Tina Brown (Vanity Fair>Newsweek>Daily Beast) isn’t someone I’d turn to for the last word on our political culture. She may be condemned by her position at the Beast to chase the latest scandal. Whatever. But when, in an interview this morning, she made it sound as though Obama will never climb out of this mess (you choose.. there are so many), I had to switch her off.
We seem to be stuck in an endless “scandal” that always turns out to be largely fictive. I’m sorry, but we need to remember that Obama couldn’t possibly be elected, much less reelected. In the end, no matter how hard they work at it, our in-House fascists can’t erase is that Obama represents, as Michael Tomasky points out, the “most transformational presidency in modern history.”
I don’t think Tomasky is wrong. I just think we’re stuck with the media we support with our dollars and often can’t see beyond them to reality. We are hoist, to coin a phrase, with our own petard. There’s a whole world of events going on out there that will “go down in history” that we’ve stopped paying attention to. To put it another way, we seem to be inhaling the breath we just exhaled, never taking in fresh air. No wonder we’re woozy-headed.*
To think back over Obama’s tenure is to be struck by a paradox that has, I think, little precedent. Obama’s is the most transformational presidency in modern history, but it simply doesn’t feel that way. Recall the famous words he spoke to a Nevada newspaper in January 2008 when he declared that Ronald Reagan “changed the trajectory of America in a way that…Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” Aside from trying to throw then-opponent Hillary Clinton off her stride a bit, Obama clearly meant to be saying that he would be changing history as Reagan did.
His tenure so far hasn’t been much like Reagan’s at all. In large part this is because Reagan’s ascension represented the rise to the very apex of power of a relatively new force, the “movement conservatism” that first sprang to life in the mid-1950s. Before Reagan, that brand of conservatism had been consigned to the barely acceptable fringes of Washington, given voice by a few second-tier legislators (Roman Hruska of Nebraska, for example) and cranky columnists (James J. Kilpatrick). Reagan altered Washington’s chemistry in a vast number of ways, from questions of domestic and foreign policy to seating arrangements in Georgetown society. The many cumulative billions from rich conservatives that helped build conservative think tanks and media outlets such as Fox News started changing the balance of power in Washington as well during Reagan’s term.
Obama has not presided over that kind of political and cultural change, and it’s hard to see how he will. And yet, his record of accomplishments in both the policy and political realms is formidable. He passed near-universal health care and sweeping financial regulation. He ended the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on military service. He was the first president to endorse same-sex marriage (which I predicted in these pages—wrongly, I’m happy to note—might prove costly at the polls). The night before the election, Rachel Maddow devoted the first ten or so minutes of her MSNBC program to listing Obama’s policy achievements. It was a staggering list.
The political accomplishments are notable as well. Bear in mind that many conservatives (and not a few liberals) believed that 2008 had to be unique, and that Obama’s aberrational triumph was made possible only by a storm of events that conspired to do in the Republicans—the financial meltdown, John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, the media’s supposed lionization of Obama, and so on. Surely, conservatives thought, that 2008 coalition was a fluke; America will never reelect a man such as this. …NYRB
*By the way, if you want to spend your time in good (intelligent) company online, this is highly recommended.
Cross posted from Prairie Weather
bad air graphic via shutterstock.com