Obama and Values-Based Messaging
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on January 24th, 2009 5:40 am by HL
Obama and Values-Based Messaging
The one sure thing about Barack Obama’s inaugural address is that it increased tensions within the progressive coalition about his taste for “bipartisanship” (or “post-partisanship,” if you prefer). Despite passages in the speech that were a very direct repudiation of the Bush administration, and a few strikingly progressive flourishes (e.g., the shout-out to religious “unbelievers”), the overall tenor continued his long rhetorical preoccupation with embracing values usually considered conservative as well as liberal, and deriding the partisan fights in Washington (this time in the Pauline phrase “childish things”). As has almost always been the case with Obama, observers have reached very different conclusions when listening to him in the inaugural speech and in other recent utterances. Some conservatives profess themselves as pleased or even charmed by his invocation of “conservative” values like hard work, personal and mutual responsibility, sacrifice and discipline, even as they (typically) warn he may not really believe in them. Some progressives continue to be alarmed by his post-partisan talk, and even more (notably both Marie Coco and Michael Crowley in separate pieces today) suggest it’s a habit that will soon expire in the partisan exigencies of Washington. A few have divined somewhat less conventional ideological leanings in Obama; both Alan Wolfe and E.J. Dionne have noted the communitarian vein that runs deep through Obama’s rhetoric.
