Obama, ideology, and progressives' surprising surprise

It's one of those twists of political fate, I suppose, that just when ideology is reeling from misuse and exhaustion, its hangers-on are springing into action with old-school vengeance.

Yesterday, for instance, the New York Times' -- (I still can't get used to prefacing his name with that) -- Bill Kristol observed that "President-elect Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress are about to serve up a supersized helping of big-government liberalism."

I guess that was a pejorative. Ouch, Bill. But I was left at guessing, because Bill then hastened to add that liberals have been outclassed in serving up big government only by modern conservatives. He then trailed off into a mostly unintelligible ideological miasma of what, in his opinion, constitutes the noble conservative of today, befogging us with exotic distinctions between big and "energetic" government as well as "constitutional (though not necessarily small or weak) government."

By now, Bill was dancing precariously on pinheads, but his exit strategy finally came to the ideological point: "If you're against big government, you'll oppose a huge public works stimulus package." On the other hand …

If you think some government action is inevitable, you might instead point out that the most unambiguous public good is national defense. You might then suggest spending a good chunk of the stimulus on national security -- directing dollars to much-needed and underfunded defense procurement rather than to fanciful green technologies, making sure funds are available for the needed expansion of the Army and Marines before rushing to create make-work civilian jobs. Obama wants to spend much of the stimulus on transportation infrastructure and schools. Fine, but lots of schools and airports seem to me to have been refurbished more recently and more generously than military bases I've visited.

So there you have it: a muscular but non-stimulating stimulus plan; one that tackles our economic woes in a truly manly fashion (no degenerate, namby-pamby multiplier effect for Bill); one that knows that sheer patriotic confidence can get you over that crumbling bridge; and one that puts children -- the greedy little bastards, what with their whining, incessant demands for textbooks and ceilings that don't cave in -- in their proper place within the militaristic hierarchy.

Now what did all that have to do with this morning's column? Very little. I just like quoting the New York Times' Mr. Kristol, because he makes the rest of us non-Times-ers look so good by comparison.

Just kidding. Actually, his piece did have something to do with what I wanted to write about, although I had no intention of quoting him quite so much. And that something was his undying faith in the power of ideological labels, plus, naturally, ideology itself.

What most intrigued was Kristol's simple and evidently heartfelt opening line about Obama's belief in "big-government liberalism." Intriguing, because while conservatives are now wielding that battle ax, it is big-government liberals who are increasingly and strenuously voicing their doubts.

In Obama, that is. And yesterday, the Politico presented quite a spread -- one to which I'll apply the cliché of a must-read -- on the widening abyss between ideological liberals and our practical president-elect.

The former are nervous, in fact, panicky and running amok, bellowing "Betrayal!" The poor dears, they still haven't read the memo, first issued by Obama in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention, in which he imposingly noted the impending death of ideology.

Red states, blue states, rightist answers and leftist designs -- Who gives a damn; that's all Obama was saying, although in somewhat more eloquent and diplomatic language. And he kept right on saying it, right through the spring, summer and fall of 2008.

But some progressives weren't listening. Early on they confused his call for a withdrawal from Iraq with some general, ideologically antiwar stance, and from there they independently extrapolated Obama's general convictions about some vast, preconceived, textbook "liberalism." In short, they made the same mistake then that Bill Kristol continues to make, with, of course, differing outcomes and differing uneasiness.

I have no sympathy for them. Obama was never devious or coy or even especially political about his stated intentions to carry out a purely practical course of governance. At times that course may lean to what some see as the right, at times to the left, and at other times straight down the ideologically indefinable middle.

Bill Kristol & Co. can indulge its delusions about Obama's "liberalism" all it wants, and progressives, in turn, can lament its attitudinal absence. The object of their mutual scorn, however, just doesn't give a damn. And though I won't always agree with his chosen course of practicality, I find Obama's wholesale rejection of ideology refreshing.