When Senator Biden accepted President-Elect Obama’s invitation to be his vice-presidential running mate, he called him a “clear-eyed pragmatist.” Others have characterized Obama in the same vein before and since.
What does it mean to be pragmatic? In its Greek root, pragmatic means to be practical, to focus on conditions as they are, on achievable goals with tangible benefits. Pragmatists usually distrust and often oppose dogmatic ideologues.
During his recent interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Obama asserted that he does not want to "get bottled up in a lot of ideology.” He does not want to get tagged with ideological labels, such as “conservative” or “liberal”. “My interest is finding something that works,” he asserted. He described his national security team as sharing “my pragmatism about the use of power."
Whether one wants to consider Obama a pragmatic president depends largely on one’s own convictions. The advocates of strict handgun control, for example, see nothing pragmatic in Obama’s praise for the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the handgun ban in the District of Columbia. For the opponents of the death penalty, Obama’s criticism of the Court's decision throwing out the death penalty for rapists made no sense. He also baffled many of his supporters when he first spoke against the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and then voted for it.
To be pragmatic means to be willing to compromise and to alter one’s position if it proves faulty and does not work. President Bush rarely yielded when he was shown to be wrong, whether it was on his pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, on the use of torture in interrogations, or on the need for more regulatory oversight over financial institutions.
When it becomes obvious that policy changes are needed, holding on to a middle-of-the-road position may not be sufficient. Neither is it morally sustainable behavior to flip-flop for opportunistic reasons. Can the reversals in Hillary Clinton’s policy positions, for example, be seen as pragmatic or simply as politically expedient?
During her early years in the White House, Mrs. Clinton supported Palestinian statehood, but she conveniently forgot that advocacy and her embrace of Mrs. Arafat when she decided to run for U. S. senator from New York. When she first voted for the invasion of Iraq but later vociferously opposed it, had she genuinely changed her mind or did she simply find it politically opportune to follow the changing public opinion?
When it was clear there were no large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, she told the Council on Foreign Relations: "We have no option but to stay involved and committed.” On the presidential campaign trail in Iowa, however, she demanded that the president "extricate our country from this before he leaves office.”
Now, as secretary of state in the Obama administration, would Mrs. Clinton again change her policy positions if the President’s differed from hers? Obama has made it clear that he is not concerned about differences between his and his advisers’ points of view. He wants to have a vigorous debate before he makes his decisions by which his advisers have to abide.
Obama has said that he wants to be as pragmatic as Abraham Lincoln, the President whom he admires most. To preserve the Union, Lincoln was willing to compromise even on slavery. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it," Lincoln wrote to newspaper editor Horace Greeley in August 1862, "and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."