In Defense of the Undecided

In the social media spaces I monitor, and in the plain old old-fashioned media, undecided voters have been catching a lot of heat lately. If you don't already know all you need to know, one line of thinking goes, then God help you/get a clue/what the f***. Like much else in our political discourse these days, this reaction strikes me as too hasty. In solidarity with those citizens still engaging in the lost art of reflection, I would like to point to three good reasons why a likely Obama voter might remain undecided even now.

(I will assume throughout that undecideds are flesh and blood people, not artifacts of polling methodologies or media strategies. I'm sure those artifacts do exist, but I don't know enough about the arts and sciences of polling and media-making to speak responsibly about it. And I don't care enough about either to find out more right now.)

It turns out that these reasons are all variations on the old 'they're not that different' argument. I know this is an old and hackle-raising move, one that puts Democrats in mind of Nader trying to wrap Gore in Bush's mantle and distinguish himself from both. But there are at least three reasons to put that argument in play this time around.

1. Obama and Romney may not be that different, take 1. First of all, it just isn't clear what Romney is - remember, this is the guy whose health insurance reform plan in Massachusetts provided the model for Obama's Affordable Care Act. Of course, he's also the same guy who has taken the art of omnidirectional placation to an entirely new level, and shamelessly attempted to turn himself into whatever the people who happen to be in front of him seem to want (except when he's having a Sister Souljah moment at an NAACP meeting). But politicians lie; we seem to have accepted that. And Romney's lies don't differ in kind from Obama's, just in degree, content, scope, frequency, and utter shamelessness. So having accepted the structure of modern politics, one might say to oneself that it just isn't clear what Romney will be if he gets in office, and that once he's through pandering to the people he needs to placate in his party, he might turn back into the governor of Massachusetts, in which case he isn't that different from Obama. I wouldn't say that myself, but one might say it without resorting to freebase logic.
2. Obama and Romney may not be that different, take 2. If the first reason to take the 'they're not that different' argument seriously this time around focuses on Romney, the second focuses on President Obama. As many, many people have documented over the last four years, Obama is essentially what we would once have called a moderate Republican. He supports the corporate-led evasions of sovereignty and of labor and environmental regulation that we call 'free trade,' despite saying that he didn't and pushing his, or Bush's, trade agreements virtually under cover of night. In the timeless contest between civil liberties, human rights, and state security, he has unequivocally come down, repeatedly, on the side of state security (ask Bradley Manning, or the people collaterally damaged by drone strikes in Pakistan). He chose establishment economists like Larry Summers to oversee his economic plan during a time of crisis, despite the fact that at least two Nobel Prize winners - Krugman and Stiglitz - had joined the crowd of heterodox economists and lefty radicals who foresaw the crisis and, it now turns out, had better diagnoses of it. (The Nobel Prizes don't make them right, but they would have given a president looking for policy alternatives - alternatives, it must be said, to the Clintonian approaches that nearly destroyed the world economy - some political cover for breaking with the Goverment Sachs crowd.) And, finally, he has doubled down on the old art of political assassination in a way not seen since perhaps the Kennedy administration, to the point of openly arguing for the right to conduct extra-judicial killings of American citizens. Oh, and there was that business about using ordinary citizens to foam the runway for crashing banks, which would seem to matter if the worry about Romney is that he favors Wall Street over Main Street.
3. The differences may not make much difference. We are supposed to think of the campaign as a struggle between competing ideologies, opposed worldviews, and conflicting sets of values and commitments. But the debates reveal perhaps more clearly than anything else the degree to which the campaign, like the model of politics for which they provide a centerpiece, is a joint venture, co-sponsored by the Democratic and Republican establishments. The disagreements aired during the debate mask a great deal of agreement on the basic structure of our society and our politics, from issues mentioned above to the role of finance capital in our national life to the acceptable boundaries of political debate and polite conversation. And this basic structure continues not to work very well for a great many people - and seems in some ways (in terms of the environment, to be sure) to be trending in literally disastrous directions. The debates are the best emblem for this because of what they leave out: issues like immigration and gender politics had to wait for the second debate to get a hearing, and plausible national candidates like Jill Stein from the Greens and Gary Johnson from the Libertarians are still awaiting their opportunity to join the conversation.

I said I'd give just three reasons, but the reasons will get traction only if we bring up a fourth consideration. One common response to all this is to point to all the things Mr. Obama has done in office apart from the things mentioned above, the good things that presumably portend more of the same in a second term. The consideration for HBCUs, his support for Pell Grants and removal of private banks from the program, ending DADT, the ACA's removal of the pre-existing condition bar to coverage, and so on.  These are all important achievements, and they have real import in the lives of real people. But they presuppose a basic structure that is still extremely worrisome, that also has real import in the lives of real people, and that Obama is no less committed to than any Republican. (Ok, maybe a little less committed, if willingness to cut the defense budget counts.) For example: The repeal of DADT did bring 21st century mores into the military; but the military remains a giant sinkhole in the federal budget - accounting for 16%-20% of federal expenditures - and an enormous black hole in our politics, distorting our foreign policy and our economy in deference to a settled option for militarism (as famously foretold years ago by Republican Dwight Eisenhower). Similarly: The ACA did give many people access to health coverage that they would not otherwise have had, and constrained to some degree the way insurers can deal with their customers. But it also established the insurance industry even more firmly at the heart of health care provision in the US, with its incentives to deny treatment and charge outrageous co-pays intact.

If the concerns above amounted to the worry that Obama had done nothing, or was identical to Romney, then 'look at what he's done' might carry more weight. But the concerns above have to do with Obama's ongoing commitment to a political structure that countenances disagreement only within a relatively narrow space. If one commits oneself wholeheartedly to that narrow space, then the differences Obama and Romney get magnified. But if one has some inkling, as some left-leaning Democrats or Democrat-leaning leftists might, that another politics is possible, then these differences have to be evaluated against the backdrop of the wider enterprise to which both men have committed themselves.