(Seeming) hypocrisy when comparing Clinton and Obama...

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

I have posted a lot of criticisms of Senator Obama for his established strategy of demonstrating his freshness and "new politics" by accepting RW framing of major issues, and accepting the validity of RW caricatures of the left, for the purpose of distancing himself from those caricatured views of the left.

The usual form is to establish a false choice, then place himself in the middle. "I think it would be wrong to blow up the world, but I'm not one of those democrats who is afraid to defend America." (an example of the form, not a quote) He distances himself from boogey-man versions of Democrats, and in doing so he suggests those RW created boogey-men are real.

Hillary and Obama are both acting with calculated arrogance. Hillary thinks she has the nomination well in hand, and is running center-right with an eye to the general election. Obama thinks he has progressives well in hand, and is running center-right with an eye toward the nomination.

Since I seldom condemn Clinton for being a centrist, I feel somewhat bad about tearing into Obama for being a Clinton-clone. But there are differences between Clinton and Obama in this respect.

Clinton's centrism is not a betrayal. Everyone knows she's a centrist, just like her husband. Everyone has been on to her from the get. She NEVER had net-roots support. But at least she sees the republicans as the enemy. In that sense, at least, she is on our side. One can vote for Clinton with nose-pinched but eyes open.

But Barack Obama's strategy has been to get progressives to believe that he is well to the left. He came on the scene as a man of color with roots in community organizing who spoke against the war. That thumbnail bio sounds like a man of the real left, and many progressives invested him with certain hopes. I know that Obama cannot completely control what people assume about him, but his strategy seems to have been based on bagging the discontented left out of the gate before veering hard right. (Though I never supported Obama--I stuck with Gore as long as it made sense to me to do so--I assumed he was well to the left, so perhaps that accounts for some of my sense of being had. I didn't expect the "anti-war" candidate to lecture me about how the post-Vietnam syndrome of US reluctance to start wars was a bad thing.)

And since his early media splash as the darling of the anti-war left, Obama seems so sure of his hold on progressives that he feels he can afford to use his own very real base as a cautionary example of the sort of "extreme" leftist ideas he rejects, in order to appeal to the fantasy demographic of the "reasonable" republican. And he may be right in his strategy. In a recent national poll where Democrats self-identified themselves ideologically, Obama had 41% of the progressives, and John Edwards had 8%. That's pretty damn strange, considering that Edwards is running miles to the left of Obama.

I would be delighted if a progressive somehow magically became president. But since I don't see that happening for a while, given a choice between a savvy centrist and a politically inexperienced centrist in progressive-clothing, I'll take the real thing. (Edwards is also a centrist running as a leftist, but at least he has boxed himself in on the positions... whatever his core convictions, he has no wiggle room. Obama has acres of wiggle room.)
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Two commendable articles on the split-the-difference and distancing strategy:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3707823

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2248793&mesg_id=2248793