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With all the talk of Obama's center-leftiness, it's worth repeating that what really separates him and his advisers apart from all the other center-lefties (Clinton, Edwards 2004, etc) isn't ideology so much as age. As Tom Edsall says:
"While there are exceptions on both sides, one of the key differences between the Clinton and Obama foreign policy gurus is generational. And this generational split has significant consequences," one knowledgeable expert said, speaking on background. "In the main, the senior folks in the Clinton administration (1993-2001) went with Hillary, while many of the less senior people went with Obama."The way I like to put it is Hillary got the Cabinet Secretaries and Obama got the Under-Secretaries. This doesn't always mean they have different philosophical outlooks, but that they endured different formative experiences, and see themselves as fighting somewhat different fights. The economists associated with Clinton weren't all that conservative, but they felt themselves to be fighting against the Democratic Left of the mid-1980s (Kennedy, you'll remember, ran on wage and price controls in 1984), which could come back at any moment, and which the party had to decisively reject. People are always purer when they're fighting for a movement's soul than for a specific policy. But Furman isn't really fighting those wars. He didn't join the administration till 1997, long after those battles had been won. He doesn't fear the Left in the way they did. Similarly, on foreign policy, Obama doesn't have a bunch of leftie radicals. What he's got are people who didn't really get red-baited in the 70s and 80s, who don't think Democrats are weak on national security because they launch fewer wars, whose formative foreign policy experience was less the Soviet Union collapsing in front of Reagan and Bush and more America's prestige collapsing because of the neoconservatives and the second Bush. In other words, context matters. Take two people, same age, weight, and health, and tell one she's got a family history of heart disease and tell the other she's got a family history of breast cancer and they'll do different things. What makes me optimistic about a possible Obama presidency is less that I think his ideology than the moment in which he's operating. 2009 looks like a plausible year for a progressive renewal in a way 1992 never did.