GETTING OBAMA. Over at TPM Cafe, Max Sawicky hits Barack Obama over his Washington Post interview in which he argued that he is better able to unite the country than Hillary Clinton. "The last thing we need, at a point where the Democrats can establish a decisive margin of political power, is somebody out to unify the country. I fear that Senator Obama is turning into the DLC candidate, in all but name." Ouch. But what Max seems to be missing is that Obama isn't saying he'll unite the country by offering a centrist policy agenda, or acting like he's ashamed to be a Democrat, which would make him the DLC candidate. Obama's unity is not about triangulation. So what is it about? There are a couple of ways to look at it. The uncharitable interpretation is that it's all talk, just vague encomia to buying the world a Coke, smilin' on your brother, and so on. The more charitable interpretation is that it's an extremely deft kind of political jujitsu that attempts to advance an agenda that some people won't like, without doing what George Bush and Karl Rove did, which is to make them hate you forever in the process. As Josh Green's terrific article on Karl Rove in the Atlantic explains, Rove believed in the campaign strategy of getting to 50 percent plus one by any means necessary . This strategy, at least in Rove's world, meant not just beating your opponent but villifying him, bludgeoning him, destroying him if possible. The problem came when Rove applied that strategy to governing. He and Bush ended up alienating almost all the Democrats in Congress, plenty of Republicans in Congress, and most of the American people, with the implicit and sometimes explicit message that if you weren't with them, you were the enemy. When things began to go wrong, they found they had few friends left.
