I Guess I'm with the Kids: Or, More Potificating on Politics

I've noted before that I think that Obama's aiming of his rhetoric to a wider audience than hard-core primary voters is a pretty smart one, in the larger sense of being able to develop a single, simple message that he can seamlessly transition into a general election. The peril of this strategy, of course, is that he risks alienating the primary voters he needs to persuade in order to actually be the Democratic candidate in the general election.

He causes concern among progressives with his rhetoric of change and compromise and for not positioning himself as a fighter against Republicans. He seems too moderate, too conciliatory, too sympathetic to perpetuating Republican themes and myths. This week, he made some nods toward Reagan's ability to harness a historical moment, a change in the public mood, and effect a political realignment:

I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I mean, I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the 60's and the 70's and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating and he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is, people wanted clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamic and entrepreneurship that had been missing, alright? I think Kennedy, twenty years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times.

We can dislike Reagan for everything he did and stood for, lament the sunny face he put on harsh policies, and detest the concerted attempts to cement his image among the halls of great presidents, but Obama's observation is unquestionably true. Reagan did shift the ground in the right's favor and influenced the way we even talk about the role of government (the assumption, for instance, that taxes are per se evil and to be reduced at all costs, rather than a means through which we fund collective priorities). Obama's larger point is that this shift can be accomplished in the service of different goals and ideology.

I admit that I'm predisposed to give his rhetoric the benefit of the doubt, even if it seems like he's playing too much to the Republicans' framework. But I don't get a sense that's what he's trying to do here, or when he says something like this:

I think it's fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you've heard it all before. You look at the economic policies when they're being debated among the Presidential candidates and it's all tax cuts. Well, you know, we've done that, we tried it. That's not really going to solve our energy problems, for example. So, some of it's the times. And some of it's, I think, there's maybe a generation element to this, partly. In the sense that there's a, I didn't did come of age in the battles of the 60's. I'm not as invested in them.

He's not saying that their ideas were good, he's not trying to ape their language to convince people that he's kind-of-Republican, he's just reiterating how their approach changed the previous framework.

There's a strong undercurrent of rage against the current administration and against the Republican movement in in general. I share it! This seems to extend toward a strong wish to find the candidate who will fight back against the people who have fear-mongered, demagogued, and demonized so many of us, who will go into the battle against people who richly deserve to be defeated and driven into thirty years of irrelevance and minority status. I get the emotional impulse. I want to defeat them. But it's hard for me to extend my feelings against the cynical leaders who have exploited people--for what has become solely the perpetuation of power--to all Republican voters. I know some of them, I'm related to some of them, and I may disagree with their world-view, but I think they can agree that things aren't great the way they are. Bush's approval ratings are in the thirties, because almost all of us feel this way. I also feel like blind rage and demonization of the Other as a sole end unto itself is a role already occupied by the Hillary-Haters and professional, well compensated, Liberal Bashers. I wholeheartedly support marginalization and mockery of these people, but I don't want to emulate them.

There seems to be a disconnect between the young voters that Obama attracts, who don't have a long memory over the misdeeds of the Republicans over the past thirty years, and the voters who do remember and who don't forgive. My feeling is that I'm tired of it all. I just want to get better things accomplished and fix what's wrong with the country. To do that, we've got to convince our friends who refused to vote for Al Gore because Tipper once banned music lyrics that there are better, saner options.