Life at 30,000 feet

Lambert has an excellent post up on Obama, food policy and words vs deeds. While it may appear that Obama is giving us some reason to hope (there’s that word again), Lambert points out why we must not abandon a critical eye when it comes to evaluating Obama’s actual policies.  Lambert is troubled that while Obama cites progressive points of view, he often uses them as booster rockets to throw him into the stratosphere where policy loses to platitudes.  Citing Obama’s response to Michael Pollan’s letter on U.S. food policy, Lambert notes:

Yep. It would have been excellent had Obama gone on to actually advocate some food policies — there’s that pesky demand for detail, again — but instead Obama soars up to the 30,000 foot level:

[OBAMA] That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

But wait. Before we look at what’s true across the board, there’s a key policy issue on food about which Obama is silent. Bradford Plumer:

[N]ote what’s missing: Our agricultural system’s also built on artificial subsidies for overproduction that, at this point, do far more harm than good. The very subsidies that Obama… still supports. So, uh, maybe it’s time to stop snuggling up to King Corn.

Meaning: It’s difficult to see how the country will get from point A (petrofood) to point B (Pollan’s sun food) if we continue, through subsidies to industrialized agriculture, to base our diet on corn syrup, the SUV of plants. That’s why it’s worse than useless to say OMG He “READ THE ARTICLE. And COMMENTED ON IT!”; the real question is how Obama will take action based on his reading, in concrete policy terms*.

Futhermore, when all we’ve got to go on is Obama’s legislative record and statements, we must not give in to the urge to bury our heads in the sand and hope for the best. Lambert gives an excellent yardstick for measuring Obama.

One way to look at the above interview — and to start thinking systematically about how to hold Obama accountable — would be to look for the commonalities and continuities between Bush and Obama, rather than the differences. That is, after all, what the Village is looking for, since it supported both candidates. You might then look at Bush and Obama as two iterations of the same package: Leader 0.9 and Leader 1.1***, say. And where Leader 0.9 was buggy and had, to be kind, usability issues, finally crashing disastrously, Leader 1.1 has a much spiffier interface and more robust engineering, while potentially including every working feature of Leader 0.9.

[...]

1. One potential critical tool is recognizing and calling out continuities between Bush (Leader 0.9) and Obama (Leader 1.1). We may feel — deeply hope — that there is no continuity; but feelings aren’t facts (and in any case, unity guarantees continuity).

2. A second potential critical tool is saying what’s left unsaid: For example, to bring matters round to food again, saying (a) that agricultural subsidies for corn are a key driver in our bad, not to say evil, food policies, and that (b) Obama is silent on the issue.

Works for me.