Trying to Placate the Right: Deja Vu All Over Again?

I'm not the only one who has qualms about Obama's "inclusive, post-partisan" strategy as it begins to take shape in the realm beyond campaign rhetoric. Blogger and former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald questions the effectiveness of such an approach in attempting to deal with forces that operate outside the laws of logic or common decency -- and argues persuasively that Obama's apparent plan to accommodate and compromise with the right is just more of the same in a long, dismal history of Democratic spinelessness. You really should read the entire post, but here are some excerpts:

"But there is one aspect of the worldview of many Obama supporters that I find genuinely difficult to understand. These supporters insist that by symbolically including and sometimes compromising with even those on the Right with whom he vigorously disagrees, Obama will be able to chip away at the partisan hostilities and resentments, and erode the cultural divisions, that have inflamed and paralyzed our politics. People on the Right may disagree with him, claim these supporters, but they won't be wallowing in rage, suspicions, and hatred towards him. Instead, they'll feel respected and accommodated. They therefore won't be distracted by petty sideshow controversies. As a result, he'll encounter less reflexive resistance to implementing the key parts of his progressive agenda. A New Politics will emerge: one of respectful and civil disagreements, but not consumed by crippling partisan and cultural hatreds.

"The one question I always return to when I hear this -- and we've been hearing it a lot to explain the Warren selection -- is this: in what conceivable sense is this approach "new"? Even for those who are convinced this will work, isn't this exactly the same thing Democrats have been doing for the last two decades: namely, accommodating and compromising with the Right in the name of bipartisan harmony and a desire to avoid partisan and cultural conflicts? This harmonious approach may be many things, but the one thing it seems not to be is "new."

"In fact, wasn't this transpartisan mentality exactly the strategic premise that drove the Bill Clinton presidency, exactly what Dick Morris' triangulation tactics were designed to achieve? Clinton spent the entire decade extending cultural fig leafs to the Right, from V-chips to school uniforms. Here's how The New York Times explained the 1996 unveiling of his "school uniform" policy:

By supporting measures like the school-uniform option, Mr. Clinton is trying to use the President's bully pulpit in this election year to articulate a moderate Democratic agenda that steps into the area of social issues that have long been the province of Republicans.

"In 1996, Clinton signed into law the single most pernicious piece of anti-gay federal legislation ever passed -- the Defense of Marriage Act -- with overwhelming Democratic support in the Congress. Scorning the "Far Left," especially on social issues, was a Clinton favorite. He is the inventor, after all, of the Sister Souljah technique. Bill Clinton was the ultimate non-ideological pragmatist. He was driven by the overriding desire to win over his opponents.

"What did all of those post-partisan, cultural outreach efforts generate? Hatred so undiluted that it led to endless investigations, accusations whose ugliness was boundless, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and ultimate impeachment over a sex scandal. Bill Clinton was anything but a cultural or partisan warrior. He was the opposite. And that was what he had to show for it.

"Then there were the Democrats of the Bush era. From 9/11 onward, they were probably the single most cooperative, compliant, and accommodating "opposition party" ever to exist. There wasn't a partisan or ideological bone in their body. To the contrary, they were compromise and accommodation finding its purest and most submissive expression. Their eagerness to accommodate was so severe that, at the end of 2007, it actually led The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin to observe: "Historians looking back on the Bush presidency may well wonder if Congress actually existed."

"Did any of that dilute the Right's anger and resentments towards Democrats? Democrats spent 2002 giving George Bush everything he wanted -- including authorization to attack Iraq -- and the Right then promptly attacked them as Saddam-allied, Osama-loving subversives. In 2004, Democrats got frightened away from nominating an actual combative liberal, because they feared he'd be too divisive and culturally alienating, and replaced him with a mild-mannered, inoffensive war hero, who then had derisive purple band-aids waved at him by the GOP convention throngs, who spent months mocking him as a weak, effete, elitist loser. In 2007, Congressional Democrats even voted overwhelmingly to formally condemn their own largest grass-roots political group, MoveOn, to placate the Right's anger over a newspaper ad the group had placed.

"When have Democrats not been eager to accommodate the Right, to sacrifice their ideological beliefs and partisan goals in pursuit of post-partisan harmony, to jettison the "Left" in order to attract the Mythical, Glorious Center? When haven't they done exactly that? Isn't that everything they've been doing for two decades now, what has defined the Party at its core? In what conceivable way is this new, and why does anyone expect that it will generate different results now?

"... Trans-partisan harmony comes only when Democrats agree to sacrifice what they claim their beliefs are and to show contempt for the "Left," and even then, the "harmony" is fleeting, insatiably greedy and inch-deep. It's certainly possible things will be different this time around, but in the absence of actual evidence, it's really hard to understand why so many people have become so intractably convinced that it will be."