Posted on Tue, Dec. 16, 2008

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Obama is rejecting narrow partisanship

It was one of the enduring lines in the history of political punditry. Only days after Bill Clinton's first inauguration, in 1993, terminally funny syndicated columnist Dave Barry, in a throwaway phrase, referred to "the failed Clinton administration."

The sardonic reference was to mutters from the Republican Party's far right based in that political fringe's knee-jerk fears and congenital negativism. This time, weeks before Barack Obama becomes president, the knee-jerk fears and congenital negativism are coming from the Democratic Party's far-left fringe.

As Obama rolled out his Cabinet choices in the past couple of weeks and talked more specifically about how he'd approach such issues as the auto bailout and withdrawal from Iraq, the rumblings began. They are principally issuing from the blogging establishment rather than from the practicing progressives actually involved in Democratic Party affairs. But in today's communications environment, they are loud enough to be heard.

"What change?" they demand as they consider the retention of Robert Gates at the Pentagon, the number of old Clinton hands headed to the new White House, and Obama's team of economic centrists. "How can he produce the results he promised with those sorts of people?" the voices ask.

They are failing to grasp the essence of the change that Obama has written and talked about for years.

His change is not one merely of faces or even policy details, but one of attitude, tone and grasp on reality.

Whether it will work to the nation's and the world's benefit remains to be seen, of course, but it deserves a fair shot after four decades of increasing polarization that has too often rendered us incapable of dealing with enduring problems.

Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson were the most recent presidents who managed to make substantial advances against the nation's largest systemic problems. Their successes in the areas of civil rights, health care and poverty were counterintuitive. Each was conservative within the context of his party, but each was able and willing to move away from embedded ideology in the interest of problem solving. Polarization only begets more polarization, and they succeeded because they avoided it.

After their administrations, the nation was burdened with presidents who emerged from a maelstrom of growing ultrapartisanship and too often could not summon the political leverage or the moral courage to move against its power.

Congress, hung over from the excesses of extremism from the left and right of the '50s and '60s, could only be depended upon to perpetuate that division, so it was of little help.

Obama is president-elect largely because a majority of Americans finally became fed up with government's inability to deal with a growing array of major problems, caused largely by an unwillingness on all sides to move beyond narrow partisanship and hardened ideology.

The change that Obama represents is tailored for ordinary citizens, not for players at the extremes of the political spectrum. It views winning office not as a reward for ideological purity or a trophy to be wrestled for every four years, but as an opportunity to solve problems.

We've had presidents like that before; maybe we will again.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.

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