For 45 years the conservative movement successfully linked our pride in America to our latent fears and hatreds, using the former to paper over the latter. This conservative strategy failed in 2006 and 2008 but it remains the standard against which political tactics are measured. It failed not because we as a people are now less patriotic or more discerning, but because Karl Rove dismissed reality as altogether irrelevant to governing. The pathetic lightweights now leading the conservatives grew from infancy in the politics of demonization. They are not alone in this trap of failed tactics. Mainstream political analysts have also grown up during the years of conservative success. They too can imagine no politics except name-calling and no goal except winning today's news cycle. Because Obama does not attack he must be weak. Because he compromises he must lack conviction. They are wrong.
I believe that Obama is neither weak nor indecisive. I believe that he is patient. Take as a premise that Americans know what they believe and know what they want, and that they don't need either conservatives or progressives to tell them what they should want. Assume further that they want a balance of personal freedom, economic well-being and national strength. Finally, assume that this balance of freedom, well-being, and strength goes far in supporting the pride we feel in our country. The last two election cycles show that Americans have had enough, for now, of hysterical hyper-patriotism as a cover for incompetence and social control. Obama, by luck or calculation, caught this wave with exquisite timing.
Obama's politics could not be more different from the recent norm. He tells you exactly what policies he plans to implement, why he wants to implement them, and what he hopes to accomplish with them. We see none of the discredited tactic of daily emotional excess. So far it seems that America is pleased with a President who does not deny that problems exist and who offers a plan for solving them.
More than that, Obama is patient and far-sighted. He is content to watch his plans ripen, to look past the day's ebb and flow towards the attainment of his goals. His goals are far from the fascist-communist-socialist delusions of his critics. They are not even very progressive, in the sense that most progressives use the term. His goals are liberal, rational, and most of all, attainable in his judgment. In this, I am convinced, we see the community organizer who co-opts the definition of the problem and the goal, and then assembles a committee to implement the details. He may not see every detail resolved as he would wish but, almost invisibly, he has won the war at its opening shot by defining the problem and setting an attainable goal. As evidence, consider that no one today seriously discusses the idea that more deregulation will fix the economy, yet not a year ago deregulation was the unquestioned wisdom of the age, brought down from the mountaintop by St. Reagan himself. The economic debate today is over the details of how large the stimulus should be and how taxation will be re-distributed; the mere implementation of a solution that the President himself defined.
Many progressives demand that Obama immediately prosecute those who authorized or conducted torture. I believe that Obama abhors our practice of torture as much as they do. Obama understands, however, that America today is more worried about the economy than with torture, even though many of us see torture as by far the greater disgrace. I believe that most Americans accept that America must, from time to time, do nasty things so long as we live in a nasty world. One of Bush's greatest failures was not realizing that there is a limit to this acceptance, a limit that he could not overcome by simple deceit and denial. Bush tried to demonize those who challenged torture, and he has failed. Obama understands that if he leads a prosecution now it could be seen as just another round of reciprocal attack, the old game, politics as usual. If prosecution is seen as a political game then he will lose, and the nation will lose.
The stakes are too high. The Republicans overreached by impeaching Clinton as a mere political tactic. Impeachment was too awesome an action for the public to accept in that context, and the hypocrisy of the effort ultimately cost Gingrich and many other Republicans their seats and their influence. Prosecuting Bush officials for torture, or merely lying about torture, will become a war crimes trial with echoes of Nuremberg, of the Holocaust itself, within living memory. It cannot be undertaken unless and until the public accepts that gravity of purpose. I believe that time is coming. I believe that Obama will prosecute when and if that time comes. I believe that gradually releasing the torture memos is the most he can do to prepare the ground now. If America demands more as we learn more, I believe he will appoint a special prosecutor and win convictions. Obama will wait to see that consensus emerge. He is a patient man.