Peering into the Future

I always ask people at Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s meals in the year before a presidential election two questions:

-Who will be the two parties’ nominees?
-Who will win?

This tradition goes back to 1979 in which not one person around our table took seriously the rather bizarre candidacy of one Ronald Reagan.

Needless to add, the 2007 gathering was just as clueless. The sure winners were going to be Rudi Giuliani (or maybe Mitt Romney) and Hillary Clinton. Not one person dared to suggest that a fairly obscure first-term black senator from Illinois would get anywhere near the nomination although one person thought he might work as a vote-stimulating No. 2 on a Hillary ticket.

I recall our shortcomings as seers because of a phrase that keeps going through my head as the health reform fight drags on against the backdrop of organized nuttiness: ‘Don’t bet against us.’

The Obama camp generates a lot of disappointments, but given recent history I still hesitate to assume I know more than they do on how to score political victories.

The Sonia Sotomayor nomination certainly was occasion for frustration as we kept waiting for the counterattack against all the offensive and racially-charged fear-mongering and insults. We can’t know today the full implications of that debate. But it is curious to note that she won confirmation by a comfortable two-thirds margin and attracted 10 more votes than Samuel Alito did.

Sotomayor now takes a Supreme Court seat (I hope she kicks ass there until she’s 100), and Obama is in good shape to win with his next appointment when the times comes.

The wackiness on display over the health care issue is enough to wonder if we have licensed enough psychiatric nurses in this country.

The bullying tactics from the usual suspects are awfully tiresome and reminiscent of how utterly lame Bill Clinton was with his smiley-reasonable response. He did nothing to build up forces that could counter these dangerous tendencies, and we got hanging chads, Bush, Iraq, subprime and Guantánamo as a result.

I don’t think we should expect people to ‘get’ the dangerously authoritarian and narcissistic tendencies embodied in the tea-bagger/birther/Palinoid-KnowNothing movements. Like negative political ads, assuming the eventual triumph of common sense among bipeds is not a winning formula.

On the other hand, predictions of the collapse of Obama’s presidency into a repeat of the ineffectual Clinton interregnum have proven premature. Those confidently boasting of a quick return of the radical right in 2010 are seeing ‘green shoots’ where none have so far appeared.