I’m having trouble deciding what I think about this latest scandal on the left — Obama’s appointment of Bill Daley to Chief of Staff.
And I must say, to my dismay: Sandra’s piece — her first for the HPR! — did not give me many answers. Rather than argue she preferred to insinuate. Daley worked at a bank! Daley made remarks against health care reform! “Clearly,” she wrote, Obama “cares more about vote-mongering than he does about his progressive ideals.”
Sandra knows what she’s doing. Writers, she explains (quoting Glenn Greenwald), should be working on behalf of the mobilized left.
Speaking out against the President’s “compromise” policies lets him know that liberals will not just sit back and let Obama do whatever he wants with the presidency…
That’s truth enough. But if that’s why we’re writing — for the sake of politicking, not truth — then we ought to admit that fact, first of all, and then — and here’s the kicker — stop criticizing Obama for doing the same.
Because, like most things in this world, the Daley appointment is hard to judge and was probably even harder to make — one would have to grapple with counterfactuals and organizational dynamics; with player incentives and with varying time horizons. Who else could he have picked? What influence does ideology have on bureaucracy? Sure I distrust the banking sector; but I also know that the politics happens in a world that is real and within an American tradition that is variegated and that compromise is not always moral weakness and is sometimes the opposite.
So if you’re a writer working to “mobilize base,” you ignore these facts. You bowdlerize complexity for the sake of expediency. You measure purity — pure accuracy in representing the difficulty and nuance of the Daley pick, for example — against the need to act. You write something like what Sandra wrote.
That willingness to compromise, so utterly American and so perfectly political, is thus what finally and ironically unites the Greenwalds of this world with the Obamas. It’s a sensibility that I deeply respect, because getting things done matters in life, perhaps above all.
And also it’s the sensibility that makes Bill Daley Chief of Staff.