Obama’s Centrism

Let’s keep this quick today:

Right on cue the Republicans have criticized the Obama budget as being an ‘attack on the elderly’. You and I saw this coming. Apparently the White House did not. Or at least they thought they could offset the criticism by appealing to high minded centrists by representing the Obama budget as having sacrifices all round.

I think Obama is nuts for doing this. We all know that the Republicans are uninterested in the budget. They simply want to attack Obama in any way possible. Yet he continues to tee the ball up for them. Why I wonder?

It’s his obsession with centrism. And being serious.

Our elite, which loves to think of itself as being above the earthiness of hard scrabble politics, has fallen prey to, and is fixated by, centrism.

To be centrist is to be serious. At least in the eyes of centrists. It is to be able to see both sides of an argument and disagree with both. It is to appear capable of making hard choices. Especially when dealing with difficult issues. especially if they’re other people’s issues. And here’s the key to centrism: a good centrist is someone who feels that they ask the tough questions.

Tough answers to tough questions.

That’s the formula. It sounds so sensible. Being centrist allows someone to avoid having any strong opinions, and yet appear to be strong at the same time. They’re the kind of people who say that nothing’s personal as they fire hundreds of workers in order to ‘save’ a company. They’re the ones who are willing to slash budgets for poor people or the unemployed because we can ‘no longer afford it’. They pose as moralists. They tell the poor that they ought to work harder. They regret having to be vicious. Then they retreat to their expensive clubs for comfort and to exchange stories about how serious they are and how hard it is to have all that responsibility. For which they are all well paid.

Another aspect of centrists is they purport to be advocates of openness and meritocracy. Yet they inhabit a very closed world characterized by shared experiences and shared education. They share a vision. They share the same problems and they thus share the same solutions. They live in the same places as other centrists. They talk only to themselves. They think they are clever. Their walls are papered with evidence of higher education. They have famous mentors. Yet they imagine they earned their way to the top. They imagine themselves to be self made. Yet they are often the third or fourth generation to go to the top schools. And, yes, Daddy made a substantial donation to secure their acceptance at that particular very selective school.

But they’re self made. They made it into the elite on merit.

Right.

I think a good question to ask anyone pretending to be a centrist making tough decisions is about the costs and benefits of the sacrifice they want to impose.

For instance: if we are being ‘forced’ to cut entitlements, what is the ‘force’? Who is doing the forcing? Why? If we are asking the poor, the sick, or the elderly to give something up, who is the beneficiary? Just whose life is better off after all these tough decisions have been made?

Chances are it will be a centrist.

But we aren’t suppose to ask that are we?