"In Praise of Extremism"

Frank Rich (former New York Times columnist and now writing for New York magazine online) has a thought-provoking article, "In Praise of Extremism,"

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/bipartisanship-2011-10/index3.html

in which he says, essentially, that it's time to give up on the conciliatory approach in the face of Republican intransigence.

Obama can’t change his DNA. He is by definition a conciliatory man of the middle: as a black man raised in white America, as a mediator among warring political factions at The Harvard Law Review, as a community organizer, as a child of divorce. But sometimes blacks and whites, liberals and conservatives, and moms and dads cannot reconcile their differences. Sometimes the negotiations and compromises that are the crux of politics are nonoperative. This is one of those times. The other side has no interest in striking grand bargains or even small ones. It wants not so much to reform government, a worthy goal, as to auction off its parts and distribute the proceeds to its corporate backers.

Unlike many liberal and progressive critics of Obama, however, Rich does not place all the blame on Obama's conciliatory nature. He writes also of "the Washington club" of "independent" pundits and political advisers who continue to urge bipartisanship. But the quest for bipartisanship is proving to be a fool's errand -- and it is that pursuit, not the ideological debate, that is paralyzing the country, according to Rich.

It’s not “stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country,” but the intransigence of the tea party and the Republican leadership it has cowed. And so, with no legislation possible and no economic miracles in store, Obama’s presidency has shrunk to the bully pulpit. His best hope is to use that pulpit, with all the muscle, talent, and energy at his command, to ferociously define and defend the American values under siege by the revolutionaries at the capital’s gates. That doesn’t mean more eloquent speeches from Washington. It means relentless barnstorming night and day. It means at long last embracing a big-picture narrative. It means going on the road and out-Trumaning Truman in drawing clear lines of battle with either the Dewey or Goldwater who emerges. It means—and this, thankfully, is another part of Obama’s DNA—playing to win.

Let's hope the passionate, at times fiery, Obama that we're seeing now is the beginning of just that -- playing, seriously, to win.

Unfortunately, it also means that not much helpful legislation is likely to get passed during the coming campaign year, which means the economy may very well look worse, with no decrease in joblessness -- and that raises the bar even higher for Obama's re-election bid.

Ralph