SALON

Thursday, Aug 12, 2010 1:01 AM UTC

Obama should be annoyed by the “professional left”

But that doesn't make it politically smart for his spokesman to say so!

By

Topics: White House, Barack Obama, Media Criticism

Obama should be annoyed by the

If nothing else, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs’ recent attack on the White House’s liberal critics demonstrates why frankness often backfires in politics. Speaking with a reporter from the Hill, Gibbs lampooned President Obama’s Democratic detractors in unfortunately sharp terms. His remarks sounded more like something a White House loyalist might say after hours in a bar than in a formal interview.

When he hears Democratic purists compare Obama to George W. Bush, Gibbs complained, “Those people ought to be drug tested.” People who accuse the administration of cutting too many deals with so-called centrists on issues like healthcare “wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

The Cleveland congressman and two-time failed presidential candidate pretty much defines the Democrats’ left boundary. Praised by such luminaries as Ralph Nader and Gore Vidal, he won no primaries in 2004 or 2008. But what does Gibbs gain by lampooning him?

There’s more in the same vein. Critics on what Gibbs called “the professional left,” he maintained, will only be “satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Concise, memorable and all too true. I’ve long referred to the perfectionist wing of the Democratic Party as the “anti-gravity left” — educated idealists who confuse the American electorate with the inhabitants of such enlightened precincts as Berkeley, Calif., or Northampton, Mass. They’re living examples of the aphorism Bill Clinton borrowed from Voltaire about letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

According to the Hill, the “White House, constantly under fire from expected enemies on the right, has been frustrated by nightly attacks on cable news shows catering to the left, where Obama and top lieutenants like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have been excoriated for … moving to the middle and bargaining on health care reform, as well as the financial regulatory overhaul and even the $787 billion economic stimulus package, which some liberals said should have been larger.”

On cue, professional lefty Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake.com showed her mettle by immediately excoriating the White House for cutting “sweetheart deals with the pharmaceutical industry in exchange for political patronage. … The problem is not that he’s fighting corporate America and losing. The problem is that all too often, it’s obvious that he’s fighting for the other side.”

Got that, Tea Party patriots? To the “netroots” left, Obama’s not a socialist, he’s a corporate sellout.

Hamsher helped lead the charge to defeat Sen. Blanche Lincoln in the Arkansas Democratic primary — a doomed effort whose main effect was to render her campaign dangerously low on funds heading into a November race against a cookie-cutter GOP opponent the Firedoglake contingent can be certain would never meet them even halfway on any substantive issue.

Sen. Lincoln risked her political career by voting for cloture on Obama’s healthcare bill — less-than-perfect legislation that’s nevertheless the most far-reaching social reform since what came out of the 1960s. I’d have preferred “public option” myself. Shoot, in theory, I’d back a Canadian-style (or Medicare-style) single-payer system. Alas, so fundamental a change in the American social contract was never remotely possible.

Anybody who blames President Obama for that political fact, or who mistook him for anything other than a pragmatic centrist during the 2008 campaign, has only him- or herself to blame.

Then there’s gay marriage, this year’s symbolic “hot button” cultural issue. The Hill reports that “MSNBC host Rachel Maddow described Obama political adviser David Axelrod as a ‘human pretzel’” for explaining that “Obama opposes same-sex marriage but favors equal benefits for partners in gay relationships.”

Again, to me, this is an easy one. Marriage is two things: a civil contract and a religious sacrament. Democrats should be about explaining that every citizen has a basic constitutional right to enter into a legal contract with anybody else, but that here in America, the government doesn’t tell churches what to believe. Over time, irrational fears will subside. As there’s zero chance of Congress voting on gay marriage, the White House shouldn’t talk about it at all.

Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, if I described American engagement there as military and geopolitical “Tar Babies,” bequeathed to Obama by the Bush administration, somebody would call me a “racist,” the universal term of opprobrium on the professional left. So perish the thought.

Everybody with political sense knows what President Obama’s real political problem is: the stagnating economy. I’m with New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman: The White House’s politically timid $787 billion stimulus package was about half as large as it needed to be, and there was never going to be a second chance to get it right.

But that was then; this is now. The Democrats’ biggest worry come November is low turnout among party loyalists. It’s hard to see how blasting the White House’s annoying left-wing critics helps.

In sum, Gibbs may be half-right. But he should also shut up.

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More Gene Lyons.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 175 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Journalists file suit against Manning's trial secrecy: Plaintiffs including Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange demand press, public access to trial and documents
169 points170 points | comment
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
163 points164 points | 90 comments
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
148 points149 points | 99 comments
vote
Report: Nearly a quarter of Americans struggle to afford food
140 points141 points | 13 comments
vote
Ted Cruz against the world - How the Junior Senator is igniting the GOP civil war
82 points83 points | 21 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations