Barack Obama's 'Ideology'

Yesterday the Washington Post prominently joined in feeding on the political feast du jour, asking in its top story just who this Barack Obama is -- ideologically speaking.

Because the press, not to mention the ideologically obsessed players themselves, strongly prefers a broad and convenient tag, one that permits a bypass of issue-by-issue analysis. It's much easier to just hang an identifying sandwich board on a presidential candidate and leave it at that.

"Statements he has made over the past month" -- notably on Iraq, surveillance and Supreme Court decisions -- "have ignited a debate about who Obama is ideologically," observed the Post. And then, most ominously: "His current policy positions have convinced some progressives that he is not one of them."

True, although the shifting exigencies of a campaign season are not the best on which to determine political simpatico. But, be that as it may, the Post pushed on, interviewing profoundly perplexed -- and in some cases profoundly unsettled -- card-carrying ideologues on both the left and right.

OpenLeft.com, for example, alerted the Post that "progressives are going to have to organize for progressive values," because Obama is clearly for "centrist government," whatever that means, though I suspect it has something to do with compromise. Imagine that, in politics.

If the folks at OpenLeft want some quick mental relief, however, they can just ask the Republicans, for they, of course, "see a different Obama." Said one ex-official of the Bush administration: "The Democratic Party today is quite liberal, and Obama, if anything, will deepen the roots of its liberalism."

Yet that, too, is automatic-pilot talk. Republicans are opportunistically accustomed to tagging every Democrat as "quite liberal" and they simply wouldn't know how to propagandize in any other way. In reality, however, they're uncomfortably curious about Obama, unsure of precisely who he is and precisely what to attack, since he keeps deploying what they see as ideological end runs. All of this has the poor dears depressively discombobulated.

Hence the Post was still stuck, asking itself and others: "What then constitutes Obama-ism? As one Democratic strategist put it: 'It's pretty clear what it isn't, but it isn't yet clear what it is.'"

Yet in my opinion the paper was asking the wrong question, for it may be that there is, in fact, no "ism" in Obama to locate, identify and dissect. 

From progressives I can hear the cries of horror already: But we've always had isms to hang our determinative hats on -- the black and white ones, the good ones and bad ones, those ideologically familiar appellations that so nicely shortcircuit thorough examination. Just tell us: he or she is a leftie or rightie or milquetoast centrist and we can go from there, no mental batteries required.

But progressives might want to stop and first consider the presidential history of the founder of modern progressivism: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For he, too, possessed no isms, no ideology.

Just yesterday I was rereading an excerpt from Frances Perkins' The Roosevelt I Knew (Perkins was FDR's secretary of labor, the first woman to sit on a presidential cabinet), in which one short passage nicely summarized what political historians have marveled at for decades:

"A superficial young reporter once said to Roosevelt in my presence, 'Mr. President, are you a communist?'" The answer, of course, was "No," and the same to each subsequent question as to Roosevelt's socialism or capitalism.

"Well," persisted the reporter, "what is your philosophy then?" To which Roosevelt responded -- in a "puzzled" manner, observed Perkins -- "Philosophy? Philosophy? I am a Christian and a Democrat -- that's all."

According to Perkins, quite accurately, "Those two words expressed ... just about what he was" -- the utter non-embodiment of "political and economic radicalism." As she further noted: "He was willing to do experimentally whatever was necessary [my italics] to promote the Golden Rule." And that was just about it: in short, human decency, pragmatically pursued.

Roosevelt's "philosophy" congealed no further than that -- and that gave ideological progressives of his era an incurable case of ulcers. He repeatedly frustrated and disappointed and downright pissed off his political friends on the left, because he refused to be corraled into an ideological box, one in which he could simply press a button and a predetermined answer to any prevailing problem would pop out.

It would be wise for contemporary progressives to study the founder and foundations of their modern political "movement" -- which, if it had any real ideology at all, it was only that of issue-by-issue pragmat-ism.