Obama’s triangulations

Political love is a dangerous undertaking, especially in America. The consoling fiction that any candidate’s private virtues will ensure unwavering constancy to their putative ‘core principles’ is tenable only if you don’t read the papers. For Washington is designed to produce political compromises, to reward whoever best negotiates the shifting sands of current events and public opinion. Knowledge of hot-button local issues – farmers’ subsidies, outsourcing, immigration – can win primaries and caucuses but general election campaigns are decided by much broader questions. Conventional wisdom says a candidate should court the political centre once they have secured the nomination, as part of a stately crescendo that ends with their party’s convention, but this is much easier said than done, particularly after a protracted and bitter primary season like the one the Democrats have just concluded.

Since he became the nominee, Senator Obama has struggled to find his stride. In the last few weeks he has repeatedly disappointed some of his strongest supporters by endorsing positions that seem incompatible with his commitment to a new kind of politics. He has supported the Supreme Court’s lifting of a ban on handguns, but opposed its striking down of a law that authorised the death penalty for the rape of a child; he has decided to forgo public funds for his presidential campaign; he has agreed to support the President’s decision to grant immunity to telecom companies that have spied on American citizens; he has promised the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to work for a ‘united Jerusalem’ – he has even begun to prepare the ground for a new policy towards Iraq. On smaller issues he has made surprising concessions, too. A few months ago he dismissed flag-pins as substitutes for ‘true patriotism’ but now he routinely wears one; quietly he has distanced himself from the church he attended for two decades; he has even disparaged the left wing of the Democratic party for their condemnation of General Petraeus and some of the countercultural excesses of the 1960s!

The blogosphere is abuzz with jeremiads on his treachery and conservative critics are anxiously labelling him a ‘flip-flopper,’ but the truth of Obama’s dilemma cannot be reduced to simple political opportunism. A closer examination of several of his alleged ‘triangulations’ reveals that his transgressions are often little more than sensible compromises in complex and fluid situations. With AIPAC, for example, he faced the unenviable task of persuading a roomful of sceptics that he was a friend to Israel. He managed to do so through strongly-worded promises, such as a commitment to a ‘united Jerusalem,’ but he also, cannily, left this vexed question open to further argument. As Bernard Avishai has pointed out: “‘Undivided’ is the Labour Party euphemism for a city whose Arab and Jewish quarters are not separated by a wall, as before 1967 … [it] does not prejudice the question of who is awarded formal sovereignty where. The Geneva Initiative, for example, proposes an undivided Jerusalem with international forces helping to keep the place an administrative whole.” That may have been too subtle for the audiences outside the room, but it certainly wasn’t careless.

The question of immunity for the telecom companies who have violated the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is another riddle with no easy answers. There is a good case to be made that the new legislation will provide much-need modernisation for America’s security capabilities with little appreciable impact on the fourth amendment freedoms which are being defended so passionately. The proposed legislation would shield companies from civil litigation but it would not protect them from any criminal charges that may be brought in the future. There is, admittedly, a powerful counter argument on the grounds that the executive is already allowed to be far too intrusive in these matters, but only a handful of critics (most notably Glenn Greenwald at salon.com) have seriously explored this objection. Obama is arguably settling for a reasonable compromise – the sort that got him elected as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Sometimes a flawed bill which can be wrangled over in the Senate is better than a notionally perfect one that will be vetoed by the president, or rendered useless by one of his many signing statements. In other words, Obama does not need to be a sell out for his support of the legislation to make sense.

Even on Iraq there seems to be enough complexity to warrant a change of heart. As George Packer has noted in the New Yorker, the happy convergence of several military and political developments has meant that Iraq is currently enjoying a period of unexpected stability. An overhasty withdrawal could prove disastrous. If, as president, Obama insisted on his original plan, Packer believes that he “could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, re-energize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia’s losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse.” In these circumstances second thoughts ought to be seen as a sign of political maturity but there is no chance that they will if, in the light of this cautious optimism, Obama revisits his plan for Iraq too publicly. Instead, he will probably finesse the issue, perhaps using his visit to justify a less ambitious exit strategy. He will be hotly denounced for deviating from his early and eloquent opposition to the war, but he will also have avoided clinging to unreal goals simply because they were his.

Quite a few of Obama’s other recent initiatives cannot be so easily explained and his critics are absolutely right to ask for explanations of his baffling new positions on handguns and the death penalty. They should keep him honest by making further volte-faces politically inconvenient. Sympathetic critics should also insist on his not yielding to false patriotism. Deciding what is politically viable in election season is relatively easy in the age of instant polling, but for most of the last year Obama’s candidacy promised  something more than the all-things-to-all-men approach that undermined so many of Bill Clinton’s political talents. Much of Obama’s appeal has come from his willingness to embrace complexity and to avoid easy answers.  Not too long ago, when Senators Clinton and McCain floated the idea of a gas-tax holiday he refused to be drawn into the usual populist rhetoric – because the idea made no economic sense.

He would do well to remember this streak of independence before his rush to the centre makes it disappear entirely.