Charm offensive: Obama at dinner with the conservative punditocracy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've been meaning all day to comment on Obama's dinner with Will, Kristol, Brooks, and Krauthammer -- the four horsemen of the right-wing apocalypse? -- but I just don't have much to say about it. On Obama's part, it was an exceptionally smart move. Why not, as the soon-to-be president, make nice and break bread with four leading conservative political commentators? If nothing else, as Michael Crowley stressed, "Obama will surely choose his words carefully and avoid saying anything that causes him trouble. He's certainly not going to make any new promises to appease the right. And a little personal charm" -- or a charm offensive? -- "is sure to buy him a few pulled punches among the columns and punditry of these men." No, they won't go soft, but maybe at least they'll show him some respect and take him, and his efforts at outreach to the right, seriously. (Remember that the Clintons did themselves no favours by attacking the media, including liberals, early on, setting a negative tone that only hindered the Clinton presidency. Obama may be stuffing his administration with Clintonites, but he has certainly learned from some of Clinton's mistakes.)

And liberals, by the way, aren't all that troubled by the dinner. Take Steve Benen and Kevin Drum, for example. And, again, I feel much the same way.

As Jon Chait argues, though, and I think he's right about this, conservatives wouldn't be nearly as understanding if the situation were reversed:

I actually don't find it terribly surprising that liberals haven't shown any outrage over Barack Obama's dinner party with George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and David Brooks. I'll get to my hypothesis why liberals aren't upset in a moment. But first imagine this counterfactual: George W. Bush (or maybe a victorious John McCain) sat down before his first inauguration with Paul Krugman, E.J. Dionne, and Frank Foer. Would conservatives have reacted with the same equanimity? No, I think they'd have gone nuts. And the reason is that they wouldn't have confidence in Bush or McCain to be surrounded by liberal ideas without being deeply influenced by them. I don't think they'd have reacted this way if, say, a President Mitt Romney did the same thing.

And that's why liberals aren't having a cow. They know that Obama understands far more about policy than any of his right-wing dinner companions, is used to being exposed to opposing ideas, and won't come out of that dinner telling his staff, "Hey, did you know we cut half the capital gains tax and raise more revenue?"

A separate issue is why Obama didn't pick some conservatives with a bit more intellectual integrity than, say, Kristol and Krauthammer. The problem, of course, is conservatives like that tend not to rise to positions of high influence.

Right, I don't think there's any concern, despite existing (and, in my view, wrong-headed) concerns among some progressives that he's a centrist of sorts, that Obama will surrender to conservative pressure or otherwise reveal himself to be a Republican. If nothing else, we have confidence in Obama's firmness. And we understand, I think, that it makes good political sense, at this time, with the economic stimulus package soon to be up for a vote and with health care, energy, and education reform looming on the horizon, to reach out not just to potentially friendly Republicans in Congress but to key figures, key opinion-shapers, on the right. Which is why he picked these four. Two of them, I agree, may not have much intellectual integrity -- I'd say Will is the only one with much of it, and Brooks has more than Krauthammer and far, far more than Kristol -- but there's no denying their lofty places in the conservative food chain. (But at least more despicable figures like Limbaugh and O'Reilly weren't there. That would have been too much even for generous and understanding liberals to take.)

This is one case where it is best to trust that Obama knows what he's doing. I have no doubt that he does.