Submitted to a Candid World

Barack Obama is a once in a lifetime candidate.  After eight years of divisiveness, we have a candidate who – quite apart from favoring serious, progressive policies to put America back on track – actually wants to work across the aisle and rebuild a collegial, functioning government.  We’ll have a true President of the United States, rather than a President of the Bible Belt.  There’s truth to Obama’s (considerable) hype – we have a lot to be excited about.

But.  Even for the best of candidates, there are compromises to be made, for the sake of fairness, and for the sake of expedience.  Coalitions and presidencies are never built on unswerving pursuit of an ideological party line, and even when they are, the country’s worse off for it (look where we are now).  When Democrats, like Kos, expect Obama to never deviate from Kos-style liberalism, they expect him to change the way politics works, and not for the better.  Liberalism imports subordination of passion to reason; we ought to bend when we have to, for the larger good.  Politics in a democracy, especially a democracy still suspicious of the word “Liberal,” means that Obama cannot be a model Daily-Kos-style Democrat.  Deal with it.  Certainly there’s an element of betrayal here – Kos democrats made Obama.  But candidate and (soon-) President Obama belongs to the American people, not to the narrow interests that got him to where he is.  Isn’t that independence, after all, what we admired about Obama in the first place?

More importantly – and more cynically – we can’t expect that, because we have an honest candidate, politics will all of a sudden be 100% honest, transparent, and above-the-table.  Politics is not sunshine and blossoms. Sometimes we as Democrats have to read the signals, guess what’s going on, intercept the code, and learn to listen for the spin.

Example: Obama on gay rights.  Yes, thank you, “Confluence,” for pointing out that Obama says he isn’t a fan of gay rights.  But that’s cheap talk.  Obama can oppose gay rights all he wants, but it’s not something he will have control over as president.  His Supreme Court picks, who will be equal-protection-clause-expansion liberals like you and me, will make the call on gay rights issues.  Obama wants his Supreme Court to protect “people who may be vulnerable in the political process.” What do you think that means?  It’s barely-concealed code for “gay rights.”  Do you want to make him say it clearer, and blow the whole game?

I realize it may hurt a few feelings for Obama to stand against a group that’s already been beaten up enough – talk about picking on the Bush administration’s scapegoat! – but his anti-gay rights stance is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  He has to say things like this to get elected.  No political campaign is conducted 100% above the table.  Watch the signs; watch the hands.

So, Democrats, I realize some of you may feel neglected, or “thrown under the bus.”  But realize that compromises have to be made, and learn to separate talk from spin, and read the signs correctly.  And then, fall the hell into line.  Even if you don’t think Obama needs your help, he does.  To turn Ben Franklin’s quote around, if we don’t hang together on this one, we won’t be hanging alone come November: under four more years of Republican rule, America will be hanging with us.  Join together.  Save the state.  Fall into line.