All of us policy advocates seem awfully slow to get the message.
Obama has been playing one game and one game only from day one - "no drama."
He called it "changing the tone", and I do believe that he has bet his re-election on it.
Republicans have pretty much bet the farm on the opposite strategy - conflict, drama, fear, alarm.
I'm so much further to the left than Obama that my opinion is irrelevant. My progressive views (anti-imperialism, anti-corporatism, progressive taxation, single payer national health insurance, election reform, regulatory reform, unions, blah blah blah) don't matter to Obama or his re-election team. That's because Obama is, ultimately, wrestling with just one meta-issue and that is race, and the problem of how a black man gets elected once, and then, how he gets elected again. It's the problem he's been solving his whole life. Ratcheting down the conflict, cooling the drama, calming the fears. It really is a "deep" game, and I challenge anyone to think of one instance when he has departed from it.
I bet you can't.
So my desire for Obama to struggle, and to take a stand, and stare those nasty Republicans down, and each of your desires for him to do that, are just so much noise and nonsense when heard inside the campaign.
He's focussed on how you get hispanics and whites in key swing states to look back on four years of his Presidency and remember a calm cool guy who doesn't fit their racist stereotypes.
It literally does not matter what he does. It is all about the style that he does it in. Republican shouting? He loves it. DailyKos shouting? My shouting? He loves that too. He loves shouting, insistence, stridency, passion on any issue and from any direction because it enables him to stand calm in the center and not do any of that. He ignores the shouting, and he believes that in doing so he wins. That's his whole game.
Hell, he even went to war with Libya and pretty much just phoned it in. Now that's playing it cool.
If he wins in 2012, I'll have to admit he's a clever fellow. Of course if one doesn't stand for anything, he or she may not be able to DO anything when he or she wins, but that's another problem.
There is a remote possibility, of course, that Obama, relieved of the burden of re-election in 2013 might push a little harder, take a stand now and then. He might do so, if his life-long strategy of non-confrontation hasn't warped his soul. He might do so if he loses interest in the outcome of the 2016 contest. But it will be a safer bet that a lifetime of ratcheting down the conflict has warped him, and he will likely still care about 2016 on behalf of others, so don't expect a different Obama than the one we have.
I don't really know anything about being a black man running for the Presidency in America. I grudgingly acknowledge that Obama might know something about this.
Could there have been another way? Could there be another way in 2012? Could Obama's race, the painful need to deal with race as the subtext of every political issue, have prevented, and still be preventing, a stronger progressive direction? I certainly don't think we'll find out this time around. Electing a black man has been a great accomplishment, but progressive politics may be paying a price on other levels and issues even today.
On balance, I think electing a black man President is a great accomplishment for our nation, and if the four years or eight years of his Presidency amount to little more than that, well, it was probably still worth it. But let's hope that just maybe a second four years, unencumbered by the need for re-election, might enable the Obama administration to amount to a little more than just a footnote on racial progress.
