A Bridge to Nowhere?

Excerpted from the New York Times, Monday 24 March 2008

Mark Penn, the chief strategist for Mrs. Clinton, said Mr. Obama’s Senate career did not back up his promise of being able to forge a new governing coalition across party lines.

“It’s a great promise,” Mr. Penn said. “But are the actions consistent with the words? I don’t see it.”

Still, many of Mr. Obama’s supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Mrs. Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured era in which progressives (few have returned to using the word “liberal”) make no apologies about their goals — universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans — and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them.

Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, often displays the wariness of Democrats who came of political age in the Reagan era, when the party was constantly on the defensive. As The New Republic recently put it, “Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.”

Mr. Obama significantly outperformed Mrs. Clinton among independents in the coast-to-coast nominating contests on Feb. 5, and in several other key contests. But can that transpartisan appeal be sustained? He has only begun to take some hard political hits — from the Clinton campaign, from conservative commentators and radio hosts, and from the campaign of Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.

So far, Republicans give every indication of planning to portray Mr. Obama as just another big-government liberal.

“When you’re rated by National Journal as to the left of Ted Kennedy and Bernie Sanders, that’s going to be difficult to explain,” said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

[ a) "Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.” Somebody actually got paid money for writing that sentence.
b) Bernie Sanders is the only avowed socialist ever elected to the US Senate.]

So the situation remains that Obama claims he is going to build bridges. And the people on the other end of the bridge he intends to build are declaring publicly that they oppose everything he favors and that they are going to rip him to shreds at their earliest opportunity.

This is very much like the situation of the peace camp in Israel. They want to build bridges to people who respond to their peaceful intentions with, "Death to the Jews!".

In both cases the problem is that wishful thinking is not a workable policy.