Throwing in Obama’s towel
The New Republic holds forth in a recent issue on the demise of the Obama presidency.
Political supporters, particularly of the punditocracy, tend to want to mitigate the misjudgment of their betrayed investment in a politician. So they turn to pre-emptive prescience about the failure of that politician.
But it's often bogus. Presidencies get second, third, fourth and fifth acts. There's always the chance history will redefine everything, as it did for Harry Truman.
Already I'm thinking George W. Bush wasn't as bad as I thought. That's because of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party.
Still, it is quite true that Barack Obama took office amid uncommonly dramatic and exciting hope for significant change and that he's now deep into the "blah, blah, blah" phase. That is to say he's still talking, but we're not so much listening.
Banality is bad enough on its own. It's worse when contrasted with recent memories of soaring eloquence.
This banality surely was the theme the other night as Obama went before the nation to say, well, something. It was about Iraq. It was typically over-measured.
It was typically laden with modulation and mitigation.
This was both by unavoidable circumstance and Obama's own validation-seeking tendency to try to keep his critics from having ammunition. That's futile, of course. The critics will fire, anyway, and you can no longer separate blanks from live rounds. Both can hurt.
The unavoidable circumstance was that, as sitting president, you dare not decry the woefully misbegotten nature of an American war. You would devalue the sacrifice of the fighting young men and women and their loved ones.
So Obama declared ... not victory, exactly. He declared a successful reduction if not quite full conclusion of this Iraqi engagement he opposed from the beginning although, on this night, he invoked only "political differences" and praised Bush for not waging this war, exactly, but for having, oh, sincere intentions along the way.
Obama said he also will soon draw down his own surge in Afghanistan so that America can attend to America's problem, which is an economy hanging in some indeterminate place between precariously improving and bankrupt.
That gets us back to The New Republic's point, which was that Obama actually has kept a good many of his grand promises -- stimulus, health reform, financial reform, successful auto and bank bailouts -- but that he lost the soul of his presidency by not being more populist and anti-Wall Street in his rhetoric, themes and policies.
That failing, the liberally inclined journal said, left the angry every-man populism to the Tea Party and the very Republicans who had been in bed with Wall Street in the first place.
Allow me, then, my own mitigation of my misjudgment in this betrayed investment, thus my own presumption of prescience.
One problem for Obama is that he got elected by first-time voters who tend not to keep up or stay active. Thus they neither pressure him to stay strong nor sustain him amid the partisan critics and inevitable pitfalls.
His great political mistake -- not necessarily his historical mistake -- was pushing health care reform even after the liberal state of Massachusetts sent him a message in the Scott Brown election to change course.
He and Democrats are burdened now with an appearance of having neglected the essential focus on the economy to foist on this already uncertain economy a frightfully uncertain new health care system.
So, for now, Obama faces these real possibilities: His party will sustain such massive losses in November that next year's Congress will repeal or strip health care reform, or time will begin to reveal the benefits of his health care reform, this happening about the time we enter the "blah, blah, blah" phase of the Palin or Huckabee or Romney presidency.
Gosh, Mitt Romney never sounded so good.
John Brummett, an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock, is author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.
