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It’s Finally Begun
By Brian | January 21, 2009 | Share on Facebook
As of noon today, Barack H. Obama is the President of the United States. As he often reminds us, he begins his presidency in the midst of war, financial crisis, and a dearth of confidence from the American people – confidence in their government, confidence in their financial markets, and confidence in their country’s standing around the world. And yet, despite all of that, Barack Obama exudes a charisma that the nation has not seen since John F. Kennedy took office in 1961. He is, in our modern terms, a celebrity. People go out of their way to see him and to hear him speak. They want to like what it is he has to say. In times like these, Obama’s ability to lead through inspiration is perhaps his most valuable asset.
Over the last twenty years, we have had three presidents who have ran the gamut during their terms in office from highly popular to highly unpopular. They have led us through war, helped us cope with national tragedy, and presided over economic booms and busts of a size and speed that our nation has never experienced before. It has been said that change is the only constant, but the last two decades have proven that old adage to be false. Change is not constant; it is accelerating. And because it is accelerating, our ability to manage change must evolve as well. Our laws must keep up with our technology. Our approaches to problem solving must apply to new economic, political and financial models. And our President must be able to manage the largest and most complex government in our history to be the most nimble and flexible it has ever been.
Communication is key, and Barack Obama is a great communicator. He is also a skilled politician, having shown through the various stages of his presidential campaign an ability to take an extreme position when warranted, and then compromise back to a more moderate position as he approaches implementation. We’ve seen him do it with regard to the war, where he took a position that was very different than his predecessor, and now seems poised to execute a policy very similar to the one laid out before he took office. We’ve seen it with the economy, where his initial proposals around tax and spending cuts have migrated slowly into a “let it ride” tax policy and a deficit-inducing stimulus package.
Through it all, though, he has controlled the message. The national dialog has been about what he wanted to discuss. When challenged (as was the case with Reverend Wright, for instance), he was able to say the following, and refocus the message back to his agenda:
We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together. This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
Barack Obama’s ability to give this speech and to focus the American people back on the issues of the campaign, rather than on Reverend Wright’s hateful sermons, is something that George W. Bush seemingly never possessed. That said, the lesson of sixteen years filled with “Lewinsky-gate” and “Bushitler” teaches us that it is an ability that can be wrestled away right under our noses.
Topics: Political Rantings | 7 Comments »
Have to admit, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised and psyched to see Obama’s actions today in the direction of transparency. Easily visible: the organization and quality of information appearing on whitehouse.gov. Proof that they really get this stuff: whitehouse.gov is now fully indexable, whereas Bush blocked large swathes of the site from search engines (http://codeulate.com/?p=24). Wonky but important: moving to make disclosure of presidential records the default under FOIA. Amazing attention to detail: the copyright notice on whitehouse.gov notes that government-employed authors have no copyright on site content, and makes all third-party content Creative Commons.
Third-party posts on whitehouse.gov? Huh. Wonder what that will be?
Regarding what you said about scandal, I think this gets back to the issue of the media needing to fill 24 hours a day. 21 of those hours are inanities unless they can invent a good scandal, at which point their week is done. (Meanwhile, real issues are lost in the invented noise.)
What I wish you had said is the obvious answer: if you think this is bad for the country, stop consuming those media, and tell your friends to do the same. They’ll continue to do this, and get worse by our standards, so long as it continues to make them money.
Likewise, it’s time we stopped tolerating certain useless aspects of political theater. I just listened to five minutes of John Kyl grandstanding about Geithner’s income taxes. Really? This will prevent you from confirming him? No? Then stop wasting time and trying to score political points.
As for not tolerating political theater – hallelujah and praise the lord, my friend. But where were you with that sentiment when Sarah Palin was a moron, John McCain was an old man, Barack Obama was an unpatriotic secret muslim, Hillary was a lesbian, and George W. Bush was creating a police state where millions of Americans were simultaneously tortured and spied upon?
I’m not railing at you, specifically, of course – I know you tend to speak out against egregious political hackery. My point in this post (and the previous one) is that Bush endured the worst of that sort of thing for eight years, and the record he beat was Bill Clinton’s.
If Obama’s presidency means the end of acceptability for that kind of inane, disrepectful persecution of public officials, then I’m ready to declare it a success right now, based on that fact alone.
But if you’re saying that, to use two Democratic examples, it shouldn’t be any of our business if the president is boffing Marilyn Monroe or his secretary, yeah, I can get behind that. Your theory that Bush was subject to undeserved slander, however, continues to make me think that whatever it is you’re smoking, it’s better than what I’ve got.
As for Keith Olbermann’s latest bit of investigative reporting, Mr. Tice can’t get halfway through the article without contradicting himself:
Right – he wasn’t aware who got cherry-picked because that’s how data-mining works. Having access to the database doesn’t mean spying on individuals, it means the ability to spy on individuals. And so yes – laws need to be written to prevent abuse here. But, as I said in my post (which you cleverly glossed over with “disparage the issue of spying on Americans,”), “not a single American citizen has made a legitimate complaint about being spied upon, tracked, or otherwise constricted by any of our anti-terror programs.”
Reporters, or even senators, who “suspect” they may have been targeted are speculating. Heck – I may have been targeted as well. But by an algorithm, not a scary guy with a visor in a smokey room. And if my name has a “little flag” next to it, it doesn’t say “potential terrorist,” it says, “matched as part of algorithm #6593623.”
That doesn’t make a good on Countdown, though, does it?
OK – fair point. My examples were somewhat left-leaning (and agreed to disagree on Sarah Palin – I think she was the Dan Quayle of 2008, which you’d probably agree with, but for totally different reasons).
Again, those are documented
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