Tripwires and Obama's Night-Vision Goggles

A recent article in The New Yorker has it that Barack Obama's administration betokens "The New Liberalism" that is abroad in the land. George Packer writes that Obama's presidency could be as momentous for today's liberals as that of FDR, first elected in 1932, was for progressives of an earlier era.

After a good start, however, the article bogs down in a morass of concern over whether Obama is more of a "post-partisan" than he is a progressive. For example, as Packer points out, even as, in one of the televised debates with his rival John McCain, Obama spoke positively about a woman's right to choose an abortion, he quickly modulated his strong rhetoric into a stated desire to seek "common ground" and to further abortion alternatives where possible. Pro-choice liberals, as a result, aren't quite sure of the extent to which President Obama will stand with them when the chips are down. They question, say, whether he will be too post-partisan to sign the pending “Freedom of Choice Act” (FOCA), which if passed would (according to this Web page)

prevent all governmental bodies at all levels from being able to “deny or interfere with a woman’s right to choose” or “discriminate” against the exercise of this right “in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services or information.”

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, can't answer the Obama-on-FOCA question. But I do take the point of the liberal Mr. Packer when he says that, in contradistinction to hot-button issues like abortion, where Obama has sometimes waffled,

On questions of social welfare—jobs, income, health care, energy—which don’t immediately provoke a battle over irreconcilable values, [Obama] has given every indication of favoring activist government.

I don't think the post-partisan Obama is really in any way different from the progressive Obama, as in the question on everyone's lips, "Which Obama will show up on Inauguration Day, the progressive or the post-partisan?" Rather, the post-partisan/new-liberal Obama is the progressive/old-style-liberal Obama.

It all has to do with tripwires. The conservative columnist Michael Gerson wrote in this piece for The Washington Post that there are three issue areas where Obama needs to tread carefully in order to avoid triggering a showdown with conservatives. Gerson's three tripwire issues concern the broad field of abortion and bioethics; the Fairness Doctrine (which, if re-imposed, would force radio stations to balance Rush Limbaugh with equal time for liberal talk-shows); and "card check" union elections (which if permitted by federal law would mean workers voting on union representation might no longer cast secret ballots).

I don't know how apt or complete Mr. Gerson's tripwire list is for Obama, but his basic concept is key. Obama impresses me as a man who has a unique set of night-vision goggles that let him see where the tripwires are in the political minefield. It is for this reason that he is able to be "post-partisan": he carefully avoids the deadly tripwires even as he discerns real opportunities to move the progressive football forward toward the end zone.


Today, these opportunities cluster around, per Mr. Packer, "questions of social welfare—jobs, income, health care, energy" — to which I would add, crucially, the "green revolution" that I think will be the ultimate centerpiece of Obama's presidential legacy.

Post columnist E. J. Dionne wrote recently in "Bold Is Good" that "you don't have to be 'far left' to be bold." Obama, says the liberal Mr. Dionne, should take a page from the Ronald Reagan post-1980 playbook and be unafraid to call for meaningful progressive steps (Reagan's were, of course, conservative) early in his tenure. Per Dionne, "health care, energy, tax reform and education ... are issues on which Obama should not be afraid to be audacious."

They are so, I would say, to the extent that, though they will provoke pro-forma dissent from the GOP side of the Capitol aisle, they do not have outright tripwires associated with them that would surely launch us backward into a "pre-post-partisan" shouting match, à la the mid-1990s.

Obama, says the Packer article in The New Yorker, wants very much to avoid that sort of thing as being the opposite of pragmatic. No one ever wins an argument that is based on differences in core principles and values, Obama seemingly realizes.

A case in point: Those who say abortion is tantamount to murder have a different set of core assumptions about what is true and what is false about fetal life than I and other pro-choice thinkers uphold. Pro-choice people such as I think fetal life is not yet fully-formed human life ... and so women should have the right to choose. We think it is more important to ensure that a baby, if born, is wanted and loved than that all fetuses are carried to term. Pro-life folks, obviously, disagree ... and Barack Obama would surely like to avoid all aspects of the dispute that are sterile and unproductive and cannot underpin some kind of pragmatic change for the better!

It is by virtue of his unique night-vision goggles that he can be expected avoid a sterile and unproductive blundering into such a tripwire of the old-style culture war. I do not look for Mr. Obama to make a Clintonesque gays-in-the-military mistake in his first days in office.

Red Counties, Blue Counties

Today's Washington Post has a pair of maps breaking down the Obama-vs.-McCain voting for president on a county-by-county basis across the nation. The counties that gave a majority of their votes to now-president-elect Barack Obama are shown in blue on one map of the pair, while those that favored Senator John McCain in this week's presidential election are in red on the other.

Here is a snapshot of a similar map online. Click on it to see the full-sized interactive map, from which you then can bring up other versions of the winners-by-county map as well:


In the maps, counties that went overwhelmingly for one candidate or the other are shown with a three-dimensional elevation the height of which is proportional to the candidate's margin of victory, in number of votes, in that county.

In addition, on both maps in the print edition the counties that switched their favored party in 2008 compared with 2004 are shown in gold. (In the online map, the flipped counties are not identified as such.) Surprisingly few counties switched: McCain flipped just 50 counties that had supported Kerry in '04, largely in a loose chain extending from Appalachia across the Upper Southland into Texas; Obama flipped some 286 counties that had gone for Bush in '04, mostly in the Upper Midwest, in African American-rich parts of the South, and here and there in the vast American West.

The huge majority of America's counties voted for McCain in '08, just as they had voted for Bush in '04, and the McCain 2008 map is about as close to being solid red as was the Bush map in '04.

Only a minority of the nation's counties voted majority-Obama in '08. His blue counties (the ones which Kerry also won in 2004) are heavily clustered in New England and the Northeast; in the upper Midwest, in economically distressed states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa; across the old Confederacy in areas in which I assume African-American voters predominate; in the heavily black Mississippi Delta in particular; in the Southwest, where many Hispanic and Native American voters cluster; and along the Pacific Coast in California, Oregon, and Washington State, where ethnically diverse populations include many Asians, Latinos, and blacks.

On the blue-county Obama map, however, there are several prepossessingly tall, or at least medium-sized, voter-margin spikes in large urban areas such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta, and the major cities of Florida and along the East Coast. By contrast, the "tallest" jurisdictions McCain could claim victory this year in are relatively puny in elevation, reflecting smaller numerical margins of victory: Fort Worth, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and several other mid-size cities cast more votes for McCain than Obama.

My interpretation: where the bulk of the populace is white, without a college education, not rich but typically not poor, and largely middle-aged or older, McCain won. That demographic is a shrinking one today, though, and where it is not predominant, Obama won.


How solid the red is on the McCain map is worrisome to yours truly, oldstyleliberal, an ardent Obama supporter. Ditto, how sparse and discontiguous the blue of the Obama map is. We heard a lot of talk during the campaign about healing the political divide that has beset us since the 1960s. The two maps seem to show that that did not happen. The country segments just as sharply into blue and red swatches today as it did four years ago.

True, the fact that most of McCain's red counties are represented at "base elevation" on the map, not raised to show large voter margins, is encouraging; there may well have been sizable minorities of Obama voters in the red jurisdictions. Still, many of the McCain counties are probably so low in population that if McCain got every vote in them, they'd still look flat on the map. Small-town/rural America is by definition sparsely inhabited. (I'd like to see the same maps with elevations indicating percentage-of-vote margins rather than number-of-vote margins.)

Yet I'd have to say that, historically, small-town/rural America accounts for an outsized share of our uniquely American cultural experience — a share whose importance the vast, nearly solid red of McCain's America depicts quite accurately. Clearly, the folks that define a huge proportion of our land's cultural "footprint," once in the majority but a shrinking portion of our total population today, looked at Obama and found him wanting.

Obama's mixed-race background and African-American looks clearly didn't help him in the American Heartland, which is what I'll call the vast composite of red counties on the McCain map — even when they are far from the geographic middle of the U.S.A. Ditto, the president-elect's odd name for an American, and his seemingly rootless/possibly elitist cultural identity. (It boggled my mind how many people refused to believe that Obama wasn't a Christian/was secretly a Muslim, and that he was hiding a pro-terrorist agenda.)

The pundits are saying Obama's election augurs a "post-racial" America. I'd like to believe they're right, but the sheer geographic hugeness of McCain's red Heartland says they're being premature.


The aging, white, non-college-educated population was the one McCain picked running mate Sarah Palin to garner votes from. Palin's candidacy was also aimed at women who had supported Hillary Clinton over Obama in the Democratic primaries, and at the Republican "base" of confirmed conservatives, cultural and otherwise. (These three groups, of course, overlapped.) One reason the Palin strategy didn't work is that the Alaska governor turned out to carry a lot of baggage: her record in Alaska, her unguarded, untutored statements to the press, and so on. Obama supporters dug up a lot of ammunition and they didn't hesitate to fire it at her — endlessly, it seemed to oldstyleliberal — and many of the bullets struck home.

Still and all, I imagine that Palin firmed up a large number of votes for McCain in his red-county Heartland. They just weren't enough to propel him to electoral-college victory, for sheerly numerical, demographic reasons. With the possible exception of some Clinton supporters who may have peeled away from Palin when they twigged to her political feet of clay, I believe Palin's candidacy did its intended job very nicely.


But McCain's candidacy was cursed by the onset of the financial crisis. Had he somehow been able to sidestep that particular negative, I think he might have managed to keep Obama from flipping fully nine states (including North Carolina, if it remains in the Obama column) that went for Bush in '04. Yet I believe Obama would have eked out his victory anyway in the electoral college — though not necessarily in the popular vote.

A big part of the reason is demographics. Where there are lots of non-whites, where the white majority is highly educated, where voters skew young — in parts of the country outside the red-county McCain Heartland, that is — there were oodles of voters that didn't reliably vote old-style "values." For the highly "pragmatic" voters of these blue counties, the Washington Post points out, today's "family values" center around mainly education and health care, not abortion and gay rights.

Given the opportunity to single out conservative cultural issues one by one, though, a 2008 blue state such as California will (as we just saw) narrowly support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Because any presidential candidate's bag of promises is by definition a mixed, highly complex bag, a Barack Obama will win handily in California, even when some of his positions in and of themselves seem way too liberal to gain majority support in the state.


At a point in the not-too-distant future — or so we must all hope — "pragmatic" issues such as fears about the economy will evaporate as the economy gets more robust again. What then? Will Obama be able to cruise to victory in 2012, even if he does a fine job in his first term, or will too many of the 286 counties he flipped this year desert him as former Bush voters revert to their old-style cultural/values concerns?

I'm hoping, naturally, for a liberal efflorescence to take hold between now and 2012. If that happens, enough now-skeptical Americans would be swept up in an affirmative, unabashedly liberal, pro-big government mood to offset any deserters and return Obama to the Oval Office for a second term. But how can that happen?


Obama needs to change America's basic mindset in much the same way as JFK began to do in the early 1960s, before he was assassinated in '63. The best way for Obama to "do a JFK" is to do pretty much what JFK did, starting in his 1960 campaign: convince Americans that an agenda of progressive change is our best bulwark against future adversity.

Obama has indicated he'll call for an "Apollo program" to switch us to alternative, renewable forms of energy over a ten-year period ... exactly as Kennedy called for putting an American on the moon by the end of his own presidential decade.

We had to beat the Soviets into space, Kennedy said, to show the world we were still a great country. Meanwhile, we had to back the symbolism of his space initiative by solving our very real problems at home: poverty, educational shortfalls, medical care that "the aged" couldn't afford, racial inequality. Those were issues of grit and substance. But Kennedy's space program was more than just symbolic; it jumpstarted a high-tech economy we have all benefited from ever since.

Obama understands that an "Apollo program" for energy will likewise have all sorts of benefits. Admittedly, it will take a huge monetary investment to go green. That money will have to come first from Uncle Sam, just as the costs of the space program were borne by taxpayers. But exactly as the space program did, America's "green revolution," once it gets under way, will pay large dividends. It will stimulate economic growth and foster job creation. It will break our dependence on foreign oil, and it will combat global warming. Overall, it will create a new sense of pride in our country ... and that can translate into affirmative support for a 21st-century liberal agenda, à la Barack Obama.