Denver
So much for bringing us together, Democrats and Republicans, in a new politics of bipartisanship. What Barack Obama advocated earlier in his presidential campaign and throughout the primaries is now officially a thing of the past. With his acceptance speech last night, Obama has become a standard liberal politician who advocates the standard liberal agenda.
Of course Obama makes the case for cleaning out the cupboard of liberal proposals–and enacting them–in an especially effective way. He is the most attractive and also the most clever spokesman liberalism has had in years. And he may get elected president.
But this isn’t what put his long-shot presidential candidacy on the map initially and thrilled so many young and idealistic voters. They rallied to his call for a fresh kind of politics that would essentially transcend the polarization and gridlock and interest groups of Washington. But there was none of that high-toned stuff in Obama’s speech or in the speeches of others who addressed the Democratic convention here. They were simply partisan.
True, Obama threw out some of the old elevating phrases. He said he was for change that would come from “a new politics for a new time.” But he’s now the champion of the oldest of old politics. He said America must “find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in a common effort.” But unity isn’t what Obama is now promoting, except among liberal Democrats.
Nor are other Democrats. If you listened to the speeches of Joe Biden, Obama’s vice presidential running mate, and former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton and practically every other well-known Democrat, you wouldn’t have heard even a whisper of uniting with Republicans on anything.
In fact, the more harshly partisan the speech, the more likely it was to be scheduled for prime time. When the folks running the convention read the prepared text of Ohio governor Ted Strickland’s speech, they liked his tough partisan approach and immediately moved him into an evening time slot with more TV coverage. As a result, the keynote address by former Virginia governor Mark Warner had to be pushed out of prime time. Warner, not coincidentally, was the rare Democrat to advocate bipartisanship.
Two of Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s best friends in the Senate, Biden and John Kerry, were slashing in their partisan criticism of him. Biden once said he’d be happy to join a presidential ticket with McCain, and Kerry sounded McCain out as his running mate in 2004. They changed their tune.
“When we choose a commander in chief this November, we are electing judgment and character, not years in the Senate or years on this earth,” Kerry said, referring to McCain’s age, 72 today. Biden, too, questioned McCain’s judgment.
The biggest surprise in Obama’s speech, to me anyway, was how aggressively he went after McCain, sometimes in a personal way. “John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell–but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives,” Obama said. Obama isn’t likely to either.
Then there was the phony dare he tossed at McCain. “If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament and judgment to serve as the next commander in chief,” Obama declared, “that’s a debate I’m ready to have.” Except he isn’t. McCain asked Obama to join him at ten town hall meetings over the summer. Obama balked. And if McCain proposes to have more than the three scheduled debates this fall, Obama is certain to balk again.
Liberals were surely thrilled by Obama’s speech and indeed by the whole tenor and substance of the Democratic convention, but the business community is bound to have been terrified. Obama offered plenty of liberal schemes for government to carry out, but business was treated as a pariah. The wishes of liberal interest groups, in contrast, were endorsed.
There’s nothing illegal or immoral or even unusual about most of this. It’s just politics at its most crass. Put another way, it’s exactly what Obama said he was determined to rise above. Now we know he isn’t who he said he was.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
