Needed: An Offense and a Defense

I don’t see any sign that Be Reasonable/Play Nice approach deployed by the president last night is going to turn the tide for more than a couple of news cycles. Obama’s ratings bump (among people who tuned in to hear him) was a relief and showed that people haven’t completely lost their minds to Fox and CNN. But the relentlessness of the war party shouldn’t be dampened by this modest setback, and they’re certainly not distracted by any silly old facts.

Masschusetts stimulated Obama’s faith in banking reform, and we heard another stern-daddy lecture on it in the State of the Union. If the legislation doesn’t ‘meet the test of real reform’, the president intoned, ‘I will send it back until we get it right’. [repeat] ‘We’ve got to get it right’.

Yes, that should happen, my cousin Jessica should lay off the vodka gimlets, and the lion should lie down with the lamb. But saying it twice doesn’t make it twice as likely to happen. Now that the Supreme Court has authorized the banks to use their unlimited cash [including ours] to buy up the last dozen remnant independent-minded fools wandering around Congress, how exactly is that worthy sentiment going to translate into anything?

For me, what’s missing in the Obama worldview is any sense that there are real differences of interest and intention among the opposing camps. He’s incapable of a Rooseveltian or Kennedyesque confrontation with the selfish, ruthless ruling elite that both of them knew so well because they were born into it.

Obama, by contrast, looks like a smart guy who’s convinced that the system is basically benign because it permitted him to come from nowhere and get where he is, and on his own merits, too. But within that alluring Weltanschauung is a dangerous trap.

The same system that made Obama president was staggering into a serious morass of its own making after the vast disaster of the Bush years and, I would argue, three largely uninterrupted decades of Reaganism. What better vehicle for a tactical retreat than someone who looks and sounds completely different—but perhaps really isn’t?

Obama’s bio reveals a guy who doesn’t show his cards but in the end is rather drawn to the conservative side of the fence. He stands for something more than Bill Clinton ever did, and he shouldn’t be counted out for flubbing Year One. But the forces out there trying to jam our society into a dangerously fanatical and narrow-minded mold are not to be underestimated either. That’s something we down on the ground can see and sense much better than the remote figures at the top.