Doug writes:
>
> On Jun 18, 2008, at 7:26 PM, Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
>> To the degree opinion from below can influence policy, I'd rather
>> have a
>> President Obama susceptible to the Democratic liberal base than a
>> President
>> McCain having to take into account pressures from his xenophobic
>> Republican
>> base. In the same vein, as far as the inner circle of policymakers is
>> concerned, while I have no particular admiration for Albright,
>> Christopher,
>> Perry, and Hamilton as individuals, they still represent a more
>> accomodating
>> wing of the US defence and foreign policy establishment than do McCain
>> advisors Robert Kagan, James Woolsey, Micheal Ledeen, Randy
>> Scheunemann, and
>> the other right wing zealots who brought us Iraq and are itching to
>> bring us
>> Iran.
>
> I agree with that. But all the Progressives for Obama who thought he
> was a transformative figure are having to cope with a lot of
> disappointment in recent weeks. He's a very smart guy and a very
> skilled politician, but his agenda is mainstream Democrat. DLC-ish even.
=======================
True. But I can't think offhand of any politicians who've come to power in the advanced capitalist countries who've sounded anything other than mainstream prior to taking office. Even FDR was a conventional Democratic pol whose New Deal reforms were an empirical response to an extraordinary crisis and extraordinary level of mass mobilization. Absent these two factors, his tenure would not been "transformative", as it's now viewed, but another in a long line of Democratic administrations which mostly tinker with the taxation and spending policies of the more business-friendly Republicans who share in the system's administration.
So too with Obama. Whether he turns out to be a tinkerer or something more than that will, IMO, largely depend on whether the current crises in foreign policy, housing, the financial system, and health care are contained or deepen. Obama, for example, is already backing off his deadline for the withdrawal of US troops in Iraq, but that's in response to the belief of the US political and military establishment - and an increasing number of Americans - that the Sunni insurgency has been contained. If it or a Shia insurrection flares up again, producing US casualties, the pressures for withdrawal will return, and Obama will revert to type as an expression of those pressures. In other words, I think the tendency to see his views - or that of any politician, for that matter - as fixed rather than fluid, and as determining rather than responding to developments - is misleading and leads to extremes of unwarranted enthusiasm or disappointment.