Is a willingness to give President Obama a pass a sign of conservative class?

In a recent Guardian article, center-left media critic Dan Kennedy noted the right’s divided reaction to Obama’s inaugural address. “For serious commentators like David Brooks of the New York Times and Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, it was an occasion to sit up and take notice – to acknowledge that Obama, in that post-partisan way of his, sometimes sounds as much like a conservative as a liberal,” Kennedy wrote. “And that, perhaps, he actually means what he says.”

Kennedy was less than impressed with the reactions of bloggers at Red State and Power Line, asserting that “…For the hard right, though, inauguration day was an occasion to continue bashing away at a guy who was falsely derided during the campaign as a socialist, a pal of terrorists and – if not actually a Muslim himself – someone whose background and very name suggested a proclivity to be soft on those who would fly planes into buildings.”

While most conservatives would likely challenge Kennedy’s suggestion that the contributors to Power Line and Red State are “far right,” it is beyond dispute that some conservatives are more cordial towards Obama than others. Why is that?

“Conservatives, and even some liberals, have had trouble pigeon-holing Obama since his emergence on the national scene, partly because his post-partisan politics can't easily be categorised [sic], partly because Obama's not above a little shape-shifting when it suits his needs,” noted Kennedy. “Still, he is essentially a mainstream liberal who projects a moderate, pragmatic appeal….though conservatives shouldn't get the idea that he's one of them, perhaps it is nevertheless beginning to dawn on the more rational among them that he's not George McGovern either. As Obama himself has said repeatedly, his opposition to the war in Iraq doesn't mean he's a pacifist. Rather, Obama comes across as the heir to a brand of muscular liberalism that was in vogue from Franklin Roosevelt through John Kennedy.”

Kennedy’s right that Brooks, Noonan, Michael Goldfarb and Tom Donnelly of the Weekly Standard and other give-Obama-a-chance conservatives recognize a strain of pragmatism in the 44th President. However, that’s not the only reason some on the right wish to treat Obama fairly. There are a number of conservatives who wish Obama played for the red team.

Obama, of course, is the nation’s first black President—and while the conservative movement presents itself as color-blind, race has been a thorny issue for the right since the mid-1960s. Two events—Barry Goldwater’s misguided decision to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s 1968 effort to reposition the GOP as the home of middle- and working-class white Americans (the inaccurately named “Southern Strategy”)—led to a permanent split between the Republican Party and black voters. Despite the American right’s efforts to emphasize the critical role that Republican legislators played in passing the ’64 Civil Rights Act and the ideological overlap between Republicans and black voters on social issues, the GOP has performed poorly among black voters in Presidential elections since 1964.

As the mainstream press has often noted, it is virtually impossible to find an elected black Republican in a prominent position in Washington or anywhere else in the country. The GOP’s decision to overlook black votes in favor of working- and middle-class white votes occurred just prior to the era in which future black leaders became politically aware.

Obama and other post-civil-rights-movement black leaders came of age in a time when they were told, in ways direct and subtle, that the GOP wasn’t really interested in them. Perhaps if the GOP had attempted to attract black support in those days, charismatic and gifted figures like Obama would have become conservative Republicans instead of liberal Democrats.

Perhaps the conservatives who are sympathetic to Obama see a man who, under different circumstances, could have been on the “right” side. It has been said that during his days at Harvard Law School, Obama demonstrated extraordinary open-mindedness, giving equal weight and respect to the views of liberal and conservative students. Of course, by the time Obama arrived at Harvard Law, he had come to the conclusion that progressivism was the more sensible worldview—a conclusion undoubtedly influenced by the way the GOP politically positioned itself in an earlier era. It’s not hard to imagine Noonan, Brooks, Goldfarb, Donnelly and others thinking to themselves: If our guys hadn’t alienated thoughtful people like him years ago, he’d be one of us today.