Obama, Keillor, Kristol, Same-Sex Marriage and Me

A few weeks ago, William Kristol wrote a column for the New York Times in which he urged the McCain campaign to take what he [Kristol] called the “very simple” step of attacking Barack Obama on the issue of what is, according to Kristol, his core problem: excessive liberalism. Here’s the quotation:

The core case against Obama is pretty simple: he’s too liberal. A few months ago
I asked one of McCain’s aides what aspect of Obama’s liberalism they thought
they could most effectively exploit. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton,
and patiently explained that talking about “conservatism” and “liberalism” was
so old-fashioned.

Maybe. But the fact is the only Democrats to win
the presidency in the past 40 years — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — distanced
themselves from liberal orthodoxy. Obama is, by contrast, a garden-variety
liberal.

This is a familiar Republican tactic; Democrats have been painted as “too liberal” for years. Obama provides what appears to be extra grist for the mill because in January, the National Journal, which does a statistical assessment of senators’ voting records and awards a score indicating a ranking, voted Obama “the most liberal senator” for 2007. In 2007, Obama voted in line with the liberal position more often than 95.5% of all senators. While the National Journal article gives an overview of how it arrives at the numbers, it does not give a detailed assessment of what the assessors and statisticians consider to be “liberal”—even in the associated article “Methodology: How the Vote Ratings are Calculated”--or how the liberal-ness or conservative-ness of a given bill is determined; nevertheless, such a ranking system presumes that there are attitudes and values that are inherently “liberal” and that those attitudes are identifiable and so are reflected by a voting record.

The article does give some idea about issues that are considered liberal, for the purposes of making this assessment: the issues mentioned are abortion, taxes, immigration, and national security. I am assuming now, but it seems probable that the liberal positions on these issues would be pro-choice, raising taxes in order to pay for public services, allow for illegal immigrants to remain in the US through some controlled process, and oppose so-called national security measures such as warrantless phone-tapping. It is, furthermore, presumably these sorts of positions to which William Kristol, and others like him, object.

But consider what attitudes are suggested by support of these, and similar, positions. To be in favor of the right of a woman—or couple—to choose an abortion is to be in favor of people having power over their own bodies and of a decision that will dramatically alter the direction, substance, and quality of her own life. To be in favor of raising enough tax money to pay for public services (health care, social security, and so forth), to be, in other words, opposed to the idea that you ensure that the rich get as rich as possible so that their wealth will “trickle down,” is to believe that we have an obligation to each other, that although we live in a country which holds, as a fundamental belief, the idea that the individual matters, we also believe that in order for all individuals to thrive, they will require help from time to time. To support the development of some sort of system by which illegal immigrants who have broken no other law and who are contributing to the economic well-being of the country by participating in the work-force—especially in roles that are typically not wanted by well-educated citizens—is to believe that the American Dream, which inspired an ancestor of virtually every one of us born here, should still be allowed to inspire others. It’s also a belief that a rigid and completely indiscriminate adherence to immigration law smacks of xenophobia, and so it advocates a revision of the laws with an idea of making judgments about immigration based on something else that doesn’t feel so coldly prejudiced. The willingness to take a new look at immigration and find some solution other than expulsion of some enormous number of people is a belief that maybe we should at least try to find a way to extend the American Dream of opportunity to earn one’s own way to as many people as possible.

[N.B. It is not my intention here to enter into a debate about how to solve the immigration problem; this is certainly one of the thorniest problems of our day, and there is no easy answer—possibly no right answer. My only contention is that the liberal take on the issue is the one that includes rather than excludes.]

Finally, to oppose the Machiavellian aspects of national security legislation, such as warrantless wire-tapping, is to believe that people should be treated with dignity and respect, and that the government is intended to serve the people, not dominate them.

That, fundamentally, is what liberalism is about: it is about serving people. It is about believing that all people—not just the ones who look like us or sound like us or go to the same church we do or live in the same neighborhood or wear the same clothes or speak the same language—are valuable. Liberalism begins with the belief that what people need is power over their own lives and their own choices because having individual power is the thing that offers the best chance of living a meaningful and successful life. It is a belief, first and foremost, of freedom over conformity.

The great liberal movement of our day, of course, is the movement for gay rights, including same-sex marriage. On this issue, Obama, whether he is the most liberal senator or not, is not liberal enough for my taste. Joe Biden spelled out the Obama-Biden position during the Vice-Presidential debate, and he made it clear that neither man is in favor of same sex marriage, offering the silly panacea of the civil union in its place, as if denying them marriage does not discriminate against homosexuals. But there are others who have shown themselves willing to pick up crusade in place of Obama and Biden, and they have done some fabulous work in demonstrating how the cause is first and foremost about the necessity of treating people with dignity. It’s about humanity, not narrow-minded morality. Some of the “No on 8” ads are particularly touching. The one embedded at the end of this posting demonstrates the traditionalism of the Same-Sex marriage movement—these are people who would rather uphold traditional family values and live together as a legally recognized family, rather than as an informal, unofficial arrangement. I also recommend this one, from Itzhak Perlman, who speaks out in support of his daughter, and this one, from a group of clergy from a variety of religious denominations, and this one, featuring young people. This series is particularly nice—completely rational rebuttal to the wild, fearful charges that the supports are making. All of these people care about fairness; all of these people care about letting other people have the power of choice in their own lives. All of these people are liberal.

Contrast that with the kind of conservatism we have been treated to in recent weeks as a result of Sarah Palin having been “unleashed” and sent out to stir up the vaunted Republican base into a frenzy of support for the McCain-Palin ticket.

Kristol has yet, so far as I have been able to find, to denounce the McCain campaign strategy of sending Palin out to stir up hate speech. In recent weeks, where he has written about her, at least that I could find, were words that seemed to approve of the plan she announced in an interview with him to raise questions about “who Obama really is,” a question she has since turned into a deeply disturbing intimation that the Barack Obama we have seen over the past few years is actually a nefarious mask, hiding an enemy of the state. In the same interview, Palin announced her belief that the campaign should stop being nice, and engage in the kind of negative campaign that McCain once vowed to avoid. Kristol’s approval was clear:

I asked at the end of our conversation whether Palin, fresh off her own debate,
had any advice for McCain. “I’m going to tell him the same thing he told me. I
talked to him just a few minutes before I walked out there on stage. And he just
said: ‘Have fun. Be yourself, and have fun.’ And Senator McCain can do the
same.” She paused, and I was about to thank her for the interview, but she had
one more thing to say. “Only maybe I’d add just a couple more words, and that
would be: ‘Take the gloves off.’ ”

And maybe I’d add, Hockey Mom knows best.

I deduce, then, that Kristol approved, at least in principle, of the McCain-Palin effort as an appropriate conservative effort to defeat the “too liberal” Obama. Perhaps having now seen the actual form the effort has taken, Kristol, too, disapproves, but if so, I would like to see him say so as publicly as he approved the effort in advance. Until he does so, we have to assume, based on his previous work, that his view of acceptable values allows for the kind of hate-speech attack that McCain and Palin have unleashed this week.

What does that suggest about the ideal of conservativism?

Conservatism, as depicted in the McCain-Palin-Kristol model suggests that some people are good and some people are bad. The bad people are bad not because they have done something heinous, but rather because they think something that the “good” people don’t like. This model suggests that there is one way to be an American and one way to be patriotic. It suggests that there is one right religion, one right sexuality, one right education, and comes dangerously close to suggesting that there is one right race. This version of conservatism offers us a club into which some people have entrée—mostly rich, white, male, Christians. They’ll take the support of others, too, but going back some years now, this brand of conservatism has been remarkably unwilling to actually respect those members of the club who don’t quite fit the acceptable model. The “base,” to which the Republican party has been pandering more and more obviously appear to be narrow-minded, anti-intellectual, fundamentalist and intrusive. That base is not interested in allowing other people to live their lives in accordance with different interests and values; it appears, instead, to be dedicated to the cause of suppressing anything “other.” This kind of conservatism is not, in actual fact, conservative in any traditional understanding of the politics of the right; it is, rather, radical, and it has hijacked the agenda for years, culminating in what has become, so far as I am concerned, the ugliest, most despicable presidential campaign of my lifetime: the Palinized hate-talk express.

Clearly, I am not liberal enough to think that McCain and Palin ought to be allowed to choose to spew venom and spread lies as part of their campaign effort. That delineation is a good example of what always constitutes the hard part for liberal-minded people: justifying a decision about where to draw the line between what we will tolerate and what we won’t. One of the classic paradoxes of philosophy is the problem of relativism: if tolerance and the wish to allow others to choose their own morality is the basis for one’s moral position, then how does one justify turning around and showing intolerance to any behavior. In other words, how can we claim to retain the label “tolerant” if we are intolerant to any behavior—drug use, polygamy, even murder? But to accept everything that people can dream up would, indeed, be “too liberal,” because to tolerate everything would be to tolerate anarchy and to tolerate every abuse of human rights imaginable. So of course we do, at some point draw the line at which we become intolerant, and we try to do it around the notion of infringing on the rights of others.

Oddly enough, that is the point at which liberalism meets what I used to think of as traditional conservative values. One of the staunchest Republican values when I was growing up was the desire to keep government OUT of personal lives. Throughout this campaign season, most of the reading I have been doing is from disaffected conservatives—people who consider themselves to be staunch Republicans, but who are angry and disappointed about what the party has become in the grip of the base—Andrew Sullivan, Daniel Larison, even Arianna Huffington (though she has developed the most rabidly liberal perspective of those three). Sullivan wrote a book about conservative values, and he frequently highlights how far the modern party is from those values. Here’s one quotation that represents his view:

The Republican Party that I knew, that I grew up in, a moderate party, a
party that believed in fiscal discipline, a party that believed in small
government, a party that had genuine conservative values. This is not a
conservative leadership. This is radical leadership. I called them neo-Jacobins.
They are radical. They're not conservative. They've stolen my party and I would
like my party back.

Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief aide.

Despite all that, despite the fact that traditional conservative values are not all that far removed from liberal values, “liberal” is still considered a dirty word. Even the Democrats seem to have bought the radical fundamentalist position, and are too often willing to treat the word “liberal” as a pejorative. The same National Journal article includes this intriguing observation:

Contacted on January 30 to respond to Obama's scores in NJ's vote ratings, his campaign said that the liberal ranking belies the public support he has been receiving. "As Senator Obama travels across the country, and as we've seen in the early contests, he's the one candidate who's shown the ability to appeal to Republicans and the ability to appeal to independents," said campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

This seems to me a sad comment coming straight from the heart of the Democratic Party. We are all too inclined to be embarrassed about being liberal, and we all too often join Ms. Psaki in an attempt to scurry away from the term before it brands us for life. It seems to me as well that one of the reasons that the Democrats have such a difficult time competing with and beating Republicans for public office is that we allow ourselves to be embarrassed about what we believe, rather than staunchly promoting it.

Some people, most fortunately, have found a way to stand up for liberalism in particularly eloquent ways. In Homegrown Democrat, Garrison Keillor has this to say: "I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.” (20)

That’s what it means to be liberal.

Barack Obama put it this way in Richmond, Virginia, on October 23rd:

(Note: the link above is to the following transcript made by a fan and corrected by me; the video of the speech is embedded at the top of this posting)

At a defining moment like this, we don't have the luxury of relying on the same political games, the same political tactics that we've become so accustomed to, this slash-and-burn politics that divides us one from another. And the reason Mark Warner and Tim Kaine do well is because they're all about solving problems. They're not about trying to make other people look bad. With the challenges and crises we face right now we can't afford to divide this country. By race. By class. By region. By who we are or what policies we support. Let me tell you something, because I know you're been hearing a lot of stuff lately. There are no real parts of the country and fake parts of the country. There are no pro-America parts of the country and anti-America parts of the country. We all love this country, no matter where we live or where we come from. Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, young, old, rich, poor, gay, straight, city-dwellers, farm-dwellers. It doesn't matter. We're all together. There are patriots who supported this war in Iraq. There are patriots who opposed it. There are patriots who believe in Democratic policies and those who believe in Republican policies. The men and women from Virginia and all across this country who serve on our battlefields, some are Democrats, some are Republicans, some are Independents. But they fought together and bled together. Some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a red America. They haven't served a blue America. They've served the United States of America. Nobody should forget that.

So we've always been at our best when we've had leadership that call on us to look past our differences to come together as a nation. Leadership that rallies us to a common purpose. To a higher purpose. I'm running for President because that's the country we need to be right now. This country and the dream it represents are being tested in ways we haven't seen in nearly a century. Future generations will judge us by how we responded to this test. Will they say this was a time when America lost its way, when it lost its nerve? When we allowed the same divisions, the same petty differences, to plunge this country into a dark and painful recession? Or will they say this was another one of those moments when America rose up? When we overcame? When webattled back from adversity. When we recognized the common stake we have in each other. This is one of those moments.

Richmond, I realize many of you are cynical. Many of you are fed up with politics. I understand you're disappointed, even angry with your leaders, and you've got every right to be. But despite all this, I ask of you what's been asked of Americans throughout our history: I ask you to believe. Believe in yourselves, believe in each other, believe in the future we can build together. See, together, we can't fail. Not now. Together, we can't fail. Not when we have a crisis to solve. Not when we have an economy to save. Not when there are so many Americans without jobs, losing their homes, can't afford to see a doctor, can't send their kids to college, or pay their
bills. Not when there's a there's a generation that's counting on us to give
them the same opportunities somebody gave us.

You know, everybody in this auditorium, at some point, somebody stood up for you. You know, some of you had parents or grandparents who they couldn't go to college but they fought so you could go to college. You had parents or grandparents, they couldn't start their own business, but they struggled so you could start your own business. They might not have been able to vote, but they marched and fought so you could vote. Maybe you can run for the United States Senate. Maybe you can run for the Presidency of the United States of America.

That's what this election is about. That's what we're fighting for, and in 13 days, if you fight for me, if you work with me, if you make phone calls with me, if you organize with me, I promise you we'll win Virginia. We'll win this election and you and I together will change the country and change the world. Thank you everybody. God bless you.

If that's what it means to be the most liberal senator in Congress, then we should hope that all the rest strive to be more like him.

Works Cited

Keillor, Garrison. Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America. Viking: New York, 2003.

Kristol, William. "How McCain Wins." New York Times 23 Sept 2008 12 Oct 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/opinion/29kristol.html.

Friel, Brian, Richard E. Cohen, and Kirk Victor. "Obama: Most Liberal Senator in 2007." National Review 31 Jan 2008. 12 Oct 2008 http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings.