It was merely a typo and may be corrected by now, but Jen Rubin wrote “damning with feint praise”, which set me to thinking that “feint praise” is a useful concept. It means praise of X that is meant to reflect badly on Y. The classic is the familiar liberal tactic of lauding dead conservatives in order to vilify living ones. Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Bill Buckley – they’ve all become exemplars of “responsible conservatism” now, highlighting how truly hateful and fanatical, not to mention mean, those Tea Party people are.
Coincidentally, Andrew Ferguson’s fierce review of Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, illustrates feint praise deployed more subtly. Mr. Ferguson compliments Bill Clinton, not to hold him up as a “good liberal” but to demonize critics of the Obama Administration.
I remember a press conference in 1993 got up by Empower America, a now-forgotten Republican think tank. The purpose was to mark the end of the first year of the Clinton administration. A murderers row of famous-for-Washington conservatives took turns denouncing the Democrats who had seized the White House after a dozen years of Republican benevolence. The upshot of the press conference was tersely summarized by Jack Kemp, a man not known for terseness: President Clinton, Kemp said, had brought to Washington something it had never seen before, the “first frankly left-wing administration in history.”
In retrospect, of course, the charge looks nuts. We know now that within another 18 months, playing defense against a newly elected Republican Congress, Clinton was triangulating his way to the most conservative Democratic administration since the great Cleveland was trundled back to New Jersey. Yet even then, in 1993, a few wise and dispassionate observers saw that Kemp’s alarm was wildly overdone. In that first year, Clinton had embraced economic policies that made him, as he privately lamented, an “Eisenhower Republican.” Inevitably he made a few wacky appointments (Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders) but overbalanced each with much saner and more significant choices (Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen). He modified but didn’t eliminate the ban on gays in the military. After a brief hesitation, he worked hard for the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Those who berate Barack Obama for radicalism are, in Mr. Ferguson’s view, engaged in the same nutty partisanship.
Now, Dinesh D’Souza may indeed be totally wrong about the President’s root ideology. The primary evidence is found in the first Obama autobiography, Dreams from My Father, from which Messrs. D’Souza and Ferguson draw starkly different conclusions: the one that young Barack sought to model himself on his anti-colonialist, pro-communist father, the other that “Far from admiring his father and emulating him, Obama makes his disillusionment with his father one of the themes of his own life story”. To decide between those readings, I’d have to read Dreams from My Father myself, and that is too great a sacrifice.
Where I part company with Mr. Ferguson is in his feint praise of Bill Clinton. Clinton the Triangulator was a post-1994 phenomenon. In 1993, “frankly left-wing” was an accurate summary. I’m pretty sure that Mr. Ferguson is old enough to remember, inter alia, the income tax and Medicare tax hikes, the proposed BTU tax, the White House staffers who sneered at military men and the resistance to welfare reform.
The indicators of Cleveland-like tendencies are risible: The fact that Harry Truman also proposed a government takeover of the health field doesn’t make Hillarycare moderate. President Truman, who vetoed the Taft-Hartley Act and fought to preserve wage-price controls, was a down-the-line progressive on domestic policy (as President – Senator Truman would have balked at most of the “Fair Deal”). “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was forced on Clinton by Congress; he had initially proposed – as one of his very first acts as President – to let homosexuals serve openly. On NAFTA, he did take the same position as most conservatives, but liberals hadn’t yet abandoned free trade in those days and the President’s support for the treaty was far from fervent. It wasn’t ratified until after the GOP took control of Congress and browbeat him into drumming up a modicum of Democratic support.
As time went on, pathological Clinton hatred did fester, inspired less by ideology than by revulsion at the President’s undisciplined and devious private life. There are certainly elements on the Right, such as the preposterous birthers, who are following in the footsteps of the “Who Killed Vince Foster?” types. But the Obama Administration’s policies really are radical at home and Third World-ish abroad. It isn’t “lunacy” to call attention to those facts, just as it wasn't “nuts” to say that Bill Clinton was a left-winger in 1993.
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