Obama the centrist? I'm not so sure. Take the foreign policy team: Hillary Clinton, James Jones and Bush holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as you can get. But the choice was far less ideological than practical.* Obama has no intention of being a foreign policy president. Unlike, say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not have aspirations abroad. He simply wants quiet on his eastern and western fronts so that he can proceed with what he really cares about -- his domestic agenda.Thanks to the unusual domestic circumstances, Obama has paid far more attention to things going on at home, but it's odd to characterize Obama as having "no intention of being a foreign policy president." Charisma aside, he defeated Clinton largely based on foreign policy differences, which he aggressively exploited. He went to great lengths (literally, with his campaign swing in the Middle East and Europe) to portray himself as having a sophisticated view of the world. He has clearly thought more about foreign policy than any incoming president since H. W. Bush. A more intelligent approach to the rest of the world was precisely what attracted many of us to him. (I was won over almost five years ago when I read the Chicago speech outlining his opposition to the Iraq war.)
As far as being more pragmatic than ideological, well, yeah, I think that's a rather obvious reflection of the president-elect himself, and was a major part of his critique of the Bush Administration's foreign policy. It was a conscious decision, not an indication of Obama's ceding his foreign policy to inoffensive centrists so he can he direct his efforts elsewhere.
*If Vegas gave odds on pundits' future positions (which isn't a bad idea), how much would a $10 bet in 1994 that Charles Krauthammer would someday refer to Hillary Clinton as being "as centrist as you can get" pay out? A million? A billion?
3 comments:
With respect, responding to Krauthammer about anything is pretty much fish-in-abarrel. A few years back Matt Yglesias started referring to him as "America's Worst Columnist" with a trademark symbol, but most Dem bloggers pretty much just ignore him, which is what he deserves.
I'll offer a limited defense of Krauthammer: every so often the issues and the stars around his column align just right, and he delivers a thought that I find convincing, or at least thought provoking. That hasn't happened in a while though, so maybe I should ignore him until it does.
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