Wall Street Journal
* SEPTEMBER 8, 2009, 5:49 A.M. ET
Obama and the Left
The lesson of the rise and fall of Van Jones.
The abrupt resignation of White House aide Van Jones, deep in the news
hiatus of Labor Day weekend, will probably be forgotten in a few days. But
it's
a story that still deserves elaboration for what it says about the
political coalition that helped to elect President Obama and whose demands are
leading him into a cul-de-sac.
As a candidate, Barack Obama was at pains to offer himself as a man of
moderate policies, and especially of moderate temperament. He said he would
listen to both the right and left, choosing the best of each depending on
"what works." He sold himself as a center-left pragmatist. When his radical
associations—Reverend Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers—came to light, Candidate
Obama promptly disavowed them. Now comes Mr. Jones, with a long trail of
extreme comments and left-wing organizing, who nonetheless became the White
House adviser for "green jobs." This weekend he too was thrown under the
bus.
However, Mr. Jones wasn't some unknown crazy who insinuated himself with
the Obama crowd under false pretenses. He has been a leading young light of
the left-wing political movement for many years. His 2008 book—"The Green
Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems"—includes
a foreword from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and was praised across the liberal
establishment.
Mr. Jones was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which
was established, funded and celebrated as the new intellectual vanguard of
the Democratic Party. The center's president is John Podesta, who was
co-chair of Mr. Obama's transition team and thus played a major role in
recommending appointees throughout the Administration. The ascent of Mr. Jones
within
the liberal intelligentsia shows how much the Democratic Party has moved
left since its "New Democrat" triangulation of the Clinton years.
Mr. Jones's incendiary comments about Republicans and his now famous
association with a statement blaming the U.S. for 9/11 had to have been known
in
some White House precincts. He was praised and sponsored by Valerie
Jarrett, who is one of the two or three most powerful White House aides and is
a
long-time personal friend of the President.
Our guess is that Mr. Jones landed in the White House precisely because his
job didn't require Senate confirmation, which would have subjected him to
more scrutiny. This is also no doubt a reason that Mr. Obama has
consolidated so much of his Administration's governing authority inside the
White
House under various "czars." Mr. Jones was poised to play a prominent role in
disbursing tens of billions of dollars of stimulus money. It was the ideal
perch from which he could keep funding the left-wing networks from which he
sprang, this time with taxpayer money.
This helps explain why the political left is so upset about Mr. Jones's
resignation. Listen to David Sirota, another left-wing think-tank denizen and
activist, who wrote the following Sunday on the Huffington Post Web site:
"Finally, the Jones announcement will inevitably create a chilling effect
on the aspirations of other movement progressives. Van is a fantastic person
who has done fantastic work. He's kept his advocacy real and didn't
compromise his principles. And so when he was appointed to a high-level White
House job, it seemed to validate that you could, in fact, keep it real and
also advance in American politics and government. That is to say, his story
seemed to prove that an outsider could also succeed on the inside—and that
outside advocacy doesn't automatically prohibit you from one day working on
the inside."
Mr. Sirota is speaking for many on the movement left who believe they
helped to elect Mr. Obama and therefore deserve seats at the inner table of
power. They are increasingly frustrated because they are discovering that Mr.
Obama will happily employ "movement progressives," but only so long as their
real views and motivations aren't widely known or understood. How bitter
it must be to discover that the Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck, who drove the
debate about Mr. Jones, counts for more at this White House than Mr.
Sirota.
No President is responsible for all of the views of his appointees, but the
rise and fall of Mr. Jones is one more warning that Mr. Obama can't
succeed on his current course of governing from the left. He is running into
political trouble not because his own message is unclear, or because his
opposition is better organized. Mr. Obama is falling in the polls because last
year he didn't tell the American people that the "change" they were asked to
believe in included trillions of dollars in new spending, deferring to the
most liberal Members of Congress, a government takeover of health care, and
appointees with the views of Van Jones.
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