David Broder writes today on the lost promise of Obama’s changing politics because…well, because he’s a Democrat.
If this were just an off night by a speaker we know can soar, it would be no more than a blip on the screen. Obama picked a bad night to be ordinary, given the huge crowd that filled the Denver Broncos’ stadium and the elaborate Grecian setting constructed for his performance.
But John McCain is hardly a major threat as a speaker, so what’s the difference?
Here’s why I think it matters. One of the major questions about Obama, of whom so little is known, is whether he is really serious about challenging the partisan gridlock in Washington or whether his election would simply bring on the regular wish list of liberal policies.
A sidebar: conservative policies are always a platform or a plan, and liberal policies are always “wish lists”. Telling.
Anyway, Broder’s frame here comes from wholeheartedly accepting the frame of another man who’s changed politics in Washington - Joe Lieberman. Lieberman was the architect of the compromise-compromise, where you start out working with the other side by signaling to them that you’re already halfway to their position anyway. It set the standard for a generation of “challenging the partisan gridlock” by totally undercutting one side of the debate before the debate ever began, and it’s the standard that the Brodertariat has used for years: how willing are liberals and Democrats to bend on their platform towards the steely, realistic resolve of the GOP?
The promise that Obama brings - realistically or not - is that he, unlike many Democrats before, will forcefully advocate for a platform that drastically alters the way business is done in Washington (and given that the past 28 years in Washington have largely been a shift towards the right with some flashes of non-insanity during the Clinton years, it’s not hard to do), and will actually listen to those on the other side without declaring them traitors for opposing him. One of the major ways you challenge the “partisan gridlock” in Washington, the current iteration of which happened to coincide entirely with the incoming Congressional class of 2007, is by making it clear that you’re going to challenge the current political dynamic rather than bowing to it. Whether or not Obama can do that is a far deeper question, but it’s not betrayed by anything he said on Thursday.
Well, unless you’re David Broder and you’re betrayed by the fact that the morning newspaper is in the bushes rather than square in the middle of the doorstep, and you’re forced to malign the many ways in which this is a betrayal of the promise of home delivery.