I've posted before about why I think Obama's style of progressive politics would him make not only a good president for the next four years but the best spokesperson for progressivism over the next decade. In case you haven't seen it, there's been a pretty interesting conversation over at TAPPED, the blog of the American Prospect, about three presidential campaigns visiting Planned Parenthood today.
A lot of Obama's agenda is still being developed and rolled out piecemeal, but the TAPPED discussion provides some hints about where it's going and some background on Obama's policy director Karen Kornbluh, who has been a proponent of what Ezra Klein calls "family-based progressivism" and creating a new social insurance system relevant to the needs of today's families.
I'll just post a few of the highlights here, it's worth going over to read it. Dana Goldstein summed up the day. Elizabeth Edwards went first and has some great lines:
Representing her husband, Elizabeth Edwards was charming, glowing, funny, and very warmly-received. "If I wanted Rick Santorum's opinion" on my reproductive health choices, "I would call him up," she quipped. In what sounded like a dig at Hillary Clinton and her perceived radical left agenda, Elizabeth argued, "We need a pro-choice candidate who can be elected on a pro-choice platform."
To move on to Obama, Goldstein writes:
BARACK OBAMA ATTEMPTS TO SHIFT THE CHOICE DEBATE. "When we argue big, we win," Barack Obama told the Planned Parenthood political academy today. By "argue big," Obama meant expanding the terms of the pro-choice debate beyond access to abortion, contraception, and comprehensive sexuality education and into a larger discussion about family planning and work-life balance for women. He called for "updating the social contract" with gender pay equity, paid maternal leave, and longer school hours that make it easier for mothers to work... Obama did have some truly stirring moments and elegantly wove gender, race, and class issues together.
Obama advocated moving towards a new social insurance, a new social contract, that is more responsive to the needs of contemporary families. This gives some context to the focus of Michelle's stump speeches on the trials of working mothers. I have a real feeling this could develop into a focus of the campaign.
Obama's trying to broaden the issue of family planning to talk about the ways families and parents are under pressure from a new economy and what government can do to help. It's a different way of approaching the issue and seems to have a lot of potential.
Anyway, Ezra Klein chimed in, pointing out that he hears the influence of Obama's policy director Karen Kornbluh:
Karen Kornbluh has been arguing for a new, family-friendly progressivism for years now. And she just happens to be Barack Obama's policy director. So if you want a glimpse of where these ideas are headed, you may want to check out her Democracy manifesto on creating a social insurance system keyed to the needs of modern families, or her Washington Monthly article on the need for workplaces to become more family friendly. I've long been a fan of this approach, and Kornbluh's involvement in Obama's policy machine is one of my main reasons for faith in his instincts.
It's worth checking out the two links from Ezra Klein. Karen Kornbluh is focused on ways to update the social insurance system of the 1930's to make it relevant to today's pressures. She writes:
[P]rogressives should turn to one of the most important innovations of the last century: social insurance. In the 1930s, progressives established a suite of social insurance schemes to help families share the risks of the industrial economy: the risks associated with the inability of the breadwinner to earn the family income because of old age, death, a temporary layoff, or disability.These social insurance programs continue to provide families essential support. But today we need to create new elements in the social insurance system-as well as reform the protections now in place-to confront the new risks families face.
Our current social insurance system-a patchwork of programs put in place over the course of decades-was designed to help nuclear families in which a breadwinner worked one job his entire career while the homemaker cared for the children and any ill relatives. Today's American family and today's workforce are markedly different. Both two-earner and single-parent families operate in a volatile, winner-takes-all economy.
I'll link a copy of the speech if one becomes available. Let me know if there's some video from today.
Completely unrelated, TAPPED also has an interesting piece today from Paul Waldman about how candidates choose issues / issues choose candidates. He's writing about Edwards and McCain, doesn't explicitly mention Al Gore, but I feel like he's floating in the background. It's a good argument for why Gore should have taken up global warming in the 2000 election as the issue he was most passionate about even if it wasn't the biggest issue in the polls.
(h/t to Ben Smith for pointing at the Ezra Klein piece on Kornbluh.)
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