Obama and the Revolt Against the New Hopeism

There's a revolution happening this first day of the New Year. It isn't on your television screens. You can't read about it in the New York Times or the Washington Post...yet.

But it's all the rage on the blogosphere.

From laptops, and desktops, clad in PJ's and sweats, downing aspirin as they're recovering from New Year's Eve, the political blogosphere is quietly asserting itself against the New Hopeism of Barack Obama.

Let's start with Markos Moulitsos of Daily Kos, who is far from a fervent supporter of John Edwards:

"...Not being blinded by candidate worship, it's easier to sniff out the bullsh**. And you have to have your head stuck deep in the sand to deny that Obama is trying to close the deal by running to the Right of his opponents. And call me crazy, but that's not a trait I generally appreciate in Democrats, no matter how much it might set the punditocracy's hearts a flutter."

link: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/1/1 33841/9311/412/428780

Kos is referring to Obama's recent attacks on trial lawyers, unions, and even Al Gore and John Kerry. Add that to the earlier gaffe of having Donnie McClurkin, a gospel singer and proponent of the controversial "ex-gay" movement, sharing the stage with you at a campaign concert fundraiser, and you have a candidate who is running to win the Democratic Party's primary who is simultaneously able to alienate some of its key constiuents.

Politico covers the outrage that unions are feeling against the New Hopeism:

"...I'm taken aback that somebody like Obama would think that Oprah Winfrey has a greater right to participate in the political process than the 4 million people I represent," Edward J. McElroy, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has spent $799,619 on New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's behalf, said, referring to the television host's high-profile support for Obama. "It's sour grapes. It sounds just like the charges the Republicans make."

Gerald W. McEntee, the president of the other major union supporting Clinton, wrote on The Huffington Post that "the Obama campaign's criticism of our political action committee and some of the so-called 527 efforts, such as the one organized in support of [John] Edwards, is troubling because they are suggesting that workers are somehow a special interest, just like insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry..."

link: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/010 8/7652.html

Matt Stoller of Open Left is even more scathing:

"...Since declaring for President, this person has called Social Security a 'crisis', attacked trial lawyers, associated unapologetically with vicious homophobes, portrayed Gore and Kerry as excessively polarizing losers, boasted as his central achievement an irrelevant ethics bill, ran against the DC establishment while taking huge amounts of cash from DC, undermined Ned Lamont in 2006, criticized NAFTA while voting for a NAFTA-style trade agreement, compiled opposition research on the most effective liberal pundit in the country, refused to promise that American troops would be out of Iraq by 2013, and endorsed the central plank of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy doctrine, the war on terror.

How would you react? You could concoct a 'theory of change' and argue that all of this is just deceptive, and the candidate is worth supporting anyway..."

link: http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?dia ryId=3002

Ian Welsh in Huffington Post does a full frontal assault on the technical aspects of the New Hopeism:

"...Then there's Barack "Consensus" Obama. It's hard to even take this seriously. In 2007 the Republicans in Congress killed, through technical filibusters, almost twice as many bills as any Congress ever has. For the last 7 years, George "I won the vote that matters 5-4" Bush has ruled the country by running rough-shod over the opposition party, giving them essentially nothing. There has been no consensus-driven voting or decision-making in the U.S. in 7 years, and there wasn't that much in the '90s, either. Oh, sure, I understand that Obama and many Americans would like to go back to the land of consensus-driven politics, where there's a center and where everyone works for what is best for America by splitting the difference. It's a pretty picture. But there's no middle left..."

link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-welsh/ the-edwards-imperative-b_b_79015.html

Ezra Klein shrewdly observes that the trend of New Hopeism is actually veering away from anything progressives or liberals would embrace as a victory:

"...But Obama's comfort attacking liberals from the right is unsettling, and if he does win Iowa, it will not be a victory that either supporters or the media ascribe to the more progressive elements of his candidacy. Instead, they will search for the distinctions he's drawn, and, sadly, a number of those distinctions point away from the heart-quickening progressivism of much of this race, and back towards the old politics of centrist caution and status quo bias..."

link: http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezrak lein_archive?month=01&year=2008& base_name=the_obama_close#103413

Finally, the New Hopeism has unfortunately lead Obama to embrace the Harry and Louise talking points that helped to successfully torch universal health care in the 1990's:



So, let's review. The New Hopeism uses right wing talking points against unions and trial lawyers. It calls out Nobel Peace Prize Winner Al Gore and Senator John Kerry for being too divisive (link: http://weblogs.newsday.com/news/local/lo ngisland/politics/blog/2007/12/obama_gor e_kerry_alienated_hal.html).

And it's willing to alienate the LGBT community by embracing a troubled man pitching a troubled and harmful philosophy of "curing" homosexuality.

On policies it embraces the Harry and Louise arguments against mandates for universal health care and calls social security a "crisis".

This isn't Clintonian triangulation. It's actually worse than that. It's unilaterally disarming before the first shot's been fired.

In the face of the New Hopeism, John Edwards's fighting words are drawing new praise. To quote Ian Welsh:

"...It's time for a new approach, and amongst the three front runners in the Democratic field, that means Edwards. As with FDR, if his approach works, he will be both the most loved and most hated man in America, and some will wring their hands about how divisive that is. But if "unpleasantness" is what is needed to stop going to war illegally, to end the shredding of the Constitution and to stop the destruction of the Middle Class, so be it. An unwillingness to really fight means that those who will, the Republicans, will walk all over those who won't.

The time for the failed politics of compromise is over.

Now it's time for John Edwards."

I couldn't agree more.