Alright, this is a problem. Matt IM'd to tell me that Leon Wieseltier has written a case against Barack Obama. "Zounds!", thought I. This was exactly what I've been looking for! A Wieseltierian assault is the perfect antidote to my skepticism and concerns. I could finally become the Obama supporter I've always wanted to be. And, for the first few grafs, all was well. Wieseltier attacks Obama for being too well-spoken, too smart. it was sweet. But then, catastrophe struck:
Obama dislikes polarization. I like it. I think it is one of the marks of an engaged citizenry. Obviously it can also become a kind of democratic decadence; but often polarization is simply your name for my refusal to assent to your opinion. I do not expect Obama, for the sake of putting an end to polarization, to support a surge or a tax cut. His failure to do so is an expression of principle, which is always sharp. As an antidote to polarization, he seems to be proposing what used to be called, when Bill Clinton did it so well, triangulation: he is running another end-of-ideology campaign. The problem is that he has not yet justified his end-of-ideology ideology with any real wonkery. Obama is perfectly correct to deplore the effects of doctrinal purity on government, but then he must illustrate his more dialectical understanding with the details of some significant neither-right-nor-left plans and programs. Otherwise it is just uplift.
Nuts. That's actually a good point. Indeed, one I keep making. If Obama can force me to agree with Leon Wieseltier, this whole unifier schtick may be more significant than I've given it credit for. Thankfully, Wieseltier rapidly returns to form, suggesting that the ghost of Cyrus Vance inhabits Obama's foreign policy thinking and worrying that though Obama got the Iraq War right, his "foreign policy inclinations...are vague and platitudinous and sanguine about the reasonableness of the world," and I'm totally down for whichever candidate's foreign policy instincts Leon trusts the least. And so I end up where I've been all along: Mistrustful of Obama's commitment to progressive domestic policy-making, but fairly sure he's the best foreign policy choice in the primary. And given that the President's range of motion on foreign policy is far greater than on domestic issues, that's been feeling like a pretty compelling advantage.
