Worrying about Obama

Robert: Tom Friedman has a great column ^[1] out in Sunday’s Times that identifies Obama’s main problem so far as his failure to construct a unifying patriotic narrative out of all the policies and positions he has put forth so far.

Friedman is onto something. It was inevitable, I suppose, that Obama would crash at some point and come down to earth like the rest of us. And I don’t think he’s totally lost the magic. But something has been lost since the summer and the uproar over health care reform, and death panels and all of that.

Obama and his advisers are sly like foxes, so it may be that in the long term he will be positioned just right. But right now, something is missing, wouldn’t you agree? It looks like Congress will pass some form of health care reform, giving coverage to more people, but it’s been a messy and ugly and drawn-out process.

I don’t think Americans really like drawn-out, messy debates on legislation. For all our talk about democracy, seeing Congress at work is something a lot of people seem profoundly uncomfortable with. The long Congressional debate (the public sausage-making as it were) also punctures the illusion of the president as the universal omnipotent leader who can single-handedly change a nation’s destiny.

What do you think? Maybe it’s not quite time for Democrats to panic, but I’m feeling quite uneasy and a little scared.

 

  Paula: I have to say that I agree with you here. For quite a while I was holding on to the notion that people had unrealistic expectations about Obama and that it was their problem, not his. But lately, like you, I’ve begun to grow uneasy.

I am dismayed on two fronts: health care, where I do feel that a more forceful line is required, and Afghanistan, where I begin to worry that points made during the campaign have taken on a life of their own. In order to make the point that Bush had attacked the wrong target, he made Afghanistan the antidote to Iraq and simply got himself into a new quagmire. This, in a sense, is what happened to Bush, as much as I hate to draw a comparison. He started by supporting a position for a variety of reasons and then the position hardened because, well, he was now associated with it.

In a sense, I wish Obama’s approach to health care and to Afghanistan could be reversed: that he were more hard-line about health care and more flexible about Afghanistan — or perhaps, I’m simply wishing that he could still exude the sort of sagacity that I associated with him during the campaign.

Finally, I have to say that even his speechifying has begun to worry me — there is a repetitive sing-song aspect to it that has begun to grate; it suggests he isn’t able to emphasize and subordinate, only to sermonize. I know I am being extremely hard on him here — and perhaps it’s a function of the degree to which I was enamoured of him before. In the end, I wonder if my Hillary-supporting friends were right — is he too young and untried?

As for Hillary — she seems to be doing an unusually good job. I was never a big fan of hers, but I have to say that she seems to have managed just the right balance of talking tough and wearing a powder blue head scarf.

 

Robert: He is young and untested. But he is at once extremely confident and yet humble enough to encourage and follow honest counsel by his advisers. And most remarkable, he doesn’t seem to have an ounce of pettiness in him. I think this will help him in the long run. And he’s got to avoid escalating in Afghanistan!