The Internet's Matt Yglesias highlights this from his colleague Ross Douthat:
Ross speaks of "the limits of what Steve Sailer likes to call Obama's 'I have understood you' appeal to people with whom he disagrees. It's an approach to politics that's sustainable only up till the moment when platitudes have to give way to actual policymaking, and as such it has the capacity to breed even greater disillusionment with government (by raising expectations and then dashing them) than the up-front partisanship it seeks to vanquish."
His response is exactly, precisely right:
That sounds to me like the kind of thing a liberal would have said before getting pummeled by Ronald Reagan.
Ross responds here. Colour me unconvinced by his caveats:
This seems largely persuasive to me, and I should have qualified my earlier remarks - the "people" I had in mind were the pundit-and-activist class, the folks who argue and fundraise and mobilize and are involved deeply enough in politics to care about "actual policymaking" in a way that the average American just doesn't. (See also Peter Suderman on this count.) Though I would add that if you end up alienating/disappointing a large enough chunk of this pundit-and-activist class, there's a trickle-down effect to the larger public, since the political class shapes how elected officials are perceived. (I think Bill Clinton's first two years in office followed this trajectory, for instance: First he lost the people who follow politics for a living, and then he lost the country.)
But of course Clinton isn't the right example here; Reagan is. The press hated Reagan, but that stopped the conservative movement precisely how?
One of these days I'll have to track down a quote from Speaker Tip O'Neill that always comes to mind in these situations. I don't remember the words, but I do remember the context. Reagan had just finished giving one of his SOTU's to Congress, and even before it was over O'Neill knew Reagan had already won the upcoming legislative fight. Tip recognized immediately that Reagan had framed the issue so perfectly that the Democrats had been forced to concede most of the fight before it had even begun. Having lost the frame, there was no way for his party to successfully push back. The fight was over before it had even begun.
If you can change the metaphor, you can change the world.
UPDATE: Ezra counters here. I take his point, but would answer that everything depends on Obama's general election campaign rhetoric. And based on everything I've read and seen over the past 4 years, I strongly suspect that Obama will run a much more inclusive, Reagan-esque fall campaign than most people think.
Remember: that's where he started his campaign, but due to the constraints of the primary campaign he's had to move away from it. But he will come back. He has to because its the fundamental premise of his entire campaign.
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