June 13, 2010 08:41 PM UTC

Obama Reconsidered

• 4 Comments
• by: JO

Travel back, waaaay back, to yesteryear, a time when fervent Democrats of all ages, especially tender ages, actually campaigned at precinct meetings and county assemblies for the right to be delegates to the state convention, just for the thrill of expressing their Hope for Change by marking their ballots BARACK OBAMA as the party’s nominee for president. A time, dimly remembered now, when people wrote Pay to the Order of, followed by smallish numbers but in great quantities, to overcome the Entrenched Forces of Evil Capital, to Disestablish the Established Candidate, chick name of Hillary, rang doorbells and crowded the cellways with calls to strangers….

Of course, there were two other names at the time that played key roles. A country club Republican whose mind was muddled after too many years of alcoholism, and Yesterday Man, reliving a culture and way of thinking that predated even Vietnam. Against them, a highly articulate, obviously intelligent, thinking candidate could woo socks off even the barefooted. Could and did. But they are gone now…at least out of mind…and the Cheese Stands Alone.

Eighteen months is a long time in the era of email, tweeting twits, disaggregated media, and attention spans measured in nanoseconds. Certainly time enough for an inheritance of muck to turn into a mess of missed opportunities.

–The new century’s greatest ecological disaster yet met not by a new energy policy, a new vision comparable to Sputnik (Romanoff), Three Mile Island (JO), or something instead of nothing (Udall), but by visions of helplessness amid tar balls washing up on the shores of Louisiana while the oil spurts forth in ever-greater but still unknown quantities without a solution in sight.

–The era of “PaperSS, HiSSpanicSS!” is met not by a policy addressing the reality of northward migration (and not just in this hemisphere) or rational solutions to a problem that incorporates, among other things, a need for cheap, unorganized manual labor, but instead by another friendly sit-down with an intractable foe whose reputation in the Arid Zone rests on being … intractable, as if reasoning with unreasonable people were not only the way to edit the Harvard Law Review, but also to govern the nation.

–“Health care insurance” reform replaces “health care reform,” as if barring such practices as canceling policies when policy-holders get sick could be put forward as a meaningful advance instead of correcting wild abuses, as if we should leave intact a system in which costs are completely out of control (2X the share of GNP as other advanced countries, for example).

Where were the Obamites this year, vying to carry forward and entrench the hope they worked to make happen as long ago as 2008? Nowhere to be seen, as far as I could tell. In their place was political hackery Chicago-style (“the F word 2-3 times per paragraph makes up for short stature and persuades everyone of how tough you are, appearances notwithstanding…“), trying to bribe challengers to established Senate wannabees regardless of their long record of loyalty to…the Republican Party…or a long record of not doing anything, anything at all, in the realm of politics.

Sure, the spinmeisters are at work, puffing hot air into trial balloons and alternative versions of reality in which a Senate majority unlikely to last or soon to be repeated is judged insufficient to achieve meaningful progress of any issue, any issue at all. Think it was hard with 40 Just Say No’s? Wait ’til you have 44 or 45, or 46! How is that the Naysayers can divert attention from a combination of the unemployed, the underemployed, and the hopeless perilously stuck at close to 20% of the population, and instead give Center Stage to a budget deficit in a society when millions face personal deficits of ruinous proportions right now.

Intellectuals have a short and weak track record in office. Witness: Woodrow Wilson. Good ideas are important, but not sufficient. Well-constructed sentences are pleasing, but not always persuasive.

Actions count. The successful figure out how to make it happen. LBJ, FDR to name two.

The second half of the first term is teetering on the brink of becoming the last half of the last term. The question arises: not whether can he can hope to succeed, but will he actually try?

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