It's Just a Strategy

I agree with this:

The thing that people haven't figured out about President Obama's conduct of foreign policy is that it's the same as his conduct of domestic policy. Obama believes in the power of negotiation and public dialogue to split his adversaries--Republicans at home, Islamists abroad--and strengthen his own position. Obama's speech in Cairo to the Muslim world was simply the foreign analogue of his dealings with the GOP.

Of course, this is how he won the primary and the presidency, too.

Obama began his presidency by elaborately courting the opposition party. Republicans in Congress believed that, by flamboyantly withholding cooperation, they could deny Obama his stated goal of bipartisan harmony and thus render him a failure. Instead, they wound up handing Obama the alternative victory of appearing to be the reasonable party. Polls showed that the public, by overwhelming margins, believed that Obama was trying to work with Republicans and that Republicans were not reciprocating.

I referred to Obama's strategy during the election as the "kumbaya shtick", but I have a lot more respect for it now. It's an impressive counter to the Republican strategy of divide and rule. Call it unite and rule: Say you and your opponent are on the same page about certain fundamental things, while in reality the opponent really isn't. This puts the opponent in an untenable position of having to cede an argument over premises, leaving only an argument on the merits that the opponent will almost certainly lose because he never intended to have it in the first place. Politics is carried on behind an armor of hypocrisy. Obama's strategy is to use the way hypocrisy works as a method to defeat the armor.

On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it's all the same thing. Obama's defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.

That doesn't make Obama honest, not a hypocrite, but it does make him an effective politician. Which is why I voted for him. It's not that I see him as a man with certain unshakable principles, although it's possible that he is. I see him at least as a politician who has presented a certain face to the world, and he has to live up to that image or have his owned hypocrisy revealed. He understands that allowing your contradictions to show makes you vulnerable, and he likes to win. Therefore, he will do at least some of what he says he will, in order to win. Since I like the things he says he wants to do, and he's good at defeating his opponents, I found it worthwhile to support him. I have no idea if he's morally pure, an idealist, or a cynical opportunist. I have my impression, but that's not evidence. Whatever the truth is, it's irrelevant. Whether he's a hypocrite or not, he will try to do what he says he will do, and that's all I can require.

Of course, this is not good enough for the fools and the professional cynics. They don't want to talk about results, about what is possible. They want to talk about principles, as if principles alone ever amounted to a pile of shit when they ran up against a political buzzsaw. They want to talk about will, in an exact parallel to the neocons' Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics. These people don't want half a loaf rather than none, they'd prefer no loaf and the continued opportunity to complain about not getting the whole loaf. About not having it handed to them on a plate, with a nice presentation, by people who will tell them they were correct from the start, that their preferred perfect result was their right to receive all along. Without any work or compromise on their part, because the fools believe that they don't need to do any political work to achieve what they want. If they did, they'd learn the limits of power and the value of compromise pretty fucking quick.

That's why when fools do venture into real-life politics they usually get immediately swallowed up by the hypocrisy machine, because being fools they lack all defenses. The rest avoid real-life politics at all costs: All they really want to do is complain about the moral failings of others. They disdainfully refer to Obama's strategy as "eleven dimensional chess" - inspired unfortunately by some Obama supporter who referred to it as "three dimensional chess", the game Spock plays in Star Trek - because they either can't or won't understand a kind of politics that isn't Manichean. These people are playing one-dimensional chess, an imaginary game of tug of war in which they are alone on the rope, heros in their own minds who are happiest to lose because that confirms their heroism. They're our equivalent of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists. Their view of the world is just a mirror image of the wingnuts. They're worse than useless, but fortunately they just stay at their keyboards and type, where they can do the least harm.

Comments

[Glomarization]

I admire the way President Obama allows his political opponents to paint themselves into corners. Didn't he do that with health insurance companies the other day, too? He said something like, well, the health insurance companies first said that the government isn't capable of running a health insurance business, but now they're saying that they can't compete with a government-run health insurance business. Which is it? If the government is no good at running a health insurance business, then a health insurance company shouldn't be afraid of the competition. And if it would be competition, since when, in our capitalist system, is a company not supposed to have competitors?