Surprise, Surprise, Surprise

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking on behalf of those who just can’t be bothered.

The irony is just delicious. You couldn’t make up stuff like this if you tried: The news moved over the wire a week or so ago that some of the anti-war groups are getting concerned about President-elect Obama’s plans for his cabinet and national security team. To quote Paul Richter of http://www.allvoices.com/, “The activists – key members of the coalition that propelled Obama to the White House – fear he is drifting from the anti-war moorings of his once-longshot presidential candidacy.”

Kevin Martin, the Executive Director of the group Peace Action, is quoted as saying, “So, in the short term, we’re going to be disappointed. They may turn out to be all pro-war, or at least people who were pro-war in the beginning.” And this is the quote I just love: “There’s so much Obama hero worship, we’re having to walk this line where we can’t directly criticize him.” (Gee, you just noticed that?)

Well, Kevin, let me share with you one of my favorite Obama quotes, and one that we will all have plenty of occasions to ponder over the next four years. I’ve shared this in previous posts, but I think it’s appropriate to emphasize it once again. It’s from Audacity of Hope: “I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.” Looks like you did some of that projecting, and it was your turn to be disappointed.

Many people have stated that we “don’t know who Obama is.” I disagree. The mainstream media certainly didn’t go out of their way to tell us, but if we’ve paid attention, we actually know a lot about who he is. We know where he came from, and the forces that shaped him. We know he was a student of Saul Alinsky – the radical “father” of community organizing. We know who his friends and associates were. We know that, by his voting record, he was the most liberal Senator in the United States Senate – he was to the left of Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, and even Ted Kennedy. We know that he believes in raising taxes on the wealthy and giving some of that money to lower income folks – and that is income redistribution no matter how much he tries to deny it. We know he believes in unrestricted abortion rights. We know that he believes in bigger government.

What we don’t know is how he will govern, because he has no track record by which to judge his governing style. Nobody knows. Not me, not Kevin Martin, not you. That’s why so many of us were nervous about seeing so many people vote for the nebulous values of “hope and change” – because hope is not a strategy, and change is not always for the better. But Obama just may be smart enough to understand that to be successful, he has to govern from the center, which, by the way, means that a lot of the people on the far left who helped elect him are going to end up feeling like Kevin Martin.

And, believe it or not, even though I didn’t vote for Obama, I do want him to be successful, because if he isn’t, it will be a disaster for the nation. I will speak out against policies that I think are bad ideas, and I will attempt to present rational arguments to support my viewpoint. But unlike many at the other end of the political spectrum – who would rather see America lose a war that would place our nation in grave danger than see George W. Bush get credit for the victory – I will not root for Obama’s failure. But I also won’t forget that quote…and you shouldn’t either.

Thanks for listening.