Not Right or Left, but Forward
CAPITAL JOURNAL
DECEMBER 5, 2008
online.wsj.com
You've got to give Barack Obama credit: The man knows how to read.
Read the results of an election, and the mood of a country, that is. The team the president-elect is assembling around him is strikingly centrist in nature, a group of people known more for competence than for ideology.
That seems to reflect what the nation ordered up this year. The campaign that brought Mr. Obama to power wasn't one that was dominated by policy positions or ideological debates, though both surely were present.
Obama's Advisers
Instead, it focused more on governing ability -- that is, who could best pull Washington out of the partisan ruts and ideological gridlock that seem to so frustrate voters. As that suggests, the mood in the country wasn't -- and isn't -- highly ideological.
Indeed, the "change" impulse that Mr. Obama tapped into so effectively was rooted at least as much in a desire for forward movement in Washington as a call for movement in a particular direction. After all, Mr. Obama identified himself explicitly as a post-partisan figure rather than as a highly partisan one.
Thus, one way to read the election is that it didn't give the president-elect so much a mandate to enact a liberal agenda as one to improve the way any agenda at all is put into effect in Washington. That was true before the fall meltdown in financial markets and probably was more true afterward. It seemed an election calling forth practicality and competence; certainly Mr. Obama's appointments by and large suggest that's how he read it.
In fact, in an interview conducted a year before the election, David Plouffe, the man who managed the Obama campaign, already saw the mood of the country shaping up this way.
"I think it's a Herculean task to change this town," Mr. Plouffe said of Washington. "I do think presidential leadership may be the only answer....Before you tackle a lot of issues you have to demonstrate that you will change the way this place operates."
That makes the historic election of 2008 different from that other seminal "change" election of recent times, Ronald Reagan's in 1980. That election was explicitly about changing ideology; this one was more about improving effectiveness.
Which brings us to the group of people Mr. Obama has assembled for the government's most important jobs. The adjectives most often attached are experienced and moderate; the team's roots run to the center of the political spectrum rather than to the left.
It appears that Mr. Obama now may turn to the left of his party for some of his next wave of appointments, which would be in keeping with what seems to be his quest for a kind of overall balance. In the aggregate, though, the emerging Obama team is a pleasant surprise to many on the right, and a source of anxiety to some on the left. In fact, it appears Mr. Obama has chosen to risk some quarrels on the left within his own party down the line in order to have a chance to govern from the middle at the outset.
The most obvious examples are retired Gen. James Jones as national-security adviser, who held senior military posts under presidents of both parties and who was comfortable enough with the business community to spend most of the past two years running a task force for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Sen. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, who ran clearly and consistently to the right of Mr. Obama on national security in the primaries; Robert Gates as defense secretary, whose identity is Republican rather than Democratic; Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary, a choice more noted for his technocratic skills than ideological passions; and Paul Volcker as general economic adviser, a counselor viewed as an éminence grise of the financial world.
One critique of the Obama team is that by bringing together so many people of experience and stature, the president-elect could see his own agenda subsumed by strong-willed appointees pushing their own agendas.
But Kenneth Duberstein, a Republican who was chief of staff for President Reagan and endorsed Mr. Obama this year, sees it the other way around. "The president's agenda will come," he says. "You first need a team of people who know how to get things done."
There are undoubtedly other land mines. Will there be clashes among so many big egos at some point? You can count on it. Will there be rebellions among unhappy campers on his party's left as time goes on? Almost certainly.
But there are no risk-free options for a president. Mr. Obama is showing that he would rather run the risk, at a time of high anxiety for the country, of having too many big personalities and too little ideology around the table, rather than the opposite.
Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com |
