Our political Quote of the Day comes from Dick Polman, who seems Obama acting like a political Batman and wonders if the President-Elect will make the leap or end up falling flat on his face:
While watching Barack Obama deliver his audaciously ambitious speech on the economy yesterday, I was reminded of the scene in The Dark Knight when Batman decides to catapult himself from one skyscraper to another, high off the ground in a pitch-black sky, guided by the fluttering wings of his batsuit.
Thanks to movie magic, Batman naturally landed without a scratch. In all likelihood, Obama won’t be that lucky. Washington isn’t Hollywood; the political denizens of the capital tend to act out their own scripts. There is no “director’s cut” in Washington. Yet here is Obama – and you’ve got to give him credit for cojones – declaring in a speech that not only should Congress enact the most far-reaching economic recovery plan in American history, in accordance with the priorities that he has outlined, but that it should swiftly enact the plan without the partisan sniping and horse-trading that is the traditional life’s blood of Capitol Hill politics.
In other words, the president-elect wants to reverse the economic crisis and erase what he calls “the worn-out dogmas…the old ideological battles” – all in one fell swoop. Whew. This is I gotta see.
Yours truly as well. Because the not-so-nice reality is this. Immediately after the election many on the center, right and left, many conservatives independents and liberals talked about this being a new era and how vital it was to focus on the big picture crisis. With the economy and so many other crisis, things couldn’t be done the same way in 2009. 2009 wouldn’t be just a continuation of 2008.
But, in fact, there are already signs that it is inching inexorably back to business as usual in the new media, old media, among partisans and, most assuredly in Congress on both sides of the aisle. As anyone who has been in any kind of personal and family counseling knows, there is but one solid truth: old patterns are HARD TO BREAK...and every day you feel the polity and political culture slipping back into it’s pre-crisis patterns. Polman’s piece should be read in full, but at the end of it he writes this:
It’s tough to re-train political animals. Certain behavior is ingrained in their nature. Personally, I’d love to teach my dog not to bark when the doorbell rings. Not gonna happen.
Nor does it appear, at this point anyway, that the lawmakers are willing to set aside their ideological predilections. (Perhaps for good reason; the big problem at the moment is that nobody has a monopoly on what recovery mix would actually work.) Liberals on the Hill are insisting that Obama’s package is too timid, that it doesn’t go far enough on the spending side; as Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa complained yesterday, the Obama plan has too much of the old Republican “trickle down” philosophy). Meanwhile, conservative Democrats and the Republicans are worried that Obama’s spending package is too fiscally risky, that it will spread too much red ink on the books. (House Republican leader John Boehner asked yesterday, “how much debt are we going to pile on future generations?” – which is quite humorous, considering how the GOP majority, in cahoots with George W. Bush, piled on the debt in the old days.)
Obama, at least for now, does have one significant advantage: He is broadly popular, whereas Congress is not. He’s sitting at 63 percent in a new national poll (with only 18 percent of Americans viewing him negatively). Congressional Democrats are perceived favorably by 41 percent. Congressional Republicans, by 24 percent. And Obama’s recovery plan gets a thumbs-up from 79 percent. He’ll have a honeymoon, and he has the biggest megaphone, one that he uses well. The message, it would appear, is that Congress would be foolish to grind up his plan in the usual sausage-making fashion.
All this, and he hasn’t even taken the oath of office yet. Only then, when the hard work truly commences, will we get the first real indications of whether he can leap between buildings – or whether, in the more traditional manner, he is a president governed by gravity.
It can be done. And there have been eras when there was a true change. But Obama will have to convince or triumph over not just those who didn’t want him elected, but many who supported him. Some of them want change — but not change that substantively impacts their perks and powers or use of the way the game was played to get exactly what they want.
And they’re more serious obstacles than The Joker…
UPDATE: The Politico notes that one part of Congress has already made Obama look “embattled”: the Democrats.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.