Centerfield

The Maverick View on Obama

Alan Stewart Carl over at Maverick Views suggests that Obama may be appearing optimistically revolutionary while being decidedly wonkish.

First there's this, which rang so true that I was astonished:

Of all the candidates, I find Barack Obama to be the most enigmatic (which is why I keep writing about him). I am certain he is not a con man but I am not at all sure what realities prop up his rhetoric. Is his earnestness a product of naiveté or does it come from a deep wisdom about America and our government?

A thousand times yes. Unlike our esteemed ex-patriates and reliable anti-Obama frothers over at Stubborn Facts, blogger Simon and war-obsessed poster Maxtrue, I don't worry that Obama is no more than a bullshit artist with a stealth agenda that is equal parts Jimmy Carter anbd Che-fricken-Guevera.

Alan goes on to refer to the recent newsweek profile.

Newsweek reveals a number of incidents where Obama has chosen pragmatism over idealism, preferring to hammer out a compromise rather than play the usual zero-sum game. He defines success as any forward movement, however small, toward his goals.

...

Take away his golden tongue and Obama is a mainline liberal who has shown an aptitude for combining persuasion and compromise to achieve incremental change. His rhetoric is made for primetime but his political temperament is more the stuff of C-Span. That’s not to say he wouldn’t make a decent president – just that those who vote for him need to look behind the big speeches and understand that by “change” Obama almost certainly means “small, drawn-out steps towards change.”

Plenty of food for thought there, By the Way, Alan is a one-time devoted centrist who used to blog at the dormant Yellow Line, and then decided he was a bit more independent than that after all.

Since I've been trolling blogrolls to review what, if anything, has become of one-time centrists who are enduring, I've found so far that there's fertile ground in reincarnation as an independent critic, Nothing wrong with that at all.

The hypothesis that suggests itself is that would-be centrists are more suited to loose confederation than they are to marching in formation. More on that in a future post, unless circumstances overtake me.