Netanyahu Oil and Obama Water-Can They Mix?

Does Bibi oil and Obama water mix? The press and media have portrayed Bibi as a radical based on his rhetoric but judged by his actions he is far from that. Certain American Jews, who have Obama's ear and raised tons of money for him, are opposed to AIPAC and want Israel to make peace at any price. It will be interesting to see their influence. Conditions between the Palestinians and Israelis are not ripe for peace as long as Hamas and Hezballah control the fate of their people and Abbas remains weak. Furthermore, will Obama stand by his previous pronouncement regarding Iran acquiring nuclear capability? Will he press troop removeal from Iraq in disregard of Pentagon advice?

Obaa is intelligent but it remains to be seen whether he is wise. (See 1 below.)

If The Saudi Peace Plan becomes the basis of Obama's initiative regarding a Palestinian and Israeli peace plan then he would be wiser to appoint The New York Times', Tom Friedman, as Secretary of State instead of Sen. Clinton.

Personally I believe it would not be in Hillary's best interest to become Secretary of State, because it would preclude her from running against Obama in 2012, should she so choose, and it would be difficult for Obama to fire her, should he so wish.

It always seems to get down to Israeli concessions of land won in wars they did not start for Arab pledges which often prove illusive. Security of sorts for promises of sorts. (See 2 below.)

Daniel Pipes write about Arab views regarding Obama. (See 3 below.)

It is now the "we did what?" time and Michael Lind writes about: "The Meaning of Obama."

Since we elected someone president about whom we know little and who has proven, time and again, capable of disavowing many of the things he held dear until he ran for the presidency it is little wonder everyone if groping to discover the man behind the smile and mask. (See 4 below.)

Michael Medved gropes for the time to begin opposing Obama and cautions it should not be premature.

As I have often stated, Liberal's behaviour towards GW was mostly outrageous, extremely partisan and ofen did a disservice to our nation. Pelosi and Reid wanted to regain power regardless of the consequences. They believe in winning at any price - otherwise they would have dumped Lieberman.

I would counsel conservative should oppose Obama on the basis of our philosophical differences. They should be both respectful of the office and person but they have every right, even a duty as the loyal opposition, to oppose Obama when their views differ. It is one thing to disagree and another matter to be disagreeable. If they act gutter like, as the Democrats have, then the Republicans deserve to lose even more seats. (See 5 below.)

Holman Jenkins puts his finger on what we both deem is the real problem. Though GW ignored the economic effect of fighting a war without demanding sacrifice by everyday citizens but only those in the military and their families, the cracks in so many unsustainable programs FDR began over 60 years ago, is the real culprit of our current problems. The Iraq War may have been the tipping point, so to speak, but many of programs begun by FDR, which have been extended beyond their initial intent and then over and under funded, led to bad public policy. FDR's approach negatively impacted many relationships, skewed many in wrong directions and distorted our free market system.

Obama now is left with the FDR legacy and though the bad consequences finally surfaced while GW was president the root causes were not of his making. If Obama does not understand this he will cause himself and us more grief. (See 6 below.)

Dick


1) Does Barack + Bibi = Disaster?
By Jonathan Tobin
If Likud wins in Israel, how badly will the two new leaders of the alliance clash?


Barack Obama spent the first week after being elected president of the United States planning the next four years. Yet, even though the office is occupied by somebody else until January, the pundits are already predicting the next administration's trouble spots.


At the top of the list is the outcome of the Israeli elections scheduled for this winter. If Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu is sent back to the prime minister's office, we are told, a major conflict with the Obama White House is inevitable.


The assumption is that an Obama administration will regard "Bibi" Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace and that he will personally blow up the U.S.-Israel alliance.

HISTORY OF CONFLICT
The Israeli left has promoted the myth that Netanyahu destroyed the peace process after the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. But the true story is that the Oslo Accords were doomed from the start because of Yasser Arafat's insincerity and the continuation of Palestinian terror after the peace was signed.


Though Clinton did just about everything to prevent the Likud leader from winning the 1996 Israeli election except moving to Israel and voting himself, the two managed to co-exist warily for three years. Despite his "hard-line" reputation, Netanyahu wound up signing supplements to the Oslo treaties: the 1996 Hebron agreement and the 1998 Wye Plantation accord. He also sent an emissary to Damascus to discuss Syria's willingness to make peace in exchange for the Golan Heights.


However, his bellicose rhetoric is remembered more than his diplomacy. Contrary to Theodore Roosevelt's advice, Netanyahu always spoke loudly while carrying a very small stick. But there was no mistaking the fact that the Clinton administration despised the Israeli. Bibi's warm relations with Clinton antagonist, Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Christian Evangelical supporters of Israel deepened the distrust between the two governments. When Netanyahu was bounced out of office by Labor's Ehud Barak in 1999, the White House did little to disguise its jubilation.


Now, almost a decade later, Netanyahu is on the verge of a remarkable comeback. A combination of Likud and other right-wing parties has a better chance of putting together a governing coalition next year than does current foreign minister Tzipi Livni of Kadima and its potential allies.


With the Obama foreign-policy team likely to be comprised of either retreads from the last Democratic administration or others equally committed to pushing hard for Israeli-Palestinian peace, trouble with the Likudniks is on the horizon.


But, despite predictions of doom and gloom, is an Obama-Bibi blowup inevitable?


Not necessarily.


Though the idea that the new president will prioritize the comatose peace process and seek to bludgeon Netanyahu into submission may be a fantasy of some of Obama's fans on the Jewish left, it disregards his innate pragmatism.


Clinton committed himself, without reservation, to the concept that Yasser Arafat was a peacemaker rather than a two-faced terrorist. On the other hand, Obama arrives in the Oval Office with no such loyalty to the powerless Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas. To suggest that rather than concentrate on more-urgent issues, Obama would risk any of his hard-won political capital on such a slender reed as Abbas is absurd.


Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that Obama and his people are inherently hostile to Netanyahu, why would it make sense for the next president to try to force Israel into a corner when the prospects for peace are so bleak? With the Palestinians hopelessly split between the weak Abbas and his Hamas rivals who control Gaza, there is no way that any Israeli government, even the current Kadima-led coalition that is desperate to achieve an agreement, could do so.


After all, the reason why Bibi may be headed back to the prime ministership is the failure, not only of the Oslo process, but also of Kadima's unilateral withdrawal concept.


Ariel Sharon left the Likud and formed the centrist Kadima Party in 2005 because Netanyahu and his followers wouldn't support the withdrawal from Gaza. His attempt to end the old left-right split in Israeli politics was initially successful, but the the pullout was a disaster. It led directly to the creation of a Hamasistan that bombarded Israeli towns like Sederot. A similar retreat in the West Bank under the current circumstances is unthinkable. This failure of unilateralism has left many Israelis looking back to Likud for leadership.


There may be disagreements between Obama and Netanyahu, but the top foreign-policy item in the Middle East, outside of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not the dead-in-the-water talks with the Palestinians, but something on which Obama and Netanyahu may well agree: the threat from Iran's nuclear weapons program.


While the Republicans made much of candidate Obama's ill-considered offer of talks with Iran, Obama also pledged never to allow the Iranians to achieve nuclear capability. If Obama doesn't keep that promise, he will have far-bigger problems in the region than not liking Netanyahu.


A chastened Bibi — who won't want a repeat of his difficulties with Clinton — and Obama will both have good domestic political reasons to avoid unnecessary conflicts with each other.

EAGER FOR CONFRONTATION
Rather than the White House being the one spoiling for a fight with Israel, the trouble may instead come from those American Jews who despise Netanyahu and are eager for a confrontation.


The left-wing J Street lobby is committed to pushing Israel hard to revive negotiations, even though anybody who's paying attention to the facts on the ground there knows that both Fatah and Hamas are uninterested in peace. But the lobby's agenda has little to do with the realities of the Middle East and everything to do with American Jewish politics.


J Street's real goal is to undercut the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and, if possible, to supplant it as the voice of American Jewry on Israel. J Street's financial backers were strong supporters of Obama and hope to have a voice in the administration.


A Netanyahu victory in Israel will give them an opening, since they will seek to deprive a Likud government of the sort of support Israelis expect here. Since AIPAC will have to stand up for Netanyahu — an Israeli who has been routinely and wrongly depicted in the American press as an extremist — as it has for every past prime minister, J Street hopes to profit from the comparison.


The test for Obama may not be so much whether he and Bibi disagree on policy, but whether the president allows some of his Jewish supporters to maneuver him into a superfluous dispute that has nothing to do with the vital interests of either country.


The fate of the U.S.-Israel relationship in the next four years may rest on the question of whether Obama will let the gadflies of J Street start a battle that serves neither the cause of peace nor that of his administration's political agenda.

2) PA to advertise Arab peace plan

The Palestinians are reaching out to the Israeli public to drum up support for a land-for-peace plan backed by the Arab world.


The ads will reprint the peace plan which offers Israel recognition by the Arab world in exchange for a withdrawal from the territories it captured in the Six-Day-War.

The Arab peace initiative was first adopted six years ago. Israel has not accepted it. However, there has been renewed interest in the idea in Israel.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the advertising campaign marks the first time the Palestinian government had reached out to the Israeli public in such a way.

3) Obama Wins, Muslims Divided
By Daniel Pipes

Ali ibn Abi-Talib, the seventh-century figure central to Shiite Islam, is said to have predicted when the world will end, columnist Amir Taheri points out. A "tall black man" commanding "the strongest army on earth" will take power "in the west." He will carry "a clear sign" from the third imam, Hussein. Ali says of the tall black man: "Shiites should have no doubt that he is with us."


Barack Hussein in Arabic means "the blessing of Hussein." In Persian, Obama translates as "He [is] with us." Thus does the name of the presumptive American president-elect, when combined with his physical attributes and geography, suggest that the End of Times is nigh – precisely what Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been predicting.

Back down on earth, the Muslim reaction to Obama's victory is more mixed than one might expect.

American Islamists are delighted; an umbrella group, the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Election, opined that, with Obama's election, "Our nation has … risen to new majestic heights." Siraj Wahhaj, Al-Hajj Talib Abdur Rashid, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, and the Muslim Alliance in North America responded with similar exuberance.

Hamas, and Islamist movements in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, India, Indonesia and the Philippines delighted in Obama's election. Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch generalizes that jihadists and Islamic supremacists worldwide showed "unalloyed joy." The New York Times finds public reaction in the Middle East mostly "euphoric." John Esposito of Georgetown University emphasizes the Muslim world's welcome to Obama as an "internationalist president."

But plenty of other Muslims have other views. Writing in Canada's Edmonton Sun, Salim Mansur found John McCain the "more worthy candidate." Yusif al-Qaradawi, the Al-Jazeera sheikh, endorsed McCain for opposite reasons: "This is because I prefer the obvious enemy who does not hypocritically [conceal] his hostility toward you… to the enemy who wears a mask [of friendliness]." Al-Qaradawi also argued that twice as many Iraqis died during Bill Clinton's two administrations than during George W. Bush's.


For tactical reasons, the influential Sunni sheikh Yusif al-Qaradawi wanted John McCain to win.

Iran's hardliners also favored a McCain victory (according to Iran's former Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi) "because they benefit more from enmity with the U.S., which allows them to rally the Islamic world behind their policies and at the same time suppress dissent at home." The Taliban took note of Obama's election promise to increase U.S. troops in Afghanistan, warning that, should he fulfill this plan, "jihad and resistance will be continued."

Iraqis are intensively divided about Obama's plan quickly to withdraw U.S. troops from their country. That plan, plus promises to end U.S. dependence on Middle East oil and to negotiate with Iranian leaders, rattled the leaders of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf governments.

Some commentators argue that Obama cannot make a real difference; an Iranian newspaper declares him unable to alter a system "established by capitalists, Zionists, and racists." Predictably, the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Obama's chief of staff confirmed Palestinian perceptions of an omnipotent Israel lobby. A commentator in the United Arab Emirates went further, predicting Obama's replication of Jimmy Carter's trajectory of flamboyant emergence, failure in the Middle East, and electoral defeat.

In all, these mixed reactions from Muslims suggest puzzlement at the prospect of a U.S. president of Islamic origins who promises "change," yet whose foreign policy may buckle under the constraints of his office. In other words, Muslims confront the same question mark hanging over Obama as everyone else:

Never before have Americans voted into the White House a person so unknown and enigmatic. Emerging from a hard-left background, he ran, especially in the general election, mostly as a center-left candidate. Which of these positions will he adopt as president? More precisely, where along the spectrum from hard- to center-left will he land?

Looking at the Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, will Obama's policies reflect Rashid Khalidi, the ex-PLO flak he befriended in the 1990s, or Dennis Ross, his recent campaign advisor and member of my board of editors? No one can yet say.

Still, one can predict. Should Obama return to his hard left roots, Muslim euphoria will largely continue. Should he seek to make his presidency a success by moving to the center-left, many – but hardly all – Muslims will experience severe disillusionment.

4) The Meaning of Obama
By Michael Lind

The messianic cult around Obama was always at odds with his modest policy proposals. But events can force politicians to be bold. The new president has a chance to redefine American liberalism


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Michael Lind is the Whitehead senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC and the author of "The American Way of Strategy" (OUP USA)
What is the meaning of Obama? It is, of course, impossible to evaluate a presidency that has yet to occur, notwithstanding premature declarations that he will be a "transformational" president to compare with giants like Lincoln and the two Roosevelts. But it is not too early to analyse the meaning of his election.

The fact that a mostly white democracy has elected a biracial chief executive is epochal in itself. Liberal democracy is now firmly rooted in much of the world, but many, if not most, liberal societies today would not choose to be led by someone who does not look like a member of the dominant tribe. Its history of slavery and apartheid notwithstanding, that can no longer be said of the United States of America.

The nightmare of the racist right in the US has always been "race-mixing." It was particularly moving therefore to see a mixed-race president, who had begun his presideantial race in Abraham Lincoln's Springfield, Illinois, conclude it on election night with an address to a jubilant multiracial crowd in Chicago's Grant Park, named after the general who defeated the slave south in the civil war. There were many ghosts among that crowd.

But Obama was not elected because the American people chose to set an example of colour-blind democracy for the world. He was elected because the 2008 presidential election was a referendum on George W Bush's two disastrous terms. And whether Obama's election marks a transformation or a restoration depends on how the regime of his predecessor is viewed. If Bush's presidency was an aberration, then Obama's election can be seen as a restoration. On the other hand, if Bush's presidency was typical of an earlier pattern, then Obama's election can be viewed as a novel departure.

In my view, Obama's election was a restoration, not a transformation. Bush's presidency was an aberration, even by the standards of the Republican presidents who preceded him: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and his father. Of these, Nixon, Ford and the first Bush were moderate Republicans who dismissed radical-right ideas of dismantling the welfare state or repudiating America's post-1945 liberal internationalism. And Reagan, the hero of the "movement conservatism" that began with Barry Goldwater in 1964, was much more moderate in practice than George W Bush, who sought to inherit Reagan's mantle rather than his father's.


***


Presidents, like prime ministers, are often chosen because of some quality conspicuously lacking in their predecessors. It was practically pre-ordained that after the partisanship and bungling of the previous eight years, the electorate would be ready for a statesmanlike figure disdaining vicious partisanship—ready, in other words, for someone like John McCain.

Who better than McCain to be the anti-Bush—the competent, reassuring, consensus-building manager for whom the nation was waiting? McCain's post-partisan credentials seemed solid. He had broken with his own party on issues like global warming and campaign finance reform. He had lost the nomination in 2000 to George W Bush because of his dislike of the religious right, and he appealed more to independents than to his own party. Indeed, his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 2008 was something of a fluke and happened despite the fact that most conservatives in the primaries preferred someone else.

But it was Obama, not McCain, who became the anti-Bush candidate in 2008. Obama, the product of left-wing Chicago activism, moved to the centre by brutally repudiating his mentor, the radical black preacher Jeremiah Wright, denouncing the Supreme Court for restricting the death penalty, musing about invading Pakistan to hunt down al Qaeda and preaching nearly universal tax cuts like a Republican, all the while making "change" his mantra. Meanwhile, McCain tried to ingratiate himself with the base of the Republican party by choosing the folksy but ill-prepared Sarah Palin as his vice-president.

McCain still might have won, but for the greatest financial crisis since the depression. It was clear that neither McCain nor Obama, any more than anyone else, knew what to do about the spreading crisis. But in the unforgiving eye of the television camera, Obama was cool and collected; McCain looked flustered and out of his depth. The young junior senator seemed more reassuring and possessed more gravitas than the elder statesman.

When Obama's election was confirmed by the networks around 11pm on 4th November, people poured into the streets in my part of Washington, DC chanting and honking car horns. Granted, Washington is a liberal city. But across the continent, the breeze that was blowing was not so much a wind of change as a huge sigh of relief. The security threats and economic challenges facing the US and the world are grave, but the country is reassured by the thought that the individual in the White House will be informed, thoughtful and articulate.


***


Obama, then, was elected as the anti-Bush. During the campaign he aptly compared himself to a Rorschach test, in which people saw what they wanted to see. But the support for him of conservatives and libertarians as well as centrists and leftists was the result of a passing moment and owed more to the unpopularity of Bush than to Obama's own qualities, attractive as they are. On assuming office, he is bound to disappoint many supporters. Let Obama be Obama, they will demand.

During one of his campaigns for office, Disraeli published a tract entitled What is He? Obama has authored two autobiographies but still seems sphinxlike. In part this is the result of successful dissimulation; though he was hardly the "pal of terrorists" the right made him out to be on the basis of his association with a former Weatherman radical, Obama was quite left-wing in his earlier career. But there seems to be a genuine indeterminacy, a certain chameleon quality, in the "Barry" Obama who reverted to "Barack."

This is not necessarily a flaw. There are conviction politicians like Reagan and Thatcher and Theodore Roosevelt, and there are masterly improvisers, like Disraeli, Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. Successes and failures are found in each genus. George W Bush is a conviction politician of the worst kind. He persevered with bad policies when a more flexible improviser would have reversed them without caring about the inconsistency.

Opportunism can be a virtue in a statesman. And Obama's opportunism is breathtaking. When his long association with the black nationalist Wright became an issue, Obama gave a televised address in which he said he could no more disown Wright than his own white grandmother. Garry Wills declared in The New York Review of Books that Obama's "speech about race," defending his association with Wright, was at the level of Lincoln's second inaugural address in 1860. Within weeks, to the discomfort of his sycophants in the press, Obama had publicly disowned Wright, tossing him aside as an obstacle to his campaign.

One of the character flaws of George W Bush was his inability to sacrifice friendship to statesmanship. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith lingered in the Pentagon long after they should have been cashiered for incompetence. To make matters worse, Bush had the peculiar habit of allowing the people he put in charge of personnel searches to suggest themselves for the jobs they were assigned to fill. Dick Cheney effectively chose himself as vice-presidential candidate and Harriet Miers as a nominee for the Supreme Court. This is not how Obama will go about staffing or running his administration.


***


Obama will need all the Machiavellianism he can muster if he is to navigate the US through the disasters looming ahead. Although the elections of 2006 and 2008 swept the Republicans out of congress and the White House, they did not provide the new Democratic majority with a mandate to govern from the left. A third or so of the electorate call themselves conservatives, compared to a mere one-fifth who describe themselves as liberals or progressives—this has not changed much in a decade. In the absence of mass conversions to liberalism, the Democrats have had to grow their party rightward. They have picked up representatives and senators from socially conservative, economically populist areas. More important, they have won over former moderate, suburban "Rockefeller Republicans," particularly in the northeast, where right-wing populists have been wiped out. Following the Republican capture of congress in 1994, the surviving Democrats in the house and senate became more homogeneous and more liberal. The party that has now regained majority status has done so by becoming less homogeneous and less liberal.

While this political diversity creates tensions, it is the price of success, in as much as majority parties in the US tend to be strange bedfellow coalitions. The Republican party now, like the Democrats in the late 1990s, will pay the price of greater homogeneity. Refusing to recognise that it was their own extremism that drove moderates into the new Democratic majority, many conservatives now insist that the voters punished the Republicans for abandoning their small government ideals. That's right—the voters punished big government Republicans by voting for even bigger government Democrats! If this becomes the orthodoxy then the Republican party may face a long period of exile as a reactionary party confined mostly to the former Confederate states, like the Democrats between the civil war and the New Deal.

The impetus for modernisation within the Republicans is likely to come from centrist governors of large, diverse states, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. But it is hard to see how moderate blue-state governors and big-city mayors can wrest control of the national Republican machine away from southern and western conservatives.

Meanwhile, congressional liberals like house speaker Nancy Pelosi will have to accommodate northeastern former Republicans from the business and professional elite as well as the anti-abortion, anti-gun control Reagan Democrats. This very diversity is likely to strengthen the hand of Obama in his dealings with the powerful congressional leadership, by permitting him to play factions against one another and put together different coalitions of Democrats, with some Republicans, on issues of his choice. Unlike Bill Clinton, who faced a Republican congressional majority for the last six years of his eight-year term, or Jimmy Carter, whose relationship with the Democratic congress was troubled from the beginning, Obama will have more of an opportunity to shape legislation from the White House than any president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.


***


Obama won the Democratic party nomination partly because he appealed to the two major wings of the post-Clinton Democrats: the single-issue left, and pro-business New Democrats based in the financial, IT and media industries. Organised labour, which used to define the left, has little passion and few resources, compared to the organised feminist, black, Latino, gay and lesbian and environmentalist movements that are funded not by ordinary citizens but by wealthy foundations. With the support of right-wing federal and state politicians and judges, organised business has all but destroyed organised labour in the private sector, where fewer than one in ten Americans are unionised, compared with one in three government workers. Organised labour in the US is thus now dominated by public sector unions, of which the most important is the teachers' union. The right wing of the Democratic party is more libertarian than conservative. Its members tend to be fiscal conservatives who favour racial integration and gay rights, but also (at least until recently) favoured free markets, free trade, and deregulation, and looked with suspicion on trade unions.

In putting together the single-issue groups of the left with the New Democrat neoliberals of Wall Street and the professions, Obama is following the precedent of Bill Clinton, who succeeded in synthesising cultural liberalism—gays in the military, affirmative action—with economic neoliberalism: Nafta, the WTO, hymns to globalisation. Clinton thus repelled culturally conservative, economically populist voters, and Obama, like Gore and Kerry, lost their votes too. (One would think that the Republicans would see the chance to be a coherently populist party and drop their free market ideology for Perot or Buchanan-style economic nationalism, but, apart from Mike Huckabee, few Republican leaders show any interest in rethinking free-market radicalism.)

By the time of the 2008 election, it was far from clear that the social issues wing and the neoliberal wing of the Democrats were actually wings at all, as opposed to the same financial-professional coastal overclass that opposes the minimum wage on Tuesday, supports drivers' licenses for their illegal alien maids and gardeners on Wednesday, and sneers at working-class whites as inbred hillbillies on Thursday. Clinton and Obama have preferred the term "progressive" to "liberal" and there is a certain logic to their choice, because their upscale white elite base resembles the constituency of the Progressive movement of the early 20th century more than the majority behind the New Deal liberalism between 1932 and 1968.

The original Progressives were chiefly upper-middle-class northeastern Protestant gentry who were horrified by the excesses of early industrial capitalism, but equally horrified by what many saw as the primitivism of agrarian populists in the south and the west, like the followers of William Jennings Bryan. Based in the emerging professional classes, the Progressives of the 1900s (and Britain's New Liberals and Fabian socialists) were attracted to Bismarck's Germany, which avoided both plutocracy and populism by empowering enlightened technocrats to carry out social reforms from above.

In the crisis of the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) managed to unite northern Protestant Progressives, southern and western populists, and urban ethnic Catholic and Jewish trade unionists in a new coalition that was described as liberal rather than progressive. The three groups shared nothing in common except a desire to counterbalance the northern capitalist establishment that had grown up after the civil war, sometimes with the help and sometimes with the opposition of their coalition partners, southern conservative Democrats.

Between FDR's four terms and Obama's first, this centre-left coalition has changed beyond recognition. The civil rights and the cultural revolutions of the late 20th century drove southern and western populists together with southern conservatives into today's Dixie-dominated Republican party. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the private sector trade unions have dwindled in influence within the Democratic party. They are still important in a few manufacturing states, but upper-middle-class greens have far more clout than working-class union members outside of government bureaucracies.

If American society in 2008 were similar to that of 1932, the loss of the Populists and a powerful trade union movement would have doomed the Progressives. But two factors have helped them. The first is the enfranchisement of black Americans and the immigration-fed growth of Latinos, who voted 2 to 1 for Obama. In 1976, the US was about 90 per cent non-Hispanic white; today it is less than three-quarters non-Hispanic white.

The second factor was even more important. As the white share of the electorate has shrunk, the college-educated professional share has expanded. Today more than a quarter of the population earns a bachelor's degree and roughly one tenth has a graduate or professional degree. The college-educated social stratum that was already the base for the Progressive movement a century ago has vastly expanded. Meanwhile, the traditional working class has not only shrunk, but is also increasingly divided along class and caste lines. Many immigrants and natives form a low-wage servant class, the so-called "working poor," while the old prosperous working class based in manufacturing and clerical services is dwindling thanks to outsourcing and technological change. A homogeneous college-educated overclass, which favours diversity in complexion but rigid liberal orthodoxy in opinions, increasingly lords it over a divided and heterogeneous class of high school graduates and drop-outs. Obama is the new face of this emergent establishment.

This raises an interesting question. If the left stands for equality, in what sense are the Democrats a party of the left? Obama showed his contempt for the white working class when, in what he thought was a secret meeting with rich donors in San Francisco, he said white working-class voters who favoured Hillary Clinton were "bitter" people who "cling to guns, or religion," or their antipathy to people unlike themselves. Unsurprisingly, Obama did worse among these voters than even Kerry had, except in a few industrial states. Despite promising tax cuts to Americans earning less than $250,000, Obama lost the votes of Americans who made more than $50,000 and less than $150,000—in other words, the working and middle class. Like every Democrat since George McGovern in 1972, Obama won the votes of an affluent white minority, plus solid non-white majorities, while losing the white working class. It is a very strange party of the left that combines the enlightened rich with the unskilled servants who work for them against a native majority working class. But then, a similar mutation of the left seems to be occurring in Europe.

When it comes to the current economic crisis the challenge is not so much political as intellectual. The good news for Democrats is that they have become the party of government because the voters perceive that the Republican party's free-market ideology is discredited by events. The problem is that the Democratic establishment, with very bad timing, has adopted much of that ideology in the last generation. Obama ran as a technocratic, centrist New Democrat in the mould of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton when the moment for their kind of neoliberalism has passed.

Much of the new progressive establishment whose members are likely to fill or advise an Obama administration has been as committed to post-1960s deregulation and market utopianism as the libertarian right. In the US what we call neoliberalism is a movement of the centre-left (not a conservative movement as it is in Britain) that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a response to the success of Thatcherism and Reaganism. Instead of arguing for a modernisation of the mixed economy, neoliberals tried to position themselves between the "old liberalism" of the mixed economy on the left and free-market fundamentalism on the right. This kind of triangulation was more justifiable in Britain, where the sclerotic left was composed of truculent trade unionists and ideological socialists, than in the US, where the "old liberals" were New Deal Democrats who would be considered centrist or centre-right in Europe. Jimmy Carter was more pro-free market than Richard Nixon had been, and Bill Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over." With the zeal of converts, neoliberals promised to carry out government functions by market means.

Their pro-business rhetoric allowed neoliberals in the US and, to a lesser extent Britain, to shift the base of the main centre-left party from organised labour to the financial elites of Wall Street and the City of London. In the 1970s, the political action committee of the AFL-CIO, the national trade union centre, was the most important Democratic donor. By the 1990s the Democrats were funded mainly by Wall Street financiers like Clinton's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who lobbied for the dismantling of the New Deal era regulations on investment banking.

So, after a generation in which they denounced any deviation from free-market orthodoxy as the kind of old thinking that had marginalised the party, the Clintonian New Democrats are almost as clueless as the Republicans in a world in which the US and other governments have been forced effectively to nationalise much of banking and insurance and may next have to nationalise the automobile and building industries. With all the talk of a new New Deal under Obama, you might think there would be neo-New Dealers waiting in the wings with volumes of plans. But the New Deal strain of liberalism is all but extinct in progressive think tanks and university faculties. In economics departments, the last generation of Democratic neoclassical economists like the recent Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, who is a conventional New Democrat of the 1990s type, have done their best to marginalise anyone to their left, like neo-Keynesians and the heirs of institutional economics. Brilliant, unorthodox thinkers like James K Galbraith are outnumbered by conformist Democratic economists who have internalised free market ideas about trade and labour markets. Elsewhere on the university campuses and in think tanks, it is hard to find any coherent progressive philosophy at all, as opposed to a miscellany of identity-politics "communities" based on race and gender.

New Democrat policymakers, like Lawrence Summers, spent a generation attacking those who thought that the US could learn something from continental European or east Asian models of capitalism as dangerous promoters of "industrial policy" or, even worse, "protectionism." In their purge, the neoliberal thought police successfully limited the socially acceptable left in the US to a combination of support for free markets with support for public goods like universal health care plus mildly redistributive tax credits for the losers from globalisation. Following the global crisis, their synthesis of libertarian capitalism and moderate social democracy looks naive and anachronistic, but nobody has yet come up with an alternative. In today's conditions a programme of tiny, symbolic subsidies and underfunded public investments in infrastructure and energy seems hopelessly small-bore.


***


The Democratic party is in equally bad shape when it comes to thinking about foreign policy. The few ideas it has are those of the Clinton years, and most are now irrelevant. Many New Democratic foreign policy mandarins supported the Iraq war and collaborated with the neoconservatives to promote a "concert of democracies" that would marginalise the UN and ostracise China and Russia (see Philip Bobbitt and David Hannay's debate, Prospect online). I myself was denounced by two of these neocon-friendly hawks—Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay—for being too critical of George W Bush. They both signed a neocon statement praising Bush on the day of the Iraq invasion. During the Bush years, the most penetrating criticism has come not from Democrats but from moderate Republican realists like former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel, along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Democratic realist. Obama sometimes sounds like a moderate realist, but he has also speculated about attacking Pakistan and echoed neocon bellicosity toward Russia in its conflict with Georgia. It will be ironic if Obama, who attacked Hillary Clinton during the primaries for her vote to authorise the war, fills his administration with liberal interventionists who applauded the invasion of Iraq and whose main complaint is that the US hasn't invaded enough countries, with Sudan high on the target list.

New Democrat neoliberalism was a political success, to the extent that it contributed to the elections of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and, arguably, Barack Obama, notwithstanding his contest with the Clinton machine. Obama's transition team and likely cabinet are filled with former Clintonites, most of them convinced that the Democrats must still prove that they are pro-business and anti-big government. But the rationale for neoliberalism collapsed this autumn, along with the intellectual consensus in favour of an idealised free market.

The point is not that Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress should rush to enact grandiose new schemes of social insurance and public spending, as some on the left demand. Before turning to difficult issues like controlling healthcare costs and providing universal health insurance in the US, President Obama, if he wants a second term, may have to spend much or all of his first term working with government authorities and the private sector and other countries to fix the market itself, by trial and error if necessary. FDR's first New Deal of 1933-34 was focused on stabilising the economy during the depression. Social security and other signature New Deal social insurance programmes came during the so-called second New Deal. But when the time comes, the American centre-left should dare to think big again, as it did in the days of FDR and LBJ. The American social contract still needs to be completed by universal healthcare and paid parental leave, and the American public prefers the simple, universal social insurance programmes of the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson's initiatives like social security and Medicare, to fiddling around with tax credits.


***


The American centre-left has gone through several phases in the last century, some more successful than others: the Progressive and Populist movements in the early 1900s; the bold and successful New Deal synthesis of 1932-68; the defensive, cautious neoliberalism of the late 20th century. The next reinvention of the centre-left may begin during Obama's term in office.

Obama's movement has so far been a personality cult, not a true movement with a substantive agenda. He is the leader of a party dominated by ideas about domestic policy that now seem trivial in their incrementalism, a party whose ideas about muscular US interventionism have been doomed by the costs of the Iraq quagmire. With no developed centre-left alternative in economic and foreign policy, and only a left of squabbling single-interest groups—greens, feminists, identity politics lobbies, pacifists, crusaders against urban sprawl—the Democrats under Obama will have to grope their way forward cautiously. They can best justify the trust which American voters have put in them by a ruthless willingness to jettison the old doctrines of the 1990s, the last era in which Democrats held the White House, and to think with a boldness more characteristic of mid-century liberals or early 20th century Progressives.

The messianic cult around Obama as a candidate was always undercut by his modest policy proposals. But events can force cautious politicians to be bold. During the secessionist crisis following his election and the early years of the civil war, Abraham Lincoln hoped that a promise of security for slavery in its borders and compensated emancipation could reunite the union. But in time he issued the Emancipation Proclamation and before his murder he was advocating suffrage for at least some freedmen. On assuming the presidency in early 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, a brilliant but rather conventional Progressive, had no idea that in a few years he would sign the Social Security Act, adopt Keynesian economic policies, lead a global alliance in a second world war and create the UN.

Along with abundant opportunities for failure there will be occasional opportunities for greatness—for Barack Obama and the nation he leads—in the turbulent years ahead. Of that at least we can be certain.

Read more

Prospect's symposium on the future of America with contributions from Martin Walker, Thomas Wright, Jonathan Derbyshire and James Crabtree.

Also, exclusively online, ABC's foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto argues that Obama will struggle to make friends in the middle east, Erik Tarloff dissects the Republican's Palin problem, and Stephen Boyle explains why the Democrats might turn out to be Obama's worst enemy.

5) The Dangers of Premature Obama Bashing
By Micahel Medved


When is the right time to begin bashing Obama?

Everyone knows that within the next few months the GOP must fight fiercely and effectively to derail major aspects of the new president's disastrous left wing agenda.

But conservatives will make a serious mistake if we begin the conflict before Obama even takes office.

The most important factor to remember is that most Americans feel exhausted and weary from a seemingly endless two year campaign and seriously crave a break from politics. Part of the general sense of relief and exultation on election night involved the shattering of an historic racial barrier, of course, but the public also felt gratitude because they sensed that a bitter partisan struggle had at long last lurched, coughed and sputtered to its climactic conclusion. They not only welcomed the unifying, bipartisan tone of both Obama's victory speech and McCain's singularly gracious concession, but embraced the idea that the nation might actually enjoy a needed respite from the daily attacks and "gotcha!" politics.

In that sense, the immediate insistence on demonizing the president-elect conveys precisely the wrong message. One of the reasons the GOP suffered major reverses across the country involved the perception that they practiced more divisive and angry politics than did the Obama-crats, with his fuzzy, feel-good message of hope and change. By a wide margin, poll respondents identified McCain more than Obama as a candidate who spent most of his time attacking rather than offering a positive vision.

In that sense, Republicans in talk radio and elsewhere who greet the new president with instantaneous denunciation as a "thug," or set up a public count-down calendar to the next presidential election, hurt themselves more than Obama. They confirm the already damaging public perception that Republicans know what we're against but offer no coherent vision of what we support.

The angry negativity also helps the GOP avoid the painful soul-searching and re-tooling of the conservative message that faces any viable party after a bitter, sweeping defeat—and that's another reason to postpone the Obama attacks. Focusing on what's wrong with the Democrats allows us to avoid facing what's wrong with us, and figuring out why the public rejected our message in both 2006 and 2008. Trashing our opponents helps us to dodge the blame for public disillusionment with the Republican Party itself– blame that extends well beyond McCain (or Palin) and should rightly include some of the same commentators most eager to return to the partisan fray.

There's nothing improper about tough partisan attacks as long as they focus on substance and significant issues, and constitute a response to some misguided initiatives or bone-headed errors by the other side. We should give Obama the chance to make such mistakes – as he surely will, following the pattern of Bill Clinton, another newly elected, young Democratic hero with seemingly messianic gifts.

Yes, the public expects harsh political warfare in the years ahead but it matters greatly who's the perceived initiator of the conflict. Bush suffered through his entire presidency for the perception that he never delivered on his earnest "uniter-not-a-divider" rhetoric, and that he and Karl Rove– and not the Democrats – created the hostile, toxic atmosphere in Washington.

It's a much smarter strategy to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt in his early days as the nation's leader. If we furiously reject any attempts at reconciliation or governing from the center before they're even made, we only encourage the new president to turn sharply to the left—and give him public justification for doing so.

It's more important right now to focus on the spirit of the upcoming holidays – giving thanks, rejoicing in family, demonstrating our commitment to patriotism, peace and good will, and dropping discussions of Obama's birth certificate (what a stupid obsession!) and past radical associations. Surely, even the most embittered battler must welcome the idea of giving rock 'em/sock 'em partisan politics a brief rest. It's also a sure thing that the American people will feel profoundly grateful if we do so.

6)Obama Hears a Giant Sucking Sound His legacy is spent before he gets his hands on it.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
His friends advise Barack Obama to launch a "New" New Deal. Maybe that's because the old New Deal is sinking fast.

Mr. Obama's one deeply false note during the campaign was his harping on "deregulation" as if that were the source of current troubles. His real problem is the crack-up of the world FDR built.


Barack Obama gets taken for a ride by the UAW.
Fannie Mae was a New Deal creation, subsidizing the securitization of mortgage debt. FDR's successors piled on the subsidies for housing debt and incentives directed at low-income borrowers. Kaboom.

Then there's the UAW, born in 1935. For decades the UAW steadily traded away domestic auto market-share to imports and transplants to keep its aging membership toiling away toward their golden pensions and collecting wages and benefits twice those of their competitors. It worked for a while . . .

Mr. Obama must be looking around and beginning to suspect he will be pouring his political capital, along with considerable taxpayer capital, down bottomless holes for the next four years. He won't be building a legacy as the new FDR, but cleaning up after the last one.

Fannie and its twin, Freddie Mac, have already come back for a second helping of taxpayer money as their once-profitable business model devolves into a politically directed subsidy machine for propping up home prices and delaying foreclosures. Their next meltdown, in government hands, is all but written in the cards.

AIG, an otherwise healthy insurance company that went bust betting on housing debt, has already consumed taxpayer loans and capital injections nearly as big as AIG's $200 billion market cap when it was one of the world's most admired firms. AIG still has a valuable insurance business, but ignoramuses in Congress and the press are busy destroying it. The company sells many of its products through busy independent agents. It uses lush "seminars" to encourage them to sit still for pitches about why AIG should still be trusted despite AIG's purgatory in the headlines. But these seminars only produce more outraged grandstanding from the political commentariat.

It will take years for the government to get AIG off its hands, and there likely won't be much value left for taxpayers when it finally does.

But the really giant sucking sound is the auto sector, getting ready to gobble up whatever hopes Mr. Obama might have had for an ambitious, forward-looking presidency.

He and Nancy Pelosi naturally insist that any "bailout" must hit multiple bogies. They want UAW jobs to be preserved. They want the shibboleth of energy independence advanced. They want "green" cars to please the Tom Friedmans of the world. They want to tell taxpayers they're getting more for their money than just a bailout of Detroit.

All this makes sense to a politician, but not to any practical person, who knows that multiple bogies are bound to be conflicting bogies. You could just barely envision a bailout that wouldn't necessarily be a disastrous waste of money, one that would help Detroit create a competitive cost structure in pursuit of building products that are competitive in the marketplace. But this is just the opposite of what Mr. Obama and his Democrats have in mind.

Today in Opinion Journal
REVIEW & OUTLOOK

The Environmental Motor CompanyPirates' DelightThe Lieberman Pardon

TODAY'S COLUMNISTS

Business World: Obama Hears a Giant Sucking Sound
– Holman W. Jenkins Jr.The Tilting Yard: It's Time to Give Voters the Liberalism They Want
– Thomas Frank

COMMENTARY

Why GM Deserves Support – Rick WagonerPirates Exploit Confusion About International Law
– David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. CaseyI'm Still Inspired by John McCain
– Robbie CohenPrepare to witness, then, the awesome capacity of an unreformed Detroit to consume taxpayer billions with nothing to show for it.

That Mr. Obama had been sent by history to assuage the insecurities of the middle class with a "New" New Deal was always a tad detached from reality anyway. The reason is those giant legacies of existing New Dealism known as Social Security and Medicare, about which he was careful to say nothing intelligible during the campaign. These programs worked for a while too, but now their expected revenues are (in present value) about $99.2 trillion short of the expected outlays required to assure present and future workers their promised comfort in retirement.

Then again, Mr. Obama did say something in his campaign about tax rebates for all these payroll taxpayers. He also said something about government matching contributions to incentivize today's low- and middle-income workers to save for their own retirement.

Voilà, personal accounts funded by payroll-tax givebacks -- strangely similar to the solution our current president promoted to help workers escape the impending insolvency of the government retirement programs. Mr. Obama envisioned himself extending FDR's work. He may end up finishing George Bush's.