Both of these things cannot be true
by David Atkins
It’s almost beating a dead horse at this point, but another salient point comes to mind in critique of this Jonathan Chait column that I took on earlier today.
Recall this paragraph by Chait, with which I agree on its merits:
What, by contrast, are we to make of third-party activists like Thomas L. Friedman or Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz? They have a president who supports virtually everything they want—short-term stimulus, long-term deficit reduction through a mix of taxes and entitlement cuts, clean energy, education reform, and social liberalism. Yet they are agitating for a third party in order to carry out an agenda that is virtually identical to Obama’s. In a column touting the third-party Americans Elect, the closest Friedman comes to explaining why we should have a third party, rather than reelect the politician who already represents their values, is to say that such a party “would have offered a grand bargain on the deficit two years ago, not on the eve of a Treasury default.” He agrees with Obama’s plan, in other words, but proposes to form a new party because he disagrees with his legislative sequencing.
And yet Chait’s lengthy disquisition is meant not to attack the centrist Third Way crowd, but the progressive base for supposedly being so unreasonable.
Sure, progressives have never really been happy with Dem presidents. Point taken. But did it not occur to Mr. Chait that if Obama has done pretty much everything that Thomas Friedman wants, anyone to the left of Thomas Friedman–which would be at least 40% of the country or significantly more, depending on which issues you focus on and how you slice the electorate–might have serious complaints?
Especially since Mr. Obama actually campaigned as a Democrat, on the Democratic Party platform and “change we can believe in,” not as a third party candidate on the Americans Elect platform for neoliberal technocracy? Either Obama is Thomas Friedman’s best choice for President–in which case progressive Democrats have every reason to be furious–or he isn’t, in which case Chait owes Thomas Friedman an apology.
Chait can’t have it both ways.
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