Comic books! Star Trek! Harry Potter! Ladies and gentlemen: Our future president is a nerd!Comic books, Star Trek, and Harry Potter are three pop-cultural phenomena that have captured hours (weeks) of my time and attention over the course of my life. My theorem: Chronic dorkdom is never escaped, merely suppressed.
Just thinking about this stuff makes me want to hear "Hail to the Chief," whistled by R2-D2 or performed by that Cantina Band of buttheaded musicians in Mos Eisley.
But seriously, even though I am (already) tired (without really having dealt with it) of the "Center-Right Nation" meme, Obama will govern from the center, no matter what the Right loudly denounces :
All of his bipartisan gestures, however necessary and sincere, need not mean that Obama must abandon his promises of change upon taking the oath of office. But he can safely ignore the pompous advice he is receiving from many quarters to ingratiate himself with the establishment and to prove that he is sufficiently mature to trash his ideals. For he above all must know by now, after traveling across the country for the past two years, that people are in the mood for something different. They have just told us, with unprecedented vehemence, that the last thing they want is more of the same.
Indeed, the corollary of Obama’s call for change is that American political culture has shifted away from the dominant conservatism of the past three decades. He perceived that shift, which is one of the reasons that he defeated Hillary Clinton, whose campaign failed to understand what was happening until it was too late.
That is why he ran for president, and it is why he ran on a platform that became increasingly specific about the changes he will make. He cannot back away from reforming health care and bringing coverage to all, but he doesn’t have to back away because that is what the public wants and what the country needs. He cannot back away from rebuilding our energy system to reduce climate change, but he doesn’t have to—because that is what the public wants and what the world needs. He doesn’t have to back away from a massive investment program in infrastructure, transportation and education, either, because everyone agrees that we need productive economic stimulus. And he doesn’t have to back away from a new regime of financial and economic regulation, including a renewal of labor rights, because deregulation is discredited, as even its advocates can no longer deny.
His ideas are anathema to the Republican right, which can be expected to protest and obstruct with all the bile it can muster. But so what? The voters are no longer entranced by conservative ideology, if they ever were, and they are impatient for new solutions.
Obama means to govern from the center, as most presidents have. That is the nature of his temperament and his character, if not his ideology. But if he means to fulfill his mandate—and there is no reason yet to believe otherwise—he will mark the center in a new place.
*Sigh* Sometimes I think all of reality is biased against conservatism. Then I remember my social science training and realize conservatism is just a terrible social theory: its descriptive and predictive/prescriptive components spectacularly fail the accuracy test, being not merely wrong key policy concerns but as wrong as its possible to be.
Hmm. From dorkiness to theory evaluation in one post...blogging is cool.
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