Sullivan on Obama's Place in History

Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish "gets" the role currently being played by Barack Obama in the flow of our country's history as well as any commentator around.

This administration's actions are defensible for the large part from the perspective of the actual circumstances we face: a collapse of the extreme free market capitalism of the last twenty years and the implosion of a neo-imperial post-Cold War foreign policy in the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Mesopotamia. To recognize this, and to defend it from ideological attacks, is, in my view, the real conservative position today.

What should matter to conservatives is the empirical data, the specific circumstances, and the least worst practical way of grappling with social and economic and political problems. That's why I see the work of, say, Yuval Levin, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Jim Manzi, Conor Friedersdorf, Fareed Zakaria, Bruce Bartlett, Jon Rauch, and on a good day, Ramesh Ponnuru (among others) as admirable and well within the contours of conservative discourse - and why I find Andy McCarthy, Powerline, Instapundit, Glenn Beck, Stephen Moore, Bill Kristol, Karl Rove, Sean Hannity and all the toujours l'audace reality-free fanatics to be the antithesis of conservatism as I have long understood it. (The deeper argument here is in The Conservative Soul.)

Obama has been criticized as a "big government liberal" by the few remaining voices of relative sanity in the GOP while the rest shrilly call him every name they can think of heedless of the actual meaning of their epithets. Obama is not a proponent of government action for its own sake but rather uses government as a tool to address a specific set of circumstances. The stimulus bill was a fairly moderate response whose scale was required by that of the fiscal crisis. The same was true of health care reform--its ambition was necessary due to the seriousness and complexity of the problem.

The Republicans have mostly played politics with distorted claims about both issues. When they have proposed actual policy alternatives, they have been as ideologically radical as their rhetoric. Sullivan's point is well-taken: who is the true conservative?

--Ballard Burgher