The Audacity of Pragmatism

I spent some of the past weekend talking to friend of mine about Clinton and Obama. He is an unabashed Obama supporter and I grudgingly in the Clinton camp.

I mention this discussion—which probably would have ended in blows were we both not so dissipated—because it seems pretty representative of the positions many Democrats. For lack of better terms, it is a difference between idealists and pragmatists.

Anyway, for pragmatists it is all about electability, those Democrats who will vote for any candidate based on, in their minds anyway, his or her electability in the general election. For the idealists it appears to be about something different, making a statement about what is possible, some new politics of change, and a candidate whose actions are more transparent, more truthful. Idealists support their support of Obama by pointing to his appeal to young people, to independents, even perhaps the oft-mentioned-but-rarely-sighted Obamakin, the Republican voter supposedly so smitten with Obama and his transcendence of all that is evil and nasty about politics that he or she is willing to cross party lines to vote for him.

I want to say first that while I consider myself a pragmatist and my friend the idealist, it is not because I know, for a fact, that Clinton is more electable than Obama. There are a lot of things that indicate this, as I have suggested ad nauseum before, but no one can say for sure. Who is to say, for example, that Obama won’t do better with working-class white voters or any of the other constituencies where he has not fared so well in the primaries? Anyway, the distinction I am making is based solely on relative emphasis: if electability is your primary concern you are a pragmatist, if not, and you are driven by something else, such as change, a black man being President, an end to politics as usual, the transformation of the American political landscape you are an idealist or a romantic.

Although often treated as pejorative terms or as signs of weakness, idealism and romanticism are neither. It is a good and necessary thing to be able to think in these terms and, if people did not, we’d never get beyond our conceptual borders or the limitations of convention, of the present. History would be an even sadder narrative than it already is. So when I say to my idealistic friend, as I have from the outset, that Obama will become mired in race and deconstructed as one of the most liberal candidates Democrats have chosen to seriously consider for the nomination, I acknowledge this as a shortcoming of sorts on my part, an inability not so much to be unable to imagine an Obama presidency but to actually believe that it could come to pass in 2008.

I see Obama’s wonderful speech in Philadelphia yesterday, a result of his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in the same light. It shows Obama’s uncommon ability to discuss matters of race or class in a way that is at once profound and yet accessible, moving but based on real experiences. The man is obviously more than an empty suit, as Clinton and some of her supporters would have us believe and his appeal clear. The problem—the reality, if you will--is that Obama’s words, while reassuring black voters that he will not completely abandon Wright and moderate white voters that he doesn’t share Wright’s uglier views, is unlikely to convince the people that are likely most offended by his association with Wright, white, working-class Democrats, and many of the independent voters who have been attracted to Obama thus far.

My lack of romanticism, is a shortcoming, though, that I can live with. I’m simply not willing to make a statement or choose a candidate even if I am moved by his or her demeanor and promise, by the thought of how wonderful, after America’s long night of racial inequality, a black American could be the chief executive of the country that once considered legally and morally correct his enslavement. None of these things, important as they are, means anything if the candidate is unable to win in November. And the fact is, I believe Obama will lose in November if he is the Party’s nominee. So that’s what it comes down to for me and I don’t believe, whatever their motives, that this is the case for my idealistic friend and most of the other Obama supporters I know.

The Democrats have suffered a lot from such idealism over the years and it has been encouraged, in fact, by the Democratic nominating process and its various rules. Party liberals and activists not only set the rules but drive the caucuses where the activism of just a few hale and hearty souls can determine the victor. Such a process has rewarded the Democrats with candidates like Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis. In fact after the McGovern debacle in 1972, in which he was trounced by Richard Nixon, the bright lights of the Democratic Party came up with the idea of the superdelegates to help reign in such silliness. Idealism and romanticism, it seems, had come to be considered dangerous.

And rightly so. If Hillary Clinton does not end up with at least the majority of the popular vote, it is unlikely that even the superdelegates will be able to save the Party from its idealists. If that is the case, we will likely be adding Obama’s name to the pantheon of beloved but flawed candidates after he loses in November. If this comes to pass, the idealists--those educated, relatively wealthy people Bill Clinton was talking about when he said, they are voting (for Obama) but they are not the ones who need a President--will just as likely hold themselves blameless, another enviable ability granted them by their frame of reference, and vote for the next new thing that comes along which stokes the fires of their imagination.

And if Hillary Clinton is the Party’s nominee and she loses in November? I’ll just have to live with the fact that I not only lack imagination but that I was just plain wrong.