{"id":449,"date":"2009-04-29T18:20:01","date_gmt":"2009-04-29T18:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/obama-the-conservative.html"},"modified":"2009-04-29T18:20:01","modified_gmt":"2009-04-29T18:20:01","slug":"obama-the-conservative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/obama-the-conservative.html","title":{"rendered":"Obama the Conservative"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Fairey<\/span>Since everyone else is honoring the momentous, history-changing and completely fatuous journalistic landmark known as “The First 100 Days Milestone” of a presidency, let me dip my toe in the water. Or rather, let me cite some others who beat me to the deep end with insights–rather than mere scorecards–that I thought genuinely illuminate the often elusive nature of Obama’s personality, and thereby, his presidency.<\/p>\n

First off, mirabile dictu, is L’Osservatore Romano<\/em>, the Vatican daily that titled its analysis “The 100 days that did not shake the world.” As John Thavis reports for CNS<\/a>, the Vatican paper says Obama has “not confirmed the Catholic Church’s worst fears about radical policy changes in ethical areas” and says the “the new president has operated with more caution than predicted in most areas, including economics and international relations.”<\/p>\n

\n

“On ethical questions, too–which from the time of the electoral campaign have been the subject of strong worries by the Catholic bishops–Obama does not seem to have confirmed the radical innovations that he had discussed,” the paper said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Closer to home, E.J. Dionne has a very good piece (posted here at TNR<\/a>) in which he recognizes Obama’s eschewing of labels but argues that he goes beyond and beneath a “whatever works” style of deliberate non-ideology. Dionne invokes Richard Hofstadter’s distinction between intelligence and intellect and argues that Obama combines the two:<\/p>\n

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Intelligence, Hofstadter argued, is an “unfailingly practical quality” that “works within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals.” Intellect, on the other hand, is the mind’s “creative and contemplative side” that “examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines.”    <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But the best piece I’ve read is by the New Yorker<\/em>‘s George Packer, whose commentary a couple weeks back, “Obamaism<\/a>,” brilliantly captures what for me–and I think much of the public, judging by the polls–is the real appeal of Obama: namely, that despite all the blur of activity and activism, and the infuriating of the left and even more so of the right, Obama is in fact a true conservative:<\/p>\n

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What underlies so many of Obama’s decisions is an attachment to the institutions that hold up American society, a desire to make them function better rather than remake them altogether. Allowing the auto industry to die would create social havoc in communities around the country, and anything less than de-facto government control seems inadequate. So the President has risked a good deal of his political capital on the largest federal intervention in a sector of the economy since at least 1952, when President Truman seized the steel industry to avert a strike during wartime…Obama may not see a similar need to put the government in charge of the big banks, but he has also shown that he has no taste for such a disruption of the system–even if it were politically possible, and perhaps even if it were the most direct route back to financial health.<\/p>\n

In his budget message to Congress, Obama invoked the value of fairness, but his budget proposals don’t create government programs–such as guaranteed-income measures or large numbers of relief jobs–that would establish equality from the top down. Instead, Obama seems to recognize that nothing has shredded the civic fabric in recent years more than the harsh inequalities of finance capitalism and the market ideology of a generation of American politics. This is not the rigid mentality of an engineer of human souls; it’s the attitude of a community organizer.<\/p>\n

It’s also a pretty good description of what used to pass for conservatism–a sense that social relations and institutions are fragile things, and that, while government can’t create wealth or impose equality, at moments like this it has to establish a new equilibrium between individuals and huge economic forces, so that society doesn’t crumble.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Packer goes on to critique–ably I’d say–what modern conservatism has become, and also why the Republicans (and I daresay conservative Catholics) are getting no traction with their over-the-top denunciations of Obama. It just doesn’t fit with perceptions of reality. An NYT story the other day<\/a> about GOP efforts to find a suitable label to denigrate Obama would have been hilarious if not so insidious. Saul Anuzis, who lost a bid to became national party chairman, said the party gained little traction with the “socialist” tag so he is starting to call Obama’s policies “economic fascism.” <\/p>\n

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“We’ve so overused the word ‘socialism’ that it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago,” Mr. Anuzis said. “Fascism — everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Maybe so. But they don’t associate that with Obama. No wonder Arlen Specter went to the Democrats, and polls show the number of self-identified Republicans at a low of 21 percent, about half of those who ID as Democrats and independents. The GOP is re-defining what it means to be a minority in America as much as Barack Obama is. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since everyone else is honoring the momentous, history-changing and completely fatuous journalistic landmark known as “The First 100 Days Milestone” of a presidency, let me dip my toe in the water. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}