OBAMA CENTRE-STAGE AS A JILTED LEFT LOOKS ON / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENTARY & ANALYSIS ( HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

Obama centre-stage as a jilted left looks on

By Jurek Martin

Published: January 25 2011 10:23


The angry thunder on the American right is still present, even if a little muted since the Tucson shootings. Some conservative Republicans, if not the firebrands, are even going to sit with Democrats at President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, rather than sitting on their hands on the other side of the aisle, shouting “liar” or conspicuously playing with their smartphones.

But, for once, it is the noise on the left that commands more attention. Its most distinctive media voice, Keith Olbermann, is going silent, removed from his prime time show on MSNBC last Friday, apparently by mutual agreement with his employers. He leaves a big hole; a talented, literate, if combustible, broadcaster, he had been the first liberal successfully to take on rightwing dominance of talk radio and TV on its own polemical terms.


Conspiracy theorists immediately attributed his demise to the imminent arrival of Comcast, the cable and internet giant, as the new parent of Universal-NBC. It certainly would have been an embarrassment to Comcast if he had left shortly after it assumed control, but the truth does appear to lie in the many and long-standing disputes between him and his existing bosses.


Elsewhere on the left, there is unconcealed distaste for the president’s supposed move to the political centre. This, in their view, was manifested last week by the appointment of an industrialist, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric, to head a new advisory panel on economic recovery; the arrival of two business-friendly operatives, Bill Daley and Gene Sperling, into the upper reaches of the White House staff; and the fact that Mr Obama even wrote a column promising less heavy-handed regulation in the Wall Street Journal no less, the house organ for his political opponents.


To my mind, these liberals are acting like jilted lovers. Mr Obama has always been an intellectual pragmatist, never a reflexive progressive, no matter how the left vested so many hopes in him or the right portrayed him as a socialist, or worse. The big difference after the midterm elections is that he no longer needs Congressional Democrats as much as he did when his legislative plate was so full. I suspect he finds not having to defer to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi quite liberating, even though he would never say so.


Mr Olbermann was far from alone in voicing disappointment. Paul Krugman of Princeton and the New York Times, the intellectual giant of the left, even went so far in a New York Review of Books article to propose that progressives “de-link” themselves from Mr Obama in the 2012 election.

Robert Reich, who served in the Clinton cabinet and commands a following as a policy commentator, attacked Mr Immelt’s elevation because GE had outsourced so many American jobs overseas, not exactly consistent, he said, with his mandate to create more jobs at home.


Mr Krugman does have a Nobel Prize to his name, but in economics not politics, and he was vague on how de-linking might be accomplished. No Democratic challenger to Mr Obama’s re-nomination is in sight, in contrast to the proliferation of potential Republican candidates. Former Senator Russell Feingold, defeated in November, gets mentioned but more in fond hope than well-founded expectation. In any case, he has always been very much his own man, not the tool of others or the standard bearer for lost causes.


If opinion polls mean anything beyond the moment, Mr Obama’s sharp rise in public approval, especially among independent voters and moderate Republicans, since the lame duck Congress actually got some things done suggests that any challenge from his left would be quixotic in the extreme. Wouldn’t it make more sense, if the centre rules again, to leave the extremes to the Palins, Bachmanns, Boltons etc on the dark side of the political moon?


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.