Politics of duped

Paul Krugman has written a provocative and, I believe, extremely important column about Barack Obama. There's a lot in here, so I'm going to excerpt pretty heavily:

Lately, Barack Obama has been saying that major action is needed to avert what he keeps calling a “crisis” in Social Security — most recently in an interview with The National Journal. Progressives who fought hard and successfully against the Bush administration’s attempt to panic America into privatizing the New Deal’s crown jewel are outraged, and rightly so.

But Mr. Obama’s Social Security mistake was, in fact, exactly what you’d expect from a candidate who promises to transcend partisanship in an age when that’s neither possible nor desirable.

To understand the nature of Mr. Obama’s mistake, you need to know something about the special role of Social Security in American political discourse.

Inside the Beltway, doomsaying about Social Security — declaring that the program as we know it can’t survive the onslaught of retiring baby boomers — is regarded as a sort of badge of seriousness, a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough-minded you are....

But the “everyone” who knows that Social Security is doomed doesn’t include anyone who actually understands the numbers. In fact, the whole Beltway obsession with the fiscal burden of an aging population is misguided....

Which brings us back to Mr. Obama. Why would he, in effect, play along with this new round of scare-mongering and devalue one of the great progressive victories of the Bush years?

I don’t believe Mr. Obama is a closet privatizer. He is, however, someone who keeps insisting that he can transcend the partisanship of our times — and in this case, that turned him into a sucker.

Mr. Obama wanted a way to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton — and for Mr. Obama, who has said that the reason “we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions” is that “politics has become so bitter and partisan,” joining in the attack on Senator Clinton’s Social Security position must have seemed like a golden opportunity to sound forceful yet bipartisan.

But Social Security isn’t a big problem that demands a solution; it’s a small problem, way down the list of major issues facing America, that has nonetheless become an obsession of Beltway insiders. And on Social Security, as on many other issues, what Washington means by bipartisanship is mainly that everyone should come together to give conservatives what they want.

We all wish that American politics weren’t so bitter and partisan. But if you try to find common ground where none exists — which is the case for many issues today — you end up being played for a fool. And that’s what has just happened to Mr. Obama.

Whew. I think this is all entirely correct, and it brings me back to the gripes I had about Barack Obama earlier in the campaign. I always had my doubts about the politics of hope. How is politics transformed, and how is his vision of transformation different from the feckless attempts at compromise and triangulation that have given us... all that we see before us? It's not even as if this stuff can be effectively leveraged--Obama can't expect that feeding Republicans a carrot like social security will bring them around on the other, unrelated issues that he's emphasized in his campaign. Much as there's no pressing objection to the current structure of the social security system, there are no relevant objections to universalizing health care, to ending torture and the war, to addressing climate change fully. And while Obama talks a good talk on those issues today, my concern is that he'll allow his demands to turn into best-wishes when he faces, for instance, a sub-60-vote majority in the Senate and other institutional hurdles.