Coming today: An Obama message "for" Hillary?

Obama just sent an email  to supporters announcing a speech to be delivered this afternoon. I imagine it will be a message "for" Clinton -- both to support her and to model a coherent pitch for incremental change. There are hints in the letter, highlighted below.

Nine years ago today, I stood on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, to announce my candidacy for President of the United States.

I asked you to join me in taking up the unfinished business of perfecting our union -- to work together to build a better future.

Along the way, Americans like you have done that by playing the most important role in our democracy -- the role of citizen. You've taken on the painstaking work of progress. You've helped us find that middle ground where real change is won -- change like rescuing our economy from the brink of another Great Depression, protecting our planet, and helping millions of Americans gain health insurance.

Capitulate, Chait! Succumb, Drum! Obama's rhetoric is a force for change

Two of the admirers of Obama I'm most attuned to claim a tough-minded immunity to the alleged intoxications of the president's rhetoric. Jonathan Chait, in a truly moving and incisive tribute to Obama's radical pragmatism, protests at the outset, "I never felt his election would change everything about American politics or government...Nothing Obama did or said ever made me well up with tears." Kevin Drum goes him one better:

I simply never took seriously any of Obama's high-flown rhetoric—Hope and change, Yes we can! You are the solution, etc.—dismissing it as nothing more than typical campaign windiness.

To which I must respond: Gentlemen! Tune in, turn on, don't cop out. Listen to what the man has been saying these five-plus years.

Impure thought of the day

This rather anodyne defense of pragmatism by P.M. Carpenter triggered a memory:

No doubt, chief among internal progressive battlegrounds is the symmetrical demarcation of idealists and pragmatists. To my mind, however, the estrangement is artificial. Idealism is essentially pointless if at least the thrust of its tenets cannot be enacted, and pragmatism would of course be non-existent as a political practice if no authentic ideals were being pursued.

In short, idealism requires a pragmatic approach, otherwise it's just pretty words and metaphysical daydreaming. And human needs need help, now, not daydreams, which are better left to lofty college seminars in political philosophy, where one perhaps acquires idealism but only later learns how to do something about it.

The other night I caught a few minutes of Rep. Barney Frank in an MSNBC interview and he succinctly put it quite well: "If you're idealistic, you have a moral obligation to be pragmatic." There is not, or, let's say, there should not be, any distinction here.

It recalled to me something I heard Salman Rushdie say in 2002 in response to an audience question, at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, if I may paraphrase: "I don't like purity. I like things messy [or mixed up? dirty?]."   That always stuck with me. Now, Googling Rushdie and purity, I found the idea elaborated in a Dec. 2005 essay: