The Jewish Journal / December 3, 2008
Unity in Change’s Clothing
By Sean Hartofilis
As President-elect Obama prepares for a swift transition into the White House, rolling out cabinet appointments like so much new carpeting in the West Wing, many of his critics—on both the left and the right—have begun to point out that “change”, after all the talk, doesn’t look a whole lot different.
In making largely centrist selections, our soon-to-be Commander in Chief is equally upsetting the liberal ideologues who loudly celebrated his election and the Conservatives hawks who’ve been waiting to pounce since around 11PM of November 4th.
Those on the far right see names like Daschle, Emanuel, and Richardson and anticipate the 1990’s all over again. On the far left, they see Obama holding onto Bush Administration staples like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and appointing a collection of Beltway politicians and Wall Street types and view it as a retread of the last decade.
And it isn’t just a matter of certain appointments not being able to please everybody, as the saying goes, but not being able to please anybody. Critics on each side of the aisle are finding reasons to oppose Obama’s nomination of Senator Clinton for Secretary of the State, for example—and for different reasons entirely. Conservatives see her as, well, Hillary Clinton: a figurehead of the liberal left, someone they fought so viciously throughout her husband’s Presidency and her eight years in Congress. Progressives see her as a consummate politician who gave President Bush permission to go into Iraq and who, with their support, Barack Obama defeated in the Democratic primary. And Independents, who Obama so successfully ingratiated with his “change” message and were essential to his general election victory, see it all as party politics as usual.
Which begs the question: exactly what “change” was imagined would flow in the wake of this historic election? A change to what? And, more importantly, from what?
Our President-elect, to be fair, does deserve some of the blame for the backlash that these appointments have provoked. His message of change was always as vague as it was inspiring, crafted to appeal to the largest audience possible, those whose discontent with the way things were had reached it’s peak and were starving for something—anything at all—different. Senator McCain, for his part, made it even tougher on his opponent, not allowing him to continue to define the election in terms of the last eight years (“If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”) And the public grew similarly weary of even hearing the sound of our sitting President’s name.
But that’s precisely what President-elect Obama’s promise of change was most directly a response to: the eight years that preceded it. It’s highly unlikely that there would have been such as resounding embrace of the concept of change, after all, if not for the significant and uninvited changes that accompanied eight years of the Bush Administration.
It was never a matter of changing to something we hadn’t seen before; it was—and is—a matter of changing back to something we haven’t seen enough of lately: a change back to transparency; back to accountability; back to constitutionality; a change back to trust—citizens trusting their government and the government trusting its citizens, working for and with us, not behind our backs.
So, despite his detractors, Obama does indeed look ready to govern from the center—and not because of any ideological bent, positional waffling, or political pandering. He’ll do so because it’s the best way to move past the partisan bickering that has begotten an impotent government and move towards collective solutions. Barack Obama was never advertising, one must remember, a change from the far right to the far left, because that would just be the same old thing reflected in a mirror of bitterness—and with similarly damaging results. What this country needs is a common middle ground: a change towards unity. And it is not only prudent, but essential, for our Commander in Chief to have a sense of humility and compromise when making decisions—about his cabinet and otherwise—if we are to achieve that.
By focusing on finding the most competent men and women to populate his cabinet—regardless of political affiliation—President-elect Obama appears eager to ensure that American politics is, once again, defined by its best ideas, not its boldest idealogues. And no matter what that is a change to or from, it really is the change that’s required.