Recently departed Newsweek editor Jon Meacham placed an article in Sunday's Washington Post that tried to make sense of the “shellacking” that Team Obama took on Tuesday. Meacham dismisses any talk of “moving to the center” as silly, as if that's where Obama presently stands. The headline was "Obama didn't change. We did." In Meacham's world, Obama is still likely headed to the pantheon of great presidents, and anyone who dismisses him now is dismissing the inevitable sweep of history. Meacham began with this phony thought:
For much of the 2008 election cycle, I did not think Barack Obama would win the presidency. (A Whole Foods-shopping law professor from Chicago's Hyde Park with "Hussein" as a middle name? Please.)
Whether he thought Obama would win is irrelevant, considering how much Meacham and Newsweek wanted him to win. Remember all those gooey cover stories? Before George W. Bush was inaugurated for a second term, during the holiday season of 2004, Newsweek was already banging a can for Obama as the Great Black Hope. As Brent Bozell reported then:
Obama was lauded as the "incredibly pragmatic" soul of civility who is "uniquely qualified to nudge the country toward the color purple" (merging the red states and blue states). He was all about "embracing our hybrid origins and transcending our often narrow-minded past."
....Obama’s article [written by Jonathan Alter] was full of praise from family and friends. His wife declared he was not a politician, but was instead a "community activist exploring the options to make change." Black leaders in Illinois applauded his talent, including Emil Jones acknowledging that he cried during Obama’s keynote speech at the Democratic convention. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid hailed him as "a gentleman and a scholar," and an "honest, God-fearing man." Rep. Rahm Emanuel claimed he was a "bridge from the left to the center." Alter the "reporter" also added his own praise, with lines like "his expert grasp of foreign policy helped him bolt from the pack."
At the convention in 2008, Meacham oozed about his speech: “We know he is eloquent. He can’t write an ineloquent check, this man." So forget the idea that Meacham was unimpressed by this Obama chap and his chances to be president. From that greasy opening, Meacham moves on to the praise for Obama's cool:
When I look back on it, it strikes me that the one factor in the Obama presidential equation that has never changed is Obama himself. Reality happens all around him - wars, recession, oil spills, midterms - yet he seems placid, even unmovable.
Now the political world, once in love, wants Obama to change right now. Doesn't he know he's been repudiated? Won't he get it at last, put away his Mao suit and turn his back on his socialist past?
But I would not hold out for a fundamentally New Obama. For better or for worse, Obama is today - and will be tomorrow - what he has always been: a bright man engaged in an endeavor that rewards luck and happenstance more often than it does intellect and good intentions. He's had his share of bad luck, and his notable inability to convince the country that he is leading a comprehensive economic turnaround is one of the most significant leadership failures in the modern history of the presidency. Still, the White House's tactical mistakes do not excuse the rest of us for ignoring our own history, a history that helps us gain perspective on the president's problems.
Obama himself has such a perspective. A president who understands that life will never completely conform to our wishes - that the world will disappoint us again and again, yet we have a duty to press on and make the best of things - is a president particularly well equipped to endure calls for a "reset" or a "move to the center," as though he has been dabbling in Marxism as corporate profits continue rising.
Meacham repeatedly mocked the idea that Obama is Mao or Marx, but that's only because his own magazine's oleaginous spin about Obama being “uniquely qualified” to move the country to the middle has by now been as thoroughly debunked as Geraldo's search for Al Capone's vault of treasures. From there, it's back to how Obama still has time to be Lincoln:
Extraordinary leaders tend to seem ordinary in real time. Thomas Jefferson left office disappointed and defeated by the threat of war with Britain. Abraham Lincoln expected to lose the 1864 election. Franklin Roosevelt divided the nation between those who loved him and those who could not speak his name (to the latter group, he was "that man"). Ronald Reagan risked impeachment in his now-fabled second term.
Each of these men was great in his way, and their kind of political greatness is enhanced, not undercut, by the fact that they lost many a fight along the way to history's pantheon. We cannot know whether Obama will one day join them. But we do know that the verdict on this president, as with virtually all presidents, will be endlessly revisited and revised. Last Tuesday did not mark the end, in reality or in metaphor, of this presidency.
Translation: don't try to make Obama look small, or like a loser. We shall resist in all of our newspaper columns and suave appearances on the Charlie Rose show on PBS. Meacham closes the article with another greasy move: claiming he disdains presidents who complain about the press, but of course, Obama is "uniquely qualified" to kvetch. (He should be joking, but he's not.)
From cable television to the Internet, we are now living with a political class which has a financial and cultural interest in conflict rather than in governing. The result: Every incremental development is invested with apocalyptic significance.
Amid that constant churn, Obama has always managed to appear detached and clinical. That seemed a virtue during the campaign, in the madness and fear of the economic collapse. Now it seems a vice to those who expected a human figure to perform superhuman feats.
Obama is not surprised that the kingdom of heaven has failed to arrive in his first two years. A more historically minded country would not be, either.
This whole article calls to mind George Will's withering line about George H. W. Bush. One hears “the tinny arf of a lapdog.”
