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In this Op-Ed from the New Yorker, Hertzberg pretty much defined the Obama Presidency. Take a minute to read it and discuss. No name-calling, kids, lets play like adults.
A politician ascending to the pinnacle of American power receives custody of the Presidency and its powers on January 20th, but he becomes President over time, through a testing procession of civic rituals and occurrences planned and unplanned: his announcement of candidacy; his acquisition and acceptance of his party’s nomination; his campaign debate appearances; his electoral mandate; his Cabinet and staff choices; his Inaugural; his first full-scale news conference; his first trip overseas on Air Force One; his first crisis in office. Barack Obama—whose first crisis took hold before his election and dwarfs any of his predecessors’ since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, which it chillingly resembles—performed another of those rituals last week. In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama took full possession of his job and his role.
For an hour, Obama spoke with a measured urgency that occasionally overrode even the customary bobbings up and down of the Speaker, the Vice-President, and the audience. (Congressional standing ovations: America’s answer to North Korean calisthenics.) The President began by casting the crisis in human terms (“the college acceptance letter your child had to put back in the envelope”), offering reassurance (“America will emerge stronger than before”), reviewing the immediate goals of the economic-stimulus bill he had signed a week earlier, and explaining why the government’s hugely expensive effort to re-start the flow of credit is an absolute necessity (“It’s not about helping banks, it’s about helping people”). He then sketched the outlines of a program for change as ambitious as any President has proposed since this one was a toddler: first, a new energy economy, based on a surge of public investment in renewable technologies and including, crucially, a cap on carbon pollution; second, the long-postponed comprehensive reform of our health-care system, aimed not only at bringing “quality, affordable health care to every American” but also at lightening its burden on American business; and, third, an expansion of educational quality and opportunity such that “every child has access to a complete and competitive education, from the day they are born to the day they begin a career.”
For some thirty years, the American political conversation has been dominated by a strain of ideological conservatism that wields market fundamentalism as a sword and cultural populism as a shield. In this speech, the President began to take up the task of reintroducing the public to what once was called, and one day may again be called, liberalism. He would have been perfectly within his rights to focus blame for the nation’s condition on his predecessor and his predecessor’s party, but he made a different choice. (The closest he came was when he said, “A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future.”) Instead, he spoke of “we”—of a common responsibility for the past and the future alike. He was able to anticipate and soothe the reflexive emotions of his opponents while explaining, in undogmatic yet value-laden terms, why the times demand a decisive departure from an essentially amoral exaltation of individual success. “Dropping out of high school is no longer an option,” he said. “It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.” That admonition, which won applause from both sides of the aisle, was not directed solely, or even primarily, at the young and underprivileged. It was a metaphorical call to duty and a redefinition of patriotism.
During the speech, CNN equipped a roomful of Democrats and Republicans with dials to turn this way or that. Though sometimes the red and blue lines crowded each other at the top of the resulting graph, at other times no lines at all were visible. They were literally off the charts. In a followup CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, ninety-two per cent of viewers had a positive reaction to the speech; eighty-two per cent said they supported its proposals. The science of this sort of thing may be doubted, especially as a predictor of future opinion. But politicians tend to take notice.
The opposition response attracted more attention than usual. Bobby Jindal has been cast as the Republican equivalent of Obama. A decade younger than the President and from a comparable background (his parents immigrated from India), he is reputed to possess a command of policy detail rivalling Bill Clinton’s. Even so, Jindal’s delivery was received kindly by no one; the only controversy was about whose it more nearly resembled, that of the late Mr. Rogers or that of Kenneth, the page on the television comedy “30 Rock.” But what was truly pitiful was what he said, not how he said it. Understandably (he is the governor of Louisiana), Jindal built his talk around Hurricane Katrina; incredibly, the lesson he drew was that the national government tries to do too much. The emotional heart of his speech—an anecdote about how, during the hurricane, he and a local sheriff defied “some bureaucrat” who refused to let volunteers launch their boats to rescue victims on rooftops because the volunteers didn’t have the proper paperwork—was quickly shown to be rather less heroic than it sounded.
Jindal dismissed Obama’s stimulus bill by harping on its funding of “something called volcano monitoring,” which allowed him to venture a feeble joke about “the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.” The stimulus does in fact allocate a hundred and forty million dollars—less than 0.0002 per cent of its total—for U.S. Geological Survey facilities and equipment, with a tenth of that amount aimed at predicting events like the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, which, in 1980, killed fifty-seven people and caused billions of dollars in damage. Coming from the governor of a state whose suffering from a natural disaster was first compounded by the incompetence and the indifference of a Republican Administration in Washington and then relieved, however inadequately, by more than a hundred billion dollars in federal outlays, this was stupefying. Jindal’s mockery recalled Sarah Palin’s campaign-trail ridicule of fruit-fly research, a key tool in the study of human genetics. Interestingly, one of the volcanoes currently causing geologists the most worry is Mt. Redoubt, about a hundred miles southwest of Anchorage, Alaska. Those 2012 primary debates should be fun.
Two days later, the President unveiled his budget proposal, which put to rest any doubts about his seriousness. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and Times columnist, who has been among the doubters, was convinced. “President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past thirty years,” Krugman wrote. “If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.” A big if. But we finally have a plan, and a President. ♦
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