It’s inherently risky for any charismatic politician to legislate. To act is to choose and to choose is to disappoint the expectations of many who had poured their hopes into the empty vessel — of which candidate Obama was the greatest representative in recent American political history.
Obama did not just act, however. He acted ideologically. To his credit, Obama didn’t just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something — to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America’s deeply and historically individualist polity.
Perhaps Obama thought he’d been sent to the White House to do just that. If so, he vastly over-read his mandate. His own electoral success — twinned with handy victories and large majorities in both houses of Congress — was a referendum on his predecessor’s governance and the post-Lehman financial collapse. It was not an endorsement of European-style social democracy.
Hence the resistance. Hence the fall. The system may not always work, but it does take its revenge.
well said!
As far as I can tell, the opposition party is acting far more ideologically than the President or the Congressional majority.
President Obama hasn’t even been in office a year yet. It is surely far to early to judge his success or failure. Tomorrow at noon he will have been President a year. Let’s see. A year into George W. Bush’s presidency we were a recession, we had the tragedy of 9/11, we were at war in Afghanistan (allegedly to capture Osama bin Laden and destroy al Quaida) and whatever popularity Bush enjoyed was largely in reaction to 9/11. On that basis, should we judge Bush a success or a failure?
I would also observe that individuals do live in a society and that society does impact on individuals and individuals impact society. There is an interdependence there that will not go away. In a society whose constitutional document begins with “We the people…” and whose first Republican President spoke of government “of the people, for the people and by the people” is fundamentally democratic (“demos”=people, “kratein”=to rule). In such a country, surely the “social democratic stream” is also part of “America’s deeply and historically polity.”
Actually, Septuagenerian, President Bush – like his successor – also inherited a recession. The major difference, of course, was that he didn’t work that – [i]ad nauseum[/i] – into every speech he gave. Come to think of it, I don’t remember him [b]ever[/b] mentioning any problems he inherited from the previous administration. I do sometimes wonder if BHO had spent his two years as Senator (before running for POTUS) actually being, well, a Senator, whether the enormity of his current office would have been less of a surprise to him than it apparently was.
Septuagenarian, the democratic republicanism of the Constitution and of the Gettysburg Address have nothing to do with later European social democratic thought and politics, save an etymology. I don’t say that there isn’t some social democratic stream in American politics: 20th century progressivism anticipated, and then embraced it. But the suggestion that social democracy (in the sense of left-wing, or progressive, or socialist political parties) is in the Constitution or the Gettysburg Address, even implicitly, is not sustainable.