We’re not quite a year into the Obama era, and yet I find myself nearly ready to give up on the Great Obama Experiment.
I don’t the mean the Barack-Obama-as-president experiment. That wasn’t an experiment. That was an election. And despite the health care fiasco — remember, controversial bills always get watered down in the end — Obama still rates a solid B for his first year if health care passes, and higher if you grade on a curve.
As presidents go, he’s definitely an improvement on the Bush-Clinton-Bush presidencies of recent vintage.
It’s easy to forget exactly what George W. Bush left for Obama: a financial system in near ruin, a housing market in full panic, rapidly rising unemployment, wars on two fronts, a nation that, in every poll, showed itself overwhelmingly worried it was headed in the wrong direction.
It’s not what Obama has done so much that has been surprising; it’s how he’s done it. During the campaign, he was criticized for producing too few details set against too much soaring rhetoric. He’s still got the rhetoric going, but he’s become a Clintonian technocrat. While the tea partiers call him a radical, liberals wonder whom they’re possibly talking about.
He’s working on fixing Wall Street and banking regulations, not reforming them. He pushed for health care insurance reform and not really health care reform. If you look back at his first year, one of the most striking moments came in a big health care speech when he said Americans were rightfully asking: “What’s in it for me?” Somehow, that didn’t sound much like change.
The Obama experiment was about something far more essential than winning elections. It was about bridging the ever-growing political divide. After all, those Obama change posters were supposed to represent more than simply an un-Bush-like face in the White House.
Obama’s campaign was about restoring belief. He was mocked as the Messiah, but, if anything, Obama was calling for the return to an old-fashioned, Kennedyesque ask-not- what-your-country-can-do-for-you belief system.
And when Obama called for a new era of volunteerism, it was interpreted by some on the fringe right as a move toward totalitarianism. No, I don’t understand that either. But here’s something else: In a recent poll, 65 percent described Obama’s volunteerism efforts as at least in part politically motivated. What do you think the numbers were for the Peace Corps?
Obama ran on ending 16 years of rancor born of the red-blue culture wars, battles left over from the ’60s. Those weren’t Obama’s fights — he was barely born — but he has been caught up in them. Sarah Palin accused him of palling around with terrorists. Billboards go up accusing Obama of being a non-American anti-American terrorist sympathizer. Glenn Beck goes on the air to call Obama a racist who hates white culture. And on and on.
Somehow things have gotten worse, and with no sign of letting up. Once people chose sides; now they choose with their clickers. Fox News becomes home to the political opposition, and MSNBC passes CNN in the ratings as the home for liberal viewers. Soon you reach the point where Keith Olbermann, with his huge contract, suggests that people join him in boycotting insurance mandates if Obama’s health care passes — as if people don’t actually, uh, need health insurance.
Meanwhile, Time magazine got its person of the year — Ben Bernanke? — completely wrong. Tiger Woods should have been the person of the year. The cover needed only a one-word headline: disillusionment.
The Woods story is the ultimate story about the era of celebrity and mythology and how it can be used to sell expensive watches or, for that matter, Gatorade. When Nike chairman Phil Knight said Woods’ issues would turn out to be a “blip,” he completely misread the situation.
In the sports world, you build them up and you knock them down, and if you miss any of it, it’s all there on instant replay.
Somehow, the Republicans, after being thoroughly beaten in 2008, bought completely into the idea of disillusionment long before Woods got sideways with a fire hydrant.
Their just-say-no-to-everything strategy against Obama was to deny him as much success as possible. It seemed crazy to use on a young, popular politician who was chosen to lead America on the path to a giant do-over.
And yet, Republicans steadfastly said no. They winked (or, in some cases, more) at the birther crazies and said the tea partiers were simply small-d democrats.
The big-d Democrats, meanwhile, are worried that America would think they can’t govern — even as they show America they’re having real trouble governing. And so, as the landmark — if watered-down — health care legislation is about to be passed, the enduring image is of Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman staring down Obama.
And liberals, who are nostalgic for a ready villain, must content themselves with the YouTube showing of Al Franken denying Lieberman an extra minute to talk on the Senate floor.
“Really?” Lieberman asked when Franken objected to him speaking.
Yeah, really.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
