Liberals to keep pressure on Obama for results
By BEN FELLER
Associated Press
December 1, 2008
Page 2 of 2
Christopher Hayes, the Washington-based editor of The Nation, offered his own lament about a lack of progressive candidates for prominent leadership spots. He said the left has been right about Iraq, financial deregulation and global warming, and yet "no one who comes from the part of American political and intellectual life that has given birth to all of these ideas is anywhere to be found within miles of the Obama Cabinet so far."
Obama pushed back a bit this past week, saying his advisers will blend "experience with fresh thinking."
Of course, he is not done picking his Cabinet, let alone occupying the Oval Office yet. Any rumblings of discontent at this point show that expectations for Obama are enormous within his party. Labor unions and liberal groups spent big money and knocked on countless doors to help get Obama elected.
The undercurrent of concern is not that Obama, granted the title of most liberal senator in one prominent ranking, will suddenly abandon the people who helped elect him or change course on core causes. Rather, it is that liberal side of his party may have to wait longer for victories, and accept smaller ones.
That is the reality of governance right now.
"I think he's moving center-left, rather than left-center. It's fair to call him pragmatic," said Paul Light, a public policy professor and presidential historian at New York University. "I think labor is going to get a lot from him. I think his liberal supporters are going to get a lot from him. But they're going to be disappointed if they want all liberal all the time."
The economy is in such remarkably dreadful shape that Obama may get a pass on other matters while he tries to fix that one.
An early test will be how Obama's team works with congressional leaders and appropriations committee chairmen on his first priority, a massive bill to stimulate the economy. If Democrats go too far left on it, they may lose some conservative members of their own caucus and give Obama some fits.
The left could get early legislative victories on expanded health care for children from poor families, and looser restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research. Obama's stimulus plan is bound to include spending and jobs supported by labor.
As for the anxious anti-war crowd, which helped propel Obama's campaign in its early days, Obama adviser David Axelrod said the new president will not renege on winding down the conflict in Iraq.
Obama says the challenges are simply too huge for the politics of labels; Democrats and Republicans must work together. Pragmatism rules.
"I think what the American people want more than anything is just common sense, smart government," he said. "They don't want ideology."
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