President of the Whole Country [View all]

[ProSense]

President of the Whole Country

By Charles P. Pierce

Barack Obama begins his second term as president of the United States surrounded by an entertaining universe of prefabricated paranoia. Almost ever since his hand left the Bible the first time, when Chief Justice John Roberts bumbled his way through the ceremony like a new maid dusting the fine crystal for the first time, the irreconcilable political Right hummed and buzzed with warnings about what Obama planned to do if he got reelected. It all fed on itself. For example, the longer he went without proposing any meaningful gun control, the more deeply convinced the gun-giddy conservatives became that it was all a plot to grab their guns in 2014. The more people he killed in drone strikes, the more deeply convinced the wilder neoconservative Right became that it was all an elaborate charade to disguise his ongoing effort to hand over U. S. "sovereignty" to some unholy combination of United Nations bureaucrats and Middle Eastern mullahs. The more he sought to compromise on taxes, and on what have become known as "entitlements," even though most of them are nothing of the sort, the more deeply convinced the supply-side fundamentalists became that, come a second term, the true redistribution of wealth would sweep away economic liberty. In short, the more things that Barack Obama did that angered his liberal base, the more the conservatives convinced themselves that he was setting up an elaborate plot to cater to that same base over his second four years in office.

<...>

It must be easier for these people to get a grip on Barack Obama than it is for the rest of us. He is the most singularly elusive politician of our era. Who Richard Nixon actually was disappeared into a wilderness of neuroses, and Ronald Reagan was unknowable. Bill Clinton in so many ways was inexplicable. George W. Bush — and his rise to the presidency, let alone his reelection — was unfathomable. But Barack Obama is there, and then he is not there, and then he is there again on so many fronts that it is almost impossible to get a bead on him long enough to land a solid punch. He is a creature of indirection, and not misdirection. (That would be Nixon again.) He approaches issues and problems from dozens of sidelong ways, very rarely confronting them head-on. He is at the same time nonsubstantial and extraordinarily solid. He has fashioned from himself a political persona quite remarkable, given the political time and place in which he has come to flourish. He is a politician who apparently is completely immune to the effects of empowered nonsense and weaponized ignorance, two effective means of political destruction against which even as gifted a politician as Bill Clinton could not completely protect himself. (Of course, imagining Barack Obama making the same kind of mistake that Clinton ultimately made takes the kind of lurid deductive powers that send you off to Hawaii looking for phony birth certificates.) This is a towering achievement, given the amount of material with which the practitioners of these modern dark arts had to work.

First of all, he's black.

But that was hardly the end of it.

The president defeated attempts to prove he was not born in this country. He beat back attempts to prove that, okay, maybe he was born in this country, but he isn't really an American. He beat back attempts to prove that his policies were three degrees to the left of Trotsky, that he was the friend of and collaborator with domestic terrorists, and that he was somehow complicit — probably by virtue of his middle name — with Islamic extremists overseas...And he did not defeat it by confronting it, except for that one memorable evening on which he defanged birtherism forever by turning Donald Trump into an object of increased national ridicule. He did not defeat it by overcompensating to prove that he wasn't all those things people were saying he was. He did it by adopting the strategy advocated by Eamon de Valera in the wake of the Easter Rising in 1916 — to defeat the British Empire by ignoring its established institutions...that is how Barack Obama defeated the shadow empire of empowered nonsense and weaponized ignorance. He ignored it. He demonstrated by his actions, including those conciliatory actions that drove his more liberal supporters around the bend, that he would be doing the business of the nation, and that the business of the nation required that he rise above all the foolishness that so many people in Washington take so seriously. This is not to say that he was above politics; his remorseless deconstruction of Willard Romney was proof enough of that, as is the fact that he is quite willing to walk American foreign policy right up to and over the very thin edge of savagery...what he has done is limit the effective power of misdirection and distraction, and he did so through indirection and allusion. None of the empowered nonsense and weaponized ignorance worked because he wasn't in one spot long enough for any of it to hit him, let alone stick to him. He was not Ali in Zaire. He was Ali in 1964, in Miami Beach, hitting Sonny Liston in the head and then disappearing again. He did not practice rope-a-dope politics. He was the butterfly and the bee.

Which does not answer the question of what comes next...It's not simply that being reelected gives him more latitude with the country and therefore more leverage in Washington...It's not simply that being reelected gives him a chance to free himself from his own worst instincts...It's not simply that he is in a unique position now to be president of the whole country...It is more that he has a chance to establish what we can call — in the way that fresh approaches always get labeled — a New Realism for the country and its politics, a demand that the empirical take precedence over the theoretical, that a distrust of experience and of expertise is no longer allowed to prevail in the councils of the government, and that the country itself has to accept all this, rather than retreating again into the comfortable fantasies promoted by its favorite TV and radio stars...By being reelected, he has made an opening. He has made a clearing. He has the ability now to marginalize that which was marginalized for so long, and ought to be again, while at the same time broadening the national dialogue to include ideas that once were quite mainstream — gun control, the necessity of a social safety net, labor rights — but that were shoved to the margins by thirty years of crackpot economics and the existential night sweats of a country grown too timid to uphold those things that made it worthwhile in the first place. That is the challenge of his second term. It is, to borrow a useful verb from a president currently packing them in at your local octoplex, to disenthrall the country, including all of us, and including himself most of all, from the nonsense of the quiet past that is inadequate to the stormy reality. We can think anew. He can act anew. And, by God, he might have a chance to save the country.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/barack-obama-president-whole-country-0213

Damn, that was good!