Obama's Political Coming-of-Age
Jul. 13th, 2008 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77I got a lot out of Ryan Lizza's article, "Making It," in the current New Yorker. Lizza provides a copiously-sourced account of Obama's political coming-of-age in Chicago, a subject the candidate has generally avoided in his two published memoirs. Lizza's account corrects a lot of misconceptions about Obama held by both supporters and detractors: Lizza's Obama is neither a revolutionary nor a naif, but probably no more ruthless than his political peers (certainly in Chicago ...). Lizza argues that what's gotten Obama this far politically is a pragmatic approach to coalition-building and an organizational and rhetorical style that he honed in the Chicago of the 1990s and early 2000s:
"Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. .... In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.
"Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right."
At one point, Lizza asks a disgruntled former Obama ally from Chicago whether the candidate's shifting alliances and maneuverings were simply inevitable parts of his rapid rise from liberal state senator from Hyde Park to viable presidential candidate. “'Can you get where he is and maintain your personal integrity?' she said. 'Is that the question?' She stared at me and grimaced. 'I’m going to pass on that.'”
Thee article's worth reading in its entirety, notwithstanding the snarky magazine cover ...
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ljdemocrats
"Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. .... In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.
"Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right."
At one point, Lizza asks a disgruntled former Obama ally from Chicago whether the candidate's shifting alliances and maneuverings were simply inevitable parts of his rapid rise from liberal state senator from Hyde Park to viable presidential candidate. “'Can you get where he is and maintain your personal integrity?' she said. 'Is that the question?' She stared at me and grimaced. 'I’m going to pass on that.'”
Thee article's worth reading in its entirety, notwithstanding the snarky magazine cover ...
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ljdemocrats
