Barack Obama’s Year in Review
The first 365 days are a notoriously bad predictor for presidential success, but there’s no escaping the fact that they’ve been brutal. Surveying the wreckage of “Yes We Can” promise, the author argues that it’s still far too early to count Obama out.
By Todd S. Purdum
VanityFair
WEB EXCLUSIVE January 20, 2010
It is almost impossible, today, to summon up the feeling of promise and purpose that suffused Washington just one year ago, when more than a million Americans thronged to the Mall to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama. A presidency that promised to be transformational has long since begun to feel conventional. Now it seems bedeviled beyond all recognition, with its filibuster-proof Senate majority gone in a burst of populist anger in Massachusetts.
Sure, Obama has made his share of mistakes, rookie and otherwise. But don’t count him out—not just yet. For the fault, dear readers, lies not in our stars, nor even in our rock-star president, but in ourselves: in our impatience, our intemperance, our lack of perspective, our susceptibility to the easy untruth and the quick fix. Barack Obama only rarely falls victim to any of these vices, and, with luck, he may yet save us from ourselves.
I’m also not sure Obama’s true mistakes are the ones the Beltway handicappers usually cite. Would he really have been better off to wait to press for health-care reform, and allow opponents even more time to organize? Could he really have done much more to jump start the economy and reduce unemployment? (Remember, conservatives accused him of making the stimulus package too big, not too small.) Could he really be expected to wind down the Iraq war, transform our relations with the rest of the world, pass climate-change legislation, or do any of the other couple dozen things his critics variously fault him for failing (or trying) to do?
Perhaps Obama’s biggest mistake was in believing that his relentless, and usually rigorous, insistence on logic, civility, and calm thinking would carry the day, in the face of a political system that is at once calcified, corrupt, and scabrous in tone. From the very start, Congressional Republicans proved impervious to Obama’s charms and Democrats remarkably unafraid of his personal popularity. Both did pretty much what they always do, which in the case of the Republicans meant they just said no, while the Democrats typically asked for too much and refused to take yes for an answer. Despite the president’s best efforts to make lobbyists personae non gratae, they posted a record year (as much for thwarting legislation as for getting any passed). The Washington media tootled along, too often oblivious to its own trivial obsessions and unable to compete with the opinion-reinforcing antics of the blogosphere and punditocracy (of left and right alike).
(More here.)
By Todd S. Purdum
VanityFair
WEB EXCLUSIVE January 20, 2010
It is almost impossible, today, to summon up the feeling of promise and purpose that suffused Washington just one year ago, when more than a million Americans thronged to the Mall to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama. A presidency that promised to be transformational has long since begun to feel conventional. Now it seems bedeviled beyond all recognition, with its filibuster-proof Senate majority gone in a burst of populist anger in Massachusetts.
Sure, Obama has made his share of mistakes, rookie and otherwise. But don’t count him out—not just yet. For the fault, dear readers, lies not in our stars, nor even in our rock-star president, but in ourselves: in our impatience, our intemperance, our lack of perspective, our susceptibility to the easy untruth and the quick fix. Barack Obama only rarely falls victim to any of these vices, and, with luck, he may yet save us from ourselves.
I’m also not sure Obama’s true mistakes are the ones the Beltway handicappers usually cite. Would he really have been better off to wait to press for health-care reform, and allow opponents even more time to organize? Could he really have done much more to jump start the economy and reduce unemployment? (Remember, conservatives accused him of making the stimulus package too big, not too small.) Could he really be expected to wind down the Iraq war, transform our relations with the rest of the world, pass climate-change legislation, or do any of the other couple dozen things his critics variously fault him for failing (or trying) to do?
Perhaps Obama’s biggest mistake was in believing that his relentless, and usually rigorous, insistence on logic, civility, and calm thinking would carry the day, in the face of a political system that is at once calcified, corrupt, and scabrous in tone. From the very start, Congressional Republicans proved impervious to Obama’s charms and Democrats remarkably unafraid of his personal popularity. Both did pretty much what they always do, which in the case of the Republicans meant they just said no, while the Democrats typically asked for too much and refused to take yes for an answer. Despite the president’s best efforts to make lobbyists personae non gratae, they posted a record year (as much for thwarting legislation as for getting any passed). The Washington media tootled along, too often oblivious to its own trivial obsessions and unable to compete with the opinion-reinforcing antics of the blogosphere and punditocracy (of left and right alike).
(More here.)
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