Maybe Barack Obama’s feints to the right will benefit him politically, maybe they’ll offend liberals who believed he really was a
different kind of politician. Maybe the swing voters Obama is
wooing with his less-liberal rhetoric are no longer paying attention by the time he lurches back
to the left.
But one thing is clear: Obama isn’t as deep a policy thinker as
his admirers pretend. Many of his issue positions, evolving and
otherwise, scarcely make sense.
Take for example his recent pronouncements on official English initiatives.
Plenty of voters, including sensible moderate swing voters and
culturally conservative Democrats, think bilingual education is an
ineffectual boondoggle and that the government should conduct its
business in English. Many La Raza-style interest groups and
multicultural liberals feel differently. Rather than alienate
either constituency, Obama spewed incoherent mush:
You know, I don’t understand when people are going
around worrying about, “We need to have English- only.” They want
to pass a law, “We want English-only.”
Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with
that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether
immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need
to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking
about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every
child speaking more than one language.
You know, it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they
all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then
we go over to Europe, and all we can say [is], “Merci
beaucoup.”
Sounds reasonable enough to a soccer mom who wants her child to be
competitive in the global economy, right? Except that the
“English-only” policies Obama is condemning have nothing to do
eliminating foreign-language instruction in public schools. There
are no Minutemen patrolling high school hallways and reporting Mrs.
Smith’s French class. The actual debate has much more to do with
whether immigrants and their children will learn English, as Obama
purports to favor.
Many bilingual education programs are premised on the idea that
a child must become proficient in his native tongue to learn a new
language. Critics argue that such programs deny children an
opportunity to develop English skills at a young age when doing so
is easiest. As John J. Miller put it, “One of the sad results of bilingual
education is that it often leaves kids semi-literate in two
languages and fluent in none.”
Yet at least this exercise in sloppy centrism was superficially
plausible. Less so was Obama’s attempt to reconcile contradictory
statements on abortion policy. He told Relevant, a Christian magazine, that he
did not believe “mental distress” was a valid exception to state
late-term abortion bans:
I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely
appropriate for states to restrict or even prohibit late-term
abortions as long as there is a strict, well-defined exception for
the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that “mental distress”
qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a
serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are
real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to
term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in
place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.
Except that
Doe v. Bolton, the companion case to
Roe
v. Wade, defines a woman’s health as “all factors — physical,
emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age — relevant
to the well-being of the patient.” The Freedom of Choice Act, which
Obama co-sponsors and has promised to sign into law as president,
upholds this standard and requires mental-health exceptions to
late-term abortion bans.
So then Obama backtracked:
My only point is this — historically I have been a
strong believer in a women’s right to choose with her doctor, her
pastor and her family. And it is…I have consistently been saying
that you have to have a health exception on many significant
restrictions or bans on abortions including late-term abortions.
In the past there has been some fear on the part of people who,
not only people who are anti-abortion, but people who may be in the
middle, that that means that if a woman just doesn’t feel good then
that is an exception. That’s never been the case.
I don’t think that is how it has been interpreted. My only point
is that in an area like partial-birth abortion having a mental,
having a health exception can be defined rigorously. It can be
defined through physical health, it can be defined by serious
clinical mental-health diseases. It is not just a matter of feeling
blue. I don’t think that’s how pro-choice folks have interpreted
it. I don’t think that’s how the courts have interpreted it and I
think that is important to emphasize and understand.
Except there is no known “feeling blue” provision in American
abortion jurisprudence. Martin Haskell, the inventor of
partial-birth abortion, told the
American Medical News in
1993 that 80 percent of the later-term abortions he performed were
“purely elective.”
Obama, a former constitutional law instructor, had similar
difficulty expressing a coherent position on the Second Amendment.
In response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the
District of Columbia’s handgun ban, Obama said: “I have always believed that the Second
Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I
also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save
their children from the violence that plagues our streets through
common-sense, effective safety measures. The Supreme Court has now
endorsed that view…”
Except that Obama had previously endorsed the constitutionality of the D.C. handgun ban,
the very same policy the Supreme Court was finding
unconstitutional. This suggests that there is at least some
distance between Obama’s interpretation of the Second Amendment and
the Court’s.
In one of his few non-rhetorical differences with the netroots,
Obama voted to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act with many provisions civil libertarians oppose. He tried to
reassure his supporters by promising to “work with Chris Dodd, Jeff
Bingaman and others in an effort to remove” immunity for telecom
companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s
surveillance program. And he did vote for an amendment that would
strip such immunity.
Except that he did so once it became clear the legislation would
pass without the amendment. Obama had once vowed to filibuster any FISA legislation that
gave immunity to the telecom companies. Instead he voted for such
legislation.
Obama may be a political genius, but logically consistent
policymaking doesn’t seem to be his strong suit. Either that or he
just doesn’t think the voters are very bright.
