into it. What Obama manages to open up in the field of the public is a field where people can recognize themselves not only in a series of policy positions, but in their ardor for social and political change.
For the first time in my life, a candidate has given us on the left permission to feel passionately a positive political emotion; we are finally authorized to feel wholly and humanly political again.
Hillary Clinton has recycled Mario Cuomo's nostrum that (paraphrasing) one campaigns in poetry and one governs in prose. That may be the case. Sausages must be made. But to discount the role of political emotion in the art of governance (even to acknowledge it in the art of campaigning) misunderstands the fact that so much of what GWB has been able to accomplish (if I may abuse a word) has rested on a foundation of fear. The dominant political affect of the Bush years has been, of course, fear. For a while I thought that the Democrats only needed to run on a platform of competence to win--a dominant of political neutrality, technocracy.
But Obama? I didn't really get it through my head that something more compelling than mere competence (read: experience, although I hate that misrepresentation of the facts) would be in the offing this election season. For the first time in my life, Obama has been able to generate a political mood of hope. If he makes it into office, he'll need the politicking skills to back that up, the material improvements to justify and underwrite that hope. But lordy, to act as if that hope doesn't influence his ability to get shit done is just plain stupid. Sausages will still be made, and they won't be gorgeous cuts of filet (to overuse a metaphor). But if Obama's hope is half as powerful as Bush's fear, a whole lot more will go on in Washington in 2009 than the partisan acrimony that Hillary Clinton promises to give us.
(Si se puede.)
I usually agree with Paul Krugman. In this case, though, I think he's extremely wrong.
This democratic nomination, and this election, are not about policy.
Krugman is a policy wonk; I have friends who are politics wonks. The line against Obama goes: He's wishy-washy, namby-pamby, gives ground to the right on policy and isn't strong enough to stand up to their attack machine. In short: Politics must be bitterly partisan, at least right now. We can put that whole hope thing off until later.
A couple of points: Nobody's concrete policies as they currently exist will see the light of day. There'll be a whole bunch of legislative sausage-making before health care policy becomes law. Foreign policy will be reactive to the global situation in a year, which nobody has any idea about (except that it'll be just another iteration of decaying American empire). The current economic crisis will either be gone or will be deeper; either way, specific proposals about how to stimulate the economy will be hugely out of date.
Which means that, rather than deal with policy positions, you need to deal with (1) styles of decision making; and (2) styles of politicking.
I personally find Obama's decision-making style to be more compelling than Clinton's. That we can have a debate about. I find her to be technocratic, whereas Obama seems to me to be vaguer. Ultimately, the President is not a technocrat. If we were performing job interviews for the director of FEMA or the Secretary of State, I'd be more about competence and detail than "the vision thing." But the Presidency is not about technical details, as best I can tell. Orienting decision making towards larger concerns, leaving fields for action productively underdefined in order to magnetize policy in a certain direction, leaving the details to be worked out later? That's my kind of thought process for the human in the oval office.
(2) is connected, but a somewhat independent variable. Obama's politicking is incredible. I have a friend who hate his "unity schtick," because he's not partisan enough, but support him on policy. But in fact, his speechifying is the reason, the only reason, to really support him. Without any meaningful differences between Clinton and Obama (and I maintain that there aren't any on the level of generality that's relevant to a presidential election), Obama's ability to galvanize public emotion is the most important aspect of his candidacy.
Now, I've talked before on the blog about political emotion. It's become a truism that politics are emotional. For a lot of people, that's a bad thing. To some extent, people's negative reactions to Obama's remarkable emotional resonance (with a certain group of people) is influenced by the position that politics should be about rational policy debate, &c. (The extreme version of this is concluded by a reference to Hitler.)
That doesn't take into account the content of the emotion that's galvanizing people. For the first time in my lifetime, a politician has managed to magnetize the left's aspirational political emotions. This has required being "vague." Hope, or any political emotion for that matter, has to be oriented towards something (here, a veritable greatest hits of a kind of milquetoast Democratic Party politics [with the exception of foreign policy, which is a big exception]--I mean, hell, Hillary Clinton is on board for everything). But the hope also has to be open enough for people to be able to project themselves into it. What Obama manages to open up in the field of the public is a field where people can recognize themselves not only in a series of policy positions, but in their ardor for social and political change.
For the first time in my life, a candidate has given us on the left permission to feel passionately a positive political emotion; we are finally authorized to feel wholly and humanly political again.
Hillary Clinton has recycled Mario Cuomo's nostrum that (paraphrasing) one campaigns in poetry and one governs in prose. That may be the case. Sausages must be made. But to discount the role of political emotion in the art of governance (even to acknowledge it in the art of campaigning) misunderstands the fact that so much of what GWB has been able to accomplish (if I may abuse a word) has rested on a foundation of fear. The dominant political affect of the Bush years has been, of course, fear. For a while I thought that the Democrats only needed to run on a platform of competence to win--a dominant of political neutrality, technocracy.
But Obama? I didn't really get it through my head that something more compelling than mere competence (read: experience, although I hate that misrepresentation of the facts) would be in the offing this election season. For the first time in my life, Obama has been able to generate a political mood of hope. If he makes it into office, he'll need the politicking skills to back that up, the material improvements to justify and underwrite that hope. But lordy, to act as if that hope doesn't influence his ability to get shit done is just plain stupid. Sausages will still be made, and they won't be gorgeous cuts of filet (to overuse a metaphor). But if Obama's hope is half as powerful as Bush's fear, a whole lot more will go on in Washington in 2009 than the partisan acrimony that Hillary Clinton promises to give us.
(Si se puede.)