Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Pragmatism as public policy

So the Obamabot lefties who were hoping for left-wing ideologues to be appointed to Obama's cabinet are hopping mad, and the righties who expected Obama to be this radical left-wing President who appointed left-wing ideologues to all positions are... stunned into almost near-silence. They don't seem to know what to say. But in reality, Obama isn't doing anything I didn't expect him to do. If you followed his actual policy proposals and so forth during the primaries and the campaign, you saw deliberately centrist positions therein. The people who are surprised at his current appointees, who are largely pragmatic centrists, are people who let ideology blind them to reality. Obama is a centrist, and always has been a centrist. The only argument is whether he's a slightly-left centrist or a slightly-right centrist, and that's an argument that's going to have to wait until we see him actually doing that Presidenting stuff (which, remember, doesn't happen until January 21?).

-- Badtux the Pragmatic Penguin

2 comments:

  1. Me neither.
    I just wish all our pragmatism included leftish and rightish good ideas and left out the bad rightish (no leftish since they are not allowed.)
    meh.
    --ml

    ReplyDelete
  2. Indeed, as anyone who was paying attention could have told them, Obama is a moderate.

    ReplyDelete

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