The Maverick Tribe

Regular readers of this blog may be inclined to think that the New Yorker is composed entirely of cartoons - hard-edged on the front, open-ended at the rear, and all manner of intellectually droll and absurd on the pages in between.  In fact the New Yorker also prints words - paragraphs of them, in fact, often organized into cogent, straight-faced, exhaustively researched articles and opinion pieces.  Behind the current issue's right-wing phantasmagorical cover laden with turbans, fatigues, and automatic weaponry, one can find two such clear-eyed articles about Barack Obama:  in one, Ryan Lizza documentshow Barack Obama cut his teeth on the ruthlessness and cynicism of Chicago politics.  And in the other, Hendrick Hertzberg pens a characteristically sharp essayexamining the alleged "flip-flops" Obama has been accused of recently.  Hertzberg writes:

Obama has been providing plenty of plastic for the flip-flop factories with the adjustments he’s been making as he retools his campaign for the general election. Under headlines like “IN CAMPAIGN, ONE MAN’S PRAGMATISM IS ANOTHER’S FLIP-FLOPPING,” the big papers have been assembling quite a list of matters on which the candidate has “changed his position,” including Iraq, abortion rights, federal aid to faith-based social services, capital punishment, gun control, public financing of campaigns, and wiretapping. Most of them are mere shifts of emphasis, some are marginal tweaks, and a few are either substantive or nonexistent.

He then examines Obama's past statements on each of these issues and fairly concludes that campaign finance and wiretapping are the only two with any substanse and worth crying about.  Besides, goes the commentary, McCain has reversed himself on many more issues of consequence, ranging from tax cuts to offshore drilling.  The bottom line: Obama is a politician, who occasionally does politician-y things, so stop your whining.

Since I agree with all of Hertzburg's specific points, why am I still sad?  I am to be consoled by the observation that Obama is a conventional politician, but his demerits aren't all that serious?  It's fine to downplay all the offenses he's committed since the start of the general election campaign, but what courageous or inspiring thing has he done to offset these offenses?  I'm willing to endure a waffle here and a pander there as long as there's a good amount of nourishing stuff that moves the conversation forward.

This is not at all about me being a lefty blogger upset that Obama is "shifting to the center".  I've long believed that Obama had centrist and pragmatic impulses on many subjects - that was even part of his appeal for me.  As the de facto leader of the Democratic party, I'd love to see him stake out some modernizing positions on, for example, affirmative action (less of it) and education (standing up to teachers' unions), two subjects on which he has suggested in the past he'd be willing to depart from the party line.

Obama is supposed to be fresh-faced, a reformer, who tells you "not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear".  But his bluff has been called by McCain, an anti-establishmentarian with a record to back it up.  So this campaign was supposed to be a contest between two unconventional candidates who would eschew the trivial and the petty in favor of an intellectually honest contest.  Does Obama want to do weekly, unscripted town hall meetings with McCain?  No, he'd prefer to stick to the traditional debate format, with all it's pre-programmed sound bites and theatrics.  And so it goes...