Speaker for the Dead Presidents

Actually, the title for this column should have been, “In Defense of Obama,” but I finally rejected that for two primary flaws. First, regular readers here might have had some sort of disastrous coronary event seeing such a title with my byline attached. Second, the defense I offer will seem something less than enthusiastic enough for the Obama faithful. But, if nothing else, I assure you that it is earnest.

I spent part of my summer re-reading Orson Scott Card’s series on Ender’s Game. His idea of a “Speaker for the Dead” is appealing to me in terms of politics, since he felt that a person’s life story could only be fully told through painful examination of brutal truths after they had died. This certainly applies to the White House.

The history of presidencies is recorded while they are in progress, but never truly written until long after they are over. Our views on many of our former leaders have morphed over the generations. Andrew Jackson was, in his own time, viewed as a divisive and troubled leader, but later scholars put his work in context and he is now generally highly regarded. Eisenhower was one of the most popular figures to ever hold the office, but the long lens of history shows us that he really didn’t accomplish all that much. Even Richard Nixon is getting a bit of a makeover as time goes by. True, his tenure will most likely always be marred, marked and defined by Watergate, but his achievements in foreign policy were extremely impressive and get more recognition today from presidential historians than you might think.

The best recent example, of course, would have to be George W. Bush. Many Republicans bristle and rush to his defense, but I found his presidency to be a fairly uniform disaster from beginning to end. The profligate spending, even when he had every chance to control it, the expansion of massive government programs without a hint as to how to pay for it, the failure to adequately balance civil liberties in the face of security threats, the disastrously unfunded mandates of No Child Left Behind… these all combined to paint an unattractive picture. But the defining moment of George W. Bush’s presidency, I firmly believe, will be his decision to invade Iraq. That, more than anything else, will define the man’s time in office as a failed presidency. But that’s today. Who knows what historians will be writing about him fifty years from now?

And this brings us back to Barack Obama. I was set off on this train of thought while reading Ed Morrissey’s take on an article by Mark Tapscott regarding the upcoming presidential address to school children. Ed chooses this example as a good time to build an overall theme for Obama’s presidency, that being incompetence. Many examples are listed under the categories of personnel management, handling of the nation’s economy and political leadership. But are we really ready to paint an entire presidency with such a broad and, frankly, offensive brush less than nine months into it? Obviously there’s a large, vocal, red-meat partisan crowd out there who will cheer on such a decision and would have been ready to do so on Jan. 25th of this year.

But it’s hardly realistic to close the book on the entire administration this early on. Mistakes have been made and there were plenty of choices which I personally disagreed with, particularly on the economy and its red headed step child, health care reform. Yet I remain aware that human beings do make mistakes from time to time, and many of the issues where I disagreed are my opinions. There are huge numbers of Americans who view those topics differently and agree with the direction the President has taken. That’s what’s still great about America. We get to disagree over things like that in a peaceful fashion and settle our disputes in the polling booth.

When you get away from the domestic, economic agenda, Obama has taken positions and made noises which are to my liking. His approach to foreign diplomacy in many cases- in particular his stance regarding Israel – has seemed just about right. His attitude toward taxing the foreign shelters of American companies and refusing to reward those who send our jobs overseas has given me some hope. While I found Judge Sotomayor less than impressive, Obama seems to be setting the foundation to keep some sort of partisan balance on the Supreme Court, which I suppose is all that we can realistically hope for these days. Unfortunately, aside from the SCOTUS appointments, most of these things are areas where Obama can do little more than “make noises” at this point. The majority of real, hard activity comes on the domestic front where we disagree almost entirely.

Ed also picks a peculiar summary for his litany of complaints against Obama.

Who could have warned us that a man who served seven years in the state legislature and three years in the Senate would not have been prepared for the toughest executive position in the Free World? We did. Repeatedly. So did John McCain, and for that matter, so did Hillary Clinton.

That sort of thing is fine for ginning up votes during the campaign, but the election is over. We’ve had plenty of executives who have risen to power from positions of relative inexperience. Some do well, others falter. And who on earth would hold up Hillary Clinton’s elected experience as a standard? Besides, who would the GOP have replace him? A small town mayor who put in half a term as governor before quitting? And really… who is prepared to take on the role of leader of the free world before they sit down in the chair?

There are plenty of areas to criticize how the president is handling the job, and we are all free to do so. But when people feel some obligation to take Every Single Thing that happens and Every Single Word out of Obama’s mouth and attempt to use it as fodder to paint him as some sort of amateur and bring him down, well… that’s one of the only ways to get me edging toward defending the man. We’re really going to gin up a fight over the president telling the nation’s students to stay in school and work hard? Sure, they may have messed up the timing a little and his staff put some inartful suggestions on their web site, but please. This is one of the plain dumbest things I’ve seen yet to use as a basis to trash Obama.

But back to our central theme today, basically, I’m just saying that the jury is still out. I’m not very pleased at all with our current national direction, but nobody knows what is to come as far away as 2012. I’ve seen some interesting names being floated by the GOP, (including some real dark horse figures like David Petraeus and Joe Scarborough) and if Obama and the Democratic leadership continue on their current arc, I may well be out there looking for a brand new edition of change we can believe in. But, by the same token, if the Republicans are actually crazy enough to nominate someone like Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum or Liz Cheney, no matter how bad the economy is doing, don’t faint if you see me here reluctantly calling for four more years of Obama.

The point is that there has been some good, some bad and some downright ugly. But there’s at least 39 more months to go and the book is still being written. People do occasionally learn from their mistakes, and some will change horses in mid-stream if they see the beast is drowning. If I am to be Barack Obama’s college advisor, I’m forced to give him mostly failing grades as a Freshman, but this is a four year school and things may improve. Who knows what challenges and threats will arise in the next few years? We are still entitled to hope that he will rise to the occasion and meet them well.