Decoding Obama: Mainstream, Not Moderate

It’s no secret that a good many Democrats on the left end of the political spectrum distrust Barack Obama. They see his brand of politics as too wishy-washy, his big tent rhetoric as too weak, and his interest in bipartisanship as fundamentally misguided–and, most damningly, evidence that the president is another centrist in the Clinton mold. It’s true that Obama has never advocated the kind of take-no-prisoners leftism practiced by John Edwards in the primaries (I’ll avoid the jokes lessons of that disaster). But that misses the point. Obama is a liberal. He is not a centrist. He simply chooses to communicate his ideological allegiances in a different way than we’re used to. Those Democrats who distrust him don’t seem to get this.

The Sotomayor nomination has been a case in point. Rachel Maddow–usually the sharpest commentator on television–was aghast last night. Said she:

“The ‘Sotomayor is a moderate’ mantra was repeated over and over and over again on TV, on nomination day one today by White House officials. [Anita Dunn and Valerie Jarrett clips] She was supported by Jesse Helms and Rick Santorum. She’s a conservative’s dream. Despite a huge Democratic majority in the Senate and even bigger Democratic majority in the House, the Democratic president who won in a landslide is selling his Supreme Court pick by saying that she’s conservative. … The questions now are: Whether Sonia Sotomayor is as conservative, as moderate as the White House says she is, and how are D.C. politics so divorced from the rest of America, so divorced from the results of the last two elections that the prospect of making the court less conservative, making the court more balanced is out of the question.”

Was Sotomayor’s “moderate” ideology really the White House message of the day? Probably not. Take a look at the transcript of yesterday’s press conference with Sotomayor. You won’t find the word moderate in the text. Instead, what is emphasized repeatedly–and what was emphasized later that day on Hardball by Chuck Schumer–is how ordinary and typical Sotomayor is; how her life has been a living embodiment of the American dream; how mainstream she is.

That word–”mainstream”–seems crucial to the Obama approach to ideology. Above all else, he seeks to change what we consider mainstream, and make what was once considered radical and damned lib’rul as perfectly acceptable and normal. And Sotomayor is a liberal. I’m not making an educated guess; the woman said so herself. Yesterday, Ben Smith unearthed a fascinating New York Times article from 1983 that included a few paragraphs on the next Supreme, then a prosecutor in New York. Said Sotomayer in her younger days:

“Once I started doing felonies, it became less hard. No matter how liberal I am, I’m still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous.”

So we have Sotomayor agonizing over how her liberal politics could be reconciled with the criminal justice system. That kind of anxiety has not been mainstream in American politics for some time. And yes, she falls down on the side of the justice system. As she should. But that anxiety is really quite liberal. Yet now, according to Obama, Sotomayor should be thought of as part of the mainstream. That’s an extraordinary sea change.

Obama is practicing a kind of bait-and-switch, with the bait being the idea of the mainstream and the switch being liberalism. It’s a strategy worth thinking about, and there are some considerable risks involved. I’ll discuss those later.