Steve Hildebrand has written a short but fascinating article in The Huffington Post chiding the “left wing” of the Democratic party for criticizing Obama’s cabinet choices.
Hildebrand writes:
This is not a time for the left wing of our Party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments that President-Elect Obama is making. Some believe the appointments generally aren’t progressive enough. Having worked with former Senator Obama for the last two years, I can tell you, that isn’t the way he thinks and it’s not likely the way he will lead. The problems I mentioned above and the many I didn’t, suggest that our president surround himself with the most qualified people to address these challenges. After all, he was elected to be the president of all the people – not just those on the left.
As a liberal member of our Party, I hope and expect our new president to address those issues that will benefit the vast majority of Americans first and foremost. That’s his job. Over time, there will be many, many issues that come before him. But first let’s get our economy moving, bring our troops home safely, fix health care, end climate change and restore our place in the world. What a great president Barack Obama will be if he can work with Congress and the American people to make great strides in these very difficult times.
What I find most fascinating about this post is its tacit mischaracterization of the intentions of the “left.” Hildebrand implies, though he doesn’t outright come and state, that the left is demanding either (i) the elimination of non-left viewpoints form Obama’s cabinet or (ii) an overall leftward tilt of said cabinet.
In fact, the progressive critique of Obama’s cabinet has been build precisely on pragmatic grounds, here and elsewhere. When Obama appoints highly ideological key architects of our financial crisis — like Lawrence “Credit Default Swap” Summers — to key posts of his economic team, he is very precisely making an unpragmatic choice.
What the left would like, I suspect, is some recognition that it has been uniformly pragmatically correct on a number of important issues — from the Iraq war through the dangers of financial deregulation. This recognition need not come in the form, as Hildebrand suggests, of a majority stake in an Obama administration. No, rather what progressives demand (or maybe I should say “request”: we lefties are so polite) is some stake, some voice. What we have seen emerging instead amounts to a sort of Clinton restoration, a return to the neoliberal nineties. Which may seem like a less bad thing than the last eight years — the nightmarish naughts — but is still pretty bad when you consider what Clinton-era liberals were wrong about: supporting the Iraq war (when it came), systematically embracing economic deregulation, stalling the Kyoto protocol (and other meaningful climate change initiatives), pushing hard for NAFTA before even health care reform, and so on. These were heartfelt positions (especially NAFTA, whose pragmatic effects were highly destructive), not artifacts of political necessity or tragic triangulations born of a triumphant Republican party. The Clintonites genuinely believed in these disastrous (and ultimately highly unpragmatic) policies.
I am fascinated by the need (a kind of reflexive urge) respectable Democrats feel to chastise us extremist divisive conclusion-drawing Americans who care about meaningfully curbing greenhouse emissions, who thought invading Iraq was wrong from the very beginning, who think that laissez-faire economics (especially in finance) can be hideously destructive, who believe in full civil rights for gay Americans, who believe that universal health care is vitally important, and so on. No, Obama won, Hildebrand is saying, so we should just be quiet and trust in our new Leader to lead us.
That’s what leaders do: they lead. Us? We follow.
Well, sorry Mr. Hildebrand. This American is watching and is drawing conclusions. And not out of some ideological mania, but from a vantage point of pure pragmatism. When President-elect Obama selects cabinet members whose ideological commitments (and track records of failure) may hinder his ability to “get our economy moving, bring our troops home safely, fix health care, end climate change and restore our place in the world,” I think it’s my place to say so and to persuade you that it’s so. Doing this seems like the absolute minimal condition for political rationality and honesty.
I see no reason to keep my real opinions, based on the best evidence I can marshall, out of the realm of public discourse. Mr. Hildebrand certainly offers none backed by any evidence.