In recent days, in response to the disappointing health care and climate change initiatives, several commentators have described Obama as a “pragmatist.” Ross Douthat, for instance, calls him “a doctrinaire liberal,” but one “who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf.” According to Ryan Lizza, “every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.” For David Axelrod, referring to health care, “The president wasn’t after a Pyrrhic victory — he wasn’t into symbolism. The president is after solving a problem that has bedeviled a country and countless families for generations.”

At first glance these judgments seem indisputable, but there is one exception, one moment in which Obama did not accommodate himself to existing institutions, did not take half a loaf, but rather ventured boldly and imaginatively forth in what he himself called an “improbable” adventure. This moment, of course, was his campaign in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries. When he entered, Hillary Clinton was the existing institution to which Obama should have but didn’t accommodate. Her success, after all, had already been crowned by her Campaign Manager, and by the media, as “inevitable.” Obama, by contrast, had two years as a junior Senator with no achievements to his credit. A young man in his forties, had he been a pragmatist, Obama would have run a respectable campaign, supported Hillary after his defeat, and waited his turn for the presidential nomination, which most likely would have eventually come.

How are we to judge an individual who accepts half a loaf, a quarter loaf, a sixteenth loaf, or even a mere fig leaf when it comes to the health of his fellow citizens or the environment of the globe, but who goes all out, enlisting others, especially young people, to secure a huge personal victory? I believe such a person is better described as an opportunist than as a pragmatist. Obviously, a person like that knows how to take chances but only takes them for his own self-advancement and not for more general goals.

Why does this matter? Is understanding Obama’s character important in guiding us through these parlous times? Not really. What is important is to understand how Obama gained his victory. He won because the country was in a true crisis — globally, economically, and in terms of its own self-respect — and it was the left wing of the Democratic Party that best grasped that crisis. Precisely because that wing is NOT pragmatic, it saw that a better America was possible. Hillary Clinton’s scorn for that left, as shown by her refusal to apologize for her vote on Iraq, was the tip of the iceberg, beneath which lay decades of corruption. Her scorn gave Obama his opening. His genius lay in seizing that opening by refusing to run against Bush’s presidency alone, but rather by running against the Clinton years as well. How quixotic! How unpragmatic! That Obama, upon receiving the nomination, immediately turned toward pandering to the right, and then, as president, to backroom deals, politics as usual, corporate finagling, and war does not prove that “pragmatism” is the only viable politics. Rather it shows that the crisis that brought Obama to power remains unaddressed, and that the need for a Left is as strong as ever.


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