Obama as the red-blue uniterNovember 16, 2007
It says something about modern politics that Sen. Barack Obama has faced some of his sharpest attacks over the charge that he's too conciliatory.
Liberal activists who consider Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton suspiciously centrist complain that Obama hasn't "taken off the gloves" against her in the Democratic presidential race. From another angle, former Sen. John Edwards ridicules Obama's pledge to reduce the influence of insurance and drug companies but still provide them a voice in negotiations on healthcare reform. There's no negotiating with these business interests, Edwards insists -- the only way to achieve universal coverage is to beat them.
Obama has given a nod to the first critics by sharpening his differences with Clinton. But he is holding his ground against Edwards and like-minded liberals who maintain that major change won't come unless the next president rallies Democrats for a crusade against the economic and ideological forces that they believe stand in the party's way. Obama argues the reverse: Big change won't come unless the next president builds a broad coalition that attracts voters and constituencies beyond the party's base. "No party has a monopoly on wisdom or virtue," Obama said in an interview. And real progress, he insists, isn't possible with just "a 50-plus-one majority."
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All of this echoes the last Democratic president, who also sought to build bridges by fusing new thinking with old values. Obama acknowledges that Bill Clinton in many respects pointed the party in the direction he wants it to follow. "He made some progress . . . on the policy side," Obama allows. But he believes that the Clintonian version of consensus focuses too much on finding a poll-driven midpoint between the parties rather than uniting Americans around fundamentally new approaches. And he argues that the Clintons incite such intense emotions that Hillary Clinton could not deliver on reconciliation even if she intends to pursue it.
Could Obama, as he claims, unite the country more effectively than Hillary Clinton? Obama's great asset as a political peacemaker -- touted in Andrew Sullivan's impassioned essay in the December issue of the Atlantic -- is that he hasn't been scarred by decades of cultural and political conflict. Clinton's great strength is her scars: She has survived enough combat to have learned something about avoiding it, as she demonstrated by shrewdly designing her new healthcare plan to court the small-business and insurance lobbies that sank her 1993 proposal.
With Clinton, there's another issue. On an intellectual level, she recognizes the value of coalition building, but her gut instinct is to respond to a punch with a punch. She could prove too much a warrior to forge a truce in Washington. Obama, a silky mediator more respected than feared, faces the opposite question: In an age of extreme partisanship, is he tough enough to make peace?
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brownstein16nov16,0,5452391.column?coll=la-opinion-columnists
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