RINO on Records

Andrew Sullivan’s article "How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics" is a welcome, necessary voice. Yes, it reads like brazen pro-Obama propaganda that would topple The New York Times in an earthquake of eye-rolling were it published there. But since it comes from the adjectival grab-bag that is the British gay libertarian baldy Andrew Sullivan, its credibility heightens. Moreover, his piece seems to use Obama’s presidency as a proxy to affront the straw man tactic in general.

Sullivan’s piece is a wonderland of statistics, references, and other evidence compared to what we hear in the Republican nomination campaign. The process to determine the GOP candidate that the media most feels like covering has been a dual-front war against Mitt Romney’s comical lack of charisma on one side and the specter of a devilish, socialist President Obama on the other. The facts that have been employed in both theaters have been suspect where not absent. At a New Hampshire town hall meeting on January 5th, new Romney fan John McCain found himself waist-deep and sinking in an anecdote that needed a quick end. He acheived it by segueing his passing utterance of the word ‘run’ into, “Just like this president can’t RUN from his record!” To which the bored audience recognized the applause sign and dutifully, rotely, riled. This type of record-bashing is common in an early campaign, but there seems to be precious little specificity on what, exactly, these Republicans are bashing. President Obama has deported more illegal immigrants than his predecessor did in eight years—too many—yet the debates are full of criticisms about his “record” on immigration laxity. It is at best intellectually lazy and at worst a straight-up lie. Andrew Sullivan challenges that.

I don’t doubt that Sullivan believes every word of his article, but I’m sure his attitude clouds about the ones he left out. This isn’t intended to be the whole story about the first term of President Barack Obama. Such an article would more likely be a large book, one that rolls all of Obama's questionable triumphs and demoralizing concessions into a context that includes both our empire and institutionalized racism eyeing their respective home stretches. “Do you think Obama’s doing a good job?” It’s a complicated question. So if Sullivan seems to be strangely un-nuanced about his support of the president, it’s because that’s not really what the article is about. It’s a rejection of the GOP’s “radical” narrative, a baseless maligning of the type that, untrammeled, legitimizes a parallel reality.

Sullivan backs off many criticisms of the administration with eloquence and conviction. (And again, evidence.) He does a good job of contextualizing Obama’s successes and not simply qualifying them. One would hope that in political peacetime this article’s premise would be something of a bipartisan baseline consensus from which to diverge on constructive criticism. Instead, we’re stuck with a greenhorn president leading the world's most powerful nation in spite of the opposition using him to live out a rape fantasy. Some may contend that a defense of Obama’s record by our most publicly RINO commentator is predictable, but I prefer to think that Sullivan, like me, feels queasy at the thought of aligning the conservative elements of his politics with that of hatefulness and paranoia. A classic conservative is someone who wants to improve society using existing structures, to ‘conserve’ the good and eliminate or mitigate the bad. Essentially, this is the mechanism of capitalism. What currently passes for conservatism is much more in line with what was formerly known as nihilism or sabotage, a cynical desire to destroy almost all the structures society constructed to self-improve. I contend that Sullivan’s British acculturation removes him from the team-identity aspect of American politics, leaving his ideology more free-floating and currently baffled by the Republican party. While his article would never be confused for a libertarian tract, Sullivan betrays none of the conservative identifier by showing more interest in constructive dialog than partisan bombast.