Obama's promise of a new majority, and the question it prompts
By Robin Toner
Sunday, March 23, 2008
WASHINGTON: At the core of Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars, and build a new governing majority.
To achieve the change the country wants, he says, "we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done."
It is a promise that convinced 67 percent of all registered voters in the last New York Times/CBS News Poll, in late February, that Obama "would be the kind of president who would be able to unify the country" - far more than those who identified his Democratic rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, or the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, that way.
But this promise leads, inevitably, to a question: Can such a majority be built and led by Obama, whose voting record was, by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year?
Also, and more immediately, if Obama wins the Democratic nomination, how will his promise of a new and less polarized type of politics fare against the Republican attacks that since the 1980s have portrayed Democrats as far out of step with the country's values?
Obama, in an interview, said that "a lot of these old labels don't apply anymore."
He said he was a progressive and a pragmatist, eager to tackle the big issues like health care and convinced that the Democrats could rally independents and disaffected Republicans to their agenda.
Only then, he said, could the party achieve what it has so rarely won in modern presidential elections - a mandate to do big things.
"Senator Clinton's argument in this campaign has really been that you can't change the electoral map," he said. "That it's a static map and we are inalterably divided, so we've got to eke out a victory and then try to govern more competently than George Bush has.
"My argument is that if that's what we're settling for, after seven or eight years of disastrous policies on the part of the Bush administration, then we're not going to deliver on the big changes that are needed."
Clinton has worked hard in the Senate to moderate her liberal image and forge working relationships with Republicans. But with her husband's tumultuous presidency still fresh in some voters' minds, she is often cast in this election as the Democrat who would try to achieve her ends by beating the Republicans at the same hyperpartisan competition that has dominated Washington for years.
Obama's rise has been built in part on the idea that he represents a break with the established identities that have defined many of the nation's divisions. To many, he embodies a promise to bridge black and white, old and young, rich and poor - and Democrats, Republicans and independents.
Even so, Obama does not come to the campaign with a reputation as one of the accommodating bridge-builders in the Senate. His voting record, albeit short, is to the left; the National Journal declared it the most liberal of 2007. Congressional Quarterly said he voted with his party 97 percent of the time on party-line votes that year.
Obama has been endorsed by advocacy groups like MoveOn.org that are anathema to Republicans on Capitol Hill. And some of his strongest supporters are activists at the "net-roots" who have clamored for less accommodation across party lines.
Obama says he understands the criticism of his voting record, but argues that the Senate is so ideologically polarized it is hard not to end up on one side or the other.
"The only votes that come up are votes that are purposely designed to divide people," he said. "It's true that if I'm presented with a series of votes like that, I'm more likely to fall left of center than right of center. But as president, I would be setting the terms of debate."
Obama seems to be promising less a split-the-difference centrism than an ability to harness the support of all those voters who yearn for something new.
In many ways, his campaign is challenging the fundamental political premise that has prevailed in Washington for more than a generation: that any majority coalition must be centrist, if not center-right.
Bill Clinton ran in 1992 as a candidate willing to break with liberal orthodoxy on many issues, including crime and welfare, and eager to move the party - which had lost five of the six previous presidential elections - to the middle. His "New Democrats" assumed a certain level of conservatism among voters.
Obama and his allies are basing his campaign on another bet: that the right-leaning political landscape Bill Clinton confronted has changed. Several major Democratic strategists, and outside analysts as well, argue that the country has shifted to the left because of the Iraq war, the economy and eight years of President George W. Bush; that it has become open to a new progressive majority and disillusioned with a generation of conservatism.
Obama said: "What I'm certain about is that people are disenchanted with a highly ideological Republican Party that believes tax cuts are the answer to every problem, and lack of regulation and oversight is always going to generate economic growth, and unilateral intervention around the world is the best approach to foreign policy. So there's no doubt the pendulum is swinging."
Still, he added, "The Democrats have to seize this opportunity by showing people in very practical terms how a different set of policies can deliver solutions that will actually make a difference in their lives. I think the jury is still out right now."
Mark Penn, chief strategist for Hillary Clinton, said that Obama's Senate career did not back up his promise to forge a new governing coalition across party lines.
"It's a great promise," Penn said. "But are the actions consistent with the words? I don't see it."
"That's the fundamental issue," he added. "It's not, 'Don't we want to have everyone unified and moving together on things like health care for all?' but who has the record of working to do that in Washington?"
But many of Obama's supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured progressive era in which progressives (few have returned to the word liberal) make no apologies about their goals - universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans - and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them.
Clinton, on the other hand, often displays the wariness of Democrats who came of political age in the Reagan glory days, when the Democratic Party was constantly on the defensive. As The New Republic recently put it, "Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority."
Simon Rosenberg, who leads the New Democrat Network and is currently unaligned in the Democratic contest, argues, "My basic belief is the generation-long era of political domination, the ascendancy of conservative politics, is at an end, and Obama has captured more than anyone else the opportunity of this era." He added: "It's very hard to put labels on him. He's building his own sandbox."
Obama, in fact, had the support of 64 percent of independents in the last New York Times/CBS News Poll. But can that transpartisan appeal be sustained? He has only begun to take some hard political hits - from the Clinton campaign, from conservative commentators and radio hosts, and from Senator John McCain's campaign. The recent flare-up about his pastor's racial views was one example. And Republicans are just starting up their attacks.
"Nobody's yet taken him on as a liberal," said Andrew Kohut, who leads the Pew Research Center. "But McCain will."
So far, Republicans give every indication of planning to portray Obama as a big-government liberal out of touch with American values and unprepared to be commander in chief.
"When you're rated by National Journal as to the left of Ted Kennedy and Bernie Sanders, that's going to be difficult to explain," said Danny Diaz , a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.
But Democrats supporting Obama argue that the voters have moved beyond those ideological attacks.
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