Assessing Obama and PUMA

President Obama has now been in office a little over three months. How do things look?

Neither the cultists nor the hysterics have been vindicated. I see neither a messianic savior leading us to the promised land nor a closet Leninist leading us to the gulag. What I do see is, frankly, a rather ordinary politician -- centrist and somewhat timid.

(Long-time readers will know that I've had both good and bad things to say about Obama, depending on what he was doing. People who never acknowledge a good move by a politician they dislike, or who always have an excuse for every bad move by one they do like, are merely being partisan.)

I opposed Obama earlier for many reasons: his inexperience, his campaign's class implications, associations like Wright and Rezko, the abuses during the caucuses, the dangerous cult mentality of many of his core supporters, and -- most relevant to the current discussion -- suspicion that he was not a true liberal. On that last point, I'd say the jury is still out.

Liberal and conservative are not just labels. There are substantive and major differences. Should women be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term? Should gays and lesbians have the same legal rights as everyone else? Should finance companies and banks be allowed to run roughshod over the rest of the economy without oversight? Should deep tax cuts for the highest-income people be kept in the face of huge deficits? Should stem-cell research that could alleviate the suffering of millions be held hostage to bronze-age religious taboos? Should the government of the world's most scientifically and technologically advanced nation pretend that creationism and global-warming denialism are worthy of respect? What about FISA?

Obama has, at least rhetorically, been on the right side of many of these issues (and remember also that even McCain, who was no ordinary Republican, was on the right side of some of them). But consider the opportunity last year's election presented. It was a repudiation of the most incompetent and unpopular Presidency since (at least) Jimmy Carter. It brought not only a large (by US standards) popular-vote margin for Obama himself, but also solid Democratic dominance of both houses of Congress. The country was ready for "change". Under the circumstances, we had every right and reason to expect a much bolder and more radical liberal agenda, pushed far more aggressively, than Obama has given us (at least so far). I think that if Hillary Clinton were President, she would be giving us that, rather than compromising principles and wasting effort by trying to "reach out" to conservatives.

I cannot see, by the way, that such efforts have mitigated attacks on Obama from the right at all. How often has he been denounced as a socialist or even a Marxist, by people who clearly have no idea what those words even mean?

On the all-important issue of foreign policy, Obama has not yet had a major test, but there have been two lesser ones. The Somali pirate hostage rescue must be counted as a plus, the North Korean missile test as a minus. On the most serious immediate threat, the Iranian nuclear program, his true intentions remain an enigma.

Obama has not been a disaster, and seems unlikely to become one unless he grossly mishandles some major foreign-policy crisis. He has made some good moves, such as ending the global gag rule on abortion and the Bush restrictions on stem-cell funding -- things any Democratic President would have done. But his caution does, as I noted, represent the loss of a huge opportunity.

So where does this leave PUMA today? It was inevitable that the movement would end up somewhat adrift after the election, since its goal was to influence the outcome. I did hope that we would be able to help pull the Republicans (our allies of convenience in the McCain-Obama race) toward a more sane and centrist position, and ultimately reclaim the Democratic party from the Obama cultists despite their man's having won the election.

So far I see no sign that PUMA is having any substantial impact in either area. The dominant tendency within the Republican party is still off in orbit around Neptune somewhere, pushing religious crackpottery and fulminating against gays and climate science; all the significant efforts to remedy this are coming from moderate Republicans, not PUMA. The Obama cult is eroding on its own, having set expectations so high that they could not be met by any politician, especially a cautious centrist such as Obama is turning out to be (Rick Warren was a wake-up call for many).

Here's what I do see, around the PUMAsphere:

First and most obviously, large-scale infiltration and co-optation by the right. On a number of originally PUMA sites and forums, rightists have arrived in such numbers as to gradually become the dominant presence there. An example is this forum which I once recommended; it is now laced with the same old leftist-bashing rhetoric you'd see on any right-wing site, the actual PUMA posters have left in disgust, paranoid conspiracy-type thinking abounds, and the level of activity has fallen to a fraction of what it once was.

More nuanced but still troubling is the debate over whether PUMA should associate with the "tea party" movement (good discussion here and here). Now, I do think the tea party movement may be a sign of the shift back toward sanity among conservatives that I've been hoping for; their focus is on opposing taxes and spending (which, even if one disagrees with it, is a rationally-defensible point of view) -- not on the nutty stuff. But it is a conservative movement. It has nothing to do with attacking Obama from the left or with the Clinton camp's reasons for opposing him last year. Conservative values are not our values; conservatives are not us.

The second and healthier PUMA trend is what might be called a return to principles, a de-coherence of the movement into natural constituencies. By this I do not mean the rhetorical tendency to link arms with Republicans, dismissing profound philosophical differences as being mere labels; this is the opposite of principled. I mean recognition, within the left, that ideas are more important that personalities.

Keep up the fight for gay marriage, DADT repeal, rollback of abortion restrictions, rollback of Bush-era invasions of privacy, defense of American workers against both predatory corporations and illegal immigration, accountability for the Wall Street robber barons "bailed out" at taxpayer expense, solid Supreme Court appointments (when the time comes) and so on, and never mind if Obama wants to nuance those things to death for the sake of other priorities or because conservatives will throw a fit. Encourage Obama to be firmer when he is on the right side; when he isn't, work around him. Work with whoever else shares whichever of our goals is being fought for. And, yes, accept that this will mean erosion of the identity of the PUMA movement. PUMA arose to win the Democratic nomination for Hillary Clinton and then to prevent Obama from becoming President. Those battles are over. The causes that motivated them remain.