SmartRemarks

In crisis lies creative potential.

If there’s any silver lining in the cascade of crises facing the country (and the world) right now, it’s in how they lay the groundwork (pardon the mixed metaphor) for the incoming Obama administration to pursue policy solutions that would otherwise have been impossible. There are good, serious ideas out there in the larger political discourse, some of which have been around for quite a while, yet which as of four years ago, or two years ago, or even six months ago, would have been dismissed by the commissars of conventional wisdom as “too radical,” or “not viable,” or outside the political “mainstream.”

I’ve stepped back a bit from my usual preoccupation with political details in recent days, perhaps out of exhaustion as much as anything else. In a sense, though, that makes it easier to avoid getting caught up in speculation about the News Of The Day and take a look at the big picture.

And one thing that’s clear from that perspective is that “change” is more than just a campaign slogan at this point—it’s an inevitability. The only question is how we choose to direct it.

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As the Obama administration and the new Congress set about choosing priorities and strategies for policymaking, an important consideration will be the political attitudes of the electorate. That, however, is often as much a matter of perception as reality.

It therefore comes as no surprise that even before Election Day (and with increased fervency once the results were in), status-quo-oriented opinion makers were spreading the meme that “America is a center-right country”:

Jon Meacham in Newsweek:
“America remains a center-right nation… [Obama] will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril.”

Joe Scarborough on MSNBC:
“This country is more conservative than it was when we took over in 1994 after two years of calamitous Democratic rule. It is a center-right country.”

Karl Rove in the WSJ:
“It is a tribute to his skills that Mr. Obama, the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, won in a country that remains center-right.”

John Boehner in the WaPo:
“America is still a center-right country. This election was neither a referendum in favor of the left’s approach to key issues nor a mandate for big government. Obama campaigned by masking liberal policies with moderate rhetoric to make his agenda more palatable to voters.”

Rich Lowry at NRO:
Republicans are consoling themselves by telling anyone who will listen that we still live in a ‘center-right country.’ They’re right.”

And there are countless others. As David Sirota has documented, media usage of the term spiked dramatically right after the election, and is still going strong.

The problem here is, it’s just not true.

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Sorry about the last few days without new posts. Been preoccupied. Stuff happens. Anyway…

With a lame-duck Congress in session (and busily accomplishing little other than upsetting Wall Street at the moment), it’s an opportune time to look ahead to the new 111th Congress we’ll have as of January 6th.

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