Serve Republicans For Breakfast,
Don’t Take Them To Dinner
By David Michael Green
February 13, 2009 "
I was pretty sure that Barack Obama would not turn out to be my ideological cup of tea. And, indeed, when it comes to his policies and cabinet picks, he did not disappoint in disappointing me, though I am increasingly despondent at how despondent he is leaving me.Three Republicans in the cabinet? Judd Frickin’ Gregg, in exchange for a new Republican senator appointed by the Democratic Governor of New Hampshire? A raft of Clintonite retreads (including an actual Clinton) coming direct from their Wall Street finishing schools? Tom Daschle (even without tax-cheat problems)? A bunch of nobodies known for the safest of white-bread politics, if they’re known for anything at all?And in the midst of that ugly collection, a single liberal – Hilda Solis – now probably about to get thrown under the bus for some absurdly minor tax infraction. Of her husband’s. if she goes down, it will be Clinton Redux for sure, and Solis will be the equivalent of Joycelyn Elders, who got fired by the philanderer-in-chief for talking about masturbation as an alternative to sex for young people. Apart from being the mother of all walking metaphors for the entirety of Bubba’s wasted eight years, that episode showed once and for all that the regressive right’s teenage-level obsession with sexuality is fundamentally not about blocking unbiblical sex, or unsafe sex, but rather, all sex.Meanwhile, speaking of getting screwed, progressives who believed Obama might be the second coming of Bobby Kennedy are rapidly being disabused of their fantasies.As noted above, that’s not a mistake I made (though I held out some hope in that regard, and still do – sorta, kinda, barely). As an agnostic waiting for the facts to come in, I have been arguing for the better part of a year now that the central question concerning Obama is whether he will turn out to be FDR or Bill Clinton. After months of waiting for the other shoe to drop, we are now well on our way to having an answer to that question, and it ain’t the one we wanted. Nor is it the one America needs. Nor, ironically, is it the one that will actually best serve Obama.While I didn’t make the Pollyannaish mistake of believing that Obama’s frustratingly oblique politics on the campaign trail would turn out to match my own, it does look like (though it is very early still – the guy hasn’t even completed his first month in office yet) I misjudged him on the question of competence.Obama ran a near letter-perfect campaign for president. Doing so allowed him – a young, inexperienced black man, no less – to defeat two of the biggest names in the pantheon of American politics, both of whom had major political machines backing them, and at least one of whom seemed all but inevitable as the campaign began. By all appearances, Obama was successful because he was smart, his campaign was highly disciplined, and he had learned well the lessons of contemporary American politics. He therefore not only came out of nowhere to win a very improbable victory, but he did so with an astonishing near-complete absence of mistakes over the course of a two-year campaign.'
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