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.