One Year: Beware of Sudden Downdrafts
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg
New Yorker
Having been around a while, I have some memory of the Years One of four previous Democratic Presidents. Turbulence during takeoff has been the rule. It is wise to keep one’s seat belt loosely fastened.
J.F.K. had the Bay of Pigs fiasco and a humiliating Vienna summit with Khrushchev, unforced errors both. He dazzled with imaginative, low-cost initiatives like the Peace Corps, but the really ambitious items on his agenda (health care!) stalled in Congress. Carter mismanaged relations with Congress and “gave away” the Panama Canal, a necessary move that had the side effect of turbocharging Ronald Reagan’s political rise. Clinton stumbled over gays in the military on the way to his own health-care debacle. Only Johnson had a stellar first year, and that was largely due to the tragically galvanizing circumstances of his taking office.
That Obama let the “outside game” part of the health-care drama get away from him, so focussed was he on the “inside game” of trying to force the legislative elephant through the Congressional keyhole, can no longer be denied. He and his team can also be faulted for the political (and perhaps substantive) inattention that has allowed the right to profit handsomely from the economic disaster that their policies, not Obama’s, brought about.
...
Obama came into office with a slightly better-than-average electoral mandate, but he was immediately faced with difficulties of a size and type that his post-mid-century Democratic predecessors were not: a gigantic economic emergency whose full effects weren’t felt until halfway into his first year; two botched wars in chaotic Muslim countries; an essentially nihilistic opposition party dominated by a pro-torture, anti-intellectual, anti-public-spirited, xenophobic “conservative” movement; and a rightist propaganda apparatus owned by nominally respectable media corporations and financed by nominally respectable advertisers. Excuses? Maybe. Good ones, though. Sometimes excuses actually excuse.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/01/one-year-beware-of-sudden-downdrafts.html
New Yorker
Having been around a while, I have some memory of the Years One of four previous Democratic Presidents. Turbulence during takeoff has been the rule. It is wise to keep one’s seat belt loosely fastened.
J.F.K. had the Bay of Pigs fiasco and a humiliating Vienna summit with Khrushchev, unforced errors both. He dazzled with imaginative, low-cost initiatives like the Peace Corps, but the really ambitious items on his agenda (health care!) stalled in Congress. Carter mismanaged relations with Congress and “gave away” the Panama Canal, a necessary move that had the side effect of turbocharging Ronald Reagan’s political rise. Clinton stumbled over gays in the military on the way to his own health-care debacle. Only Johnson had a stellar first year, and that was largely due to the tragically galvanizing circumstances of his taking office.
That Obama let the “outside game” part of the health-care drama get away from him, so focussed was he on the “inside game” of trying to force the legislative elephant through the Congressional keyhole, can no longer be denied. He and his team can also be faulted for the political (and perhaps substantive) inattention that has allowed the right to profit handsomely from the economic disaster that their policies, not Obama’s, brought about.
...
Obama came into office with a slightly better-than-average electoral mandate, but he was immediately faced with difficulties of a size and type that his post-mid-century Democratic predecessors were not: a gigantic economic emergency whose full effects weren’t felt until halfway into his first year; two botched wars in chaotic Muslim countries; an essentially nihilistic opposition party dominated by a pro-torture, anti-intellectual, anti-public-spirited, xenophobic “conservative” movement; and a rightist propaganda apparatus owned by nominally respectable media corporations and financed by nominally respectable advertisers. Excuses? Maybe. Good ones, though. Sometimes excuses actually excuse.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/01/one-year-beware-of-sudden-downdrafts.html
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