Mr. Kristof is off, and Ms. Collins is still on book leave. Mr. Coates, in “Obama and His Discontents,” says a look at the politics that surrounded the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation seems more relevant today than ever. He’s just a tad put out… Mr. Bruni, in “The Path From Poetry to Drudgery,” says President Obama is having to govern under limits, but he surely yearns to move past them. Here’s Mr. Coates:
The administration of President Obama has never held much regard for its left flank. Admonished by the vice president to “stop whining,” inveighed against by the president himself for “griping and groaning,” the liberal critics have been generally viewed by the White House as petulant children. “The Professional Left,” former press secretary Robert Gibbs dubbed them, a gang of nettlesome romantics who “ought to be drug-tested,” and would not be happy until “we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.”
Keeping up the theme, the administration recently released a video of Mr. Obama waxing scornfully at the expense of his softheaded allies. The audience was an ideological cross-section of college students, no doubt picked to emphasize Mr. Obama’s ever open mind. The president invoked Abraham Lincoln, noting that the Emancipation Proclamation was a compromise that freed only the slaves in rebel territory. “Can you imagine how The Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think about it, ‘Lincoln sells out slaves.’ ”
Rendering the hallowed Proclamation as a seminal act of hippy-punching is understandably attractive to the Very Serious People of Washington. But, in Mr. Obama’s case, it also evinces a narrow politicocentric view of democracy that holds that the first duty of a loyal opposition is to stay on message and fall in line.
In fact, many of Lincoln’s most vociferous critics welcomed the Proclamation. Wendell Phillips, who once derided Lincoln as “the slave-hound of Illinois,” claimed the Proclamation as “the people’s triumph.” Frederick Douglass, who helped wage a primary campaign against the president in 1864 and once charged that Lincoln was “a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred,” hailed the Proclamation as “the greatest event of our nation’s history.”
Douglass was not delusional. With a wave of his pen, Lincoln freed tens of thousands of slaves and opened the Army to blacks, an act that Lincoln himself once derided. “Never before had so large a number of slaves been declared free,” writes historian Eric Foner in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, “The Fiery Trial.”
“The proclamation altered the nature of the Civil War, the relationship of the federal government to slavery, and the course of American history. It liquidated the largest concentration of property in the United States. … Henceforth, freedom would follow the American flag.”
In sum, it’s true that the Proclamation was a compromise. But hailing it merely as such is akin to hailing “Moby-Dick” for being a book — technically correct, if painfully thickwitted.
Likewise, a pedantic focus on the document itself conveniently omits the work of abolitionists and radicals whose tactics, encompassing jailbreaks, treason and shootouts, far outstripped anything ever concocted by MoveOn.org. But Lincoln understood their relationship to the larger cause. “They are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally,” he once said of the Radicals. “They are utterly lawless — the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with — but after all their faces are set Zionward.”
Obama, too, stands atop the work of a coalition of unhandy devils. In the fall of 2002, Chicago’s own professional left organized a rally to oppose the Iraq War and invited Mr. Obama to join them. He accepted, and the first unwitting steps to the White House were taken. It is considerably harder to imagine Mr. Obama’s path through the Democratic primary had he been just another pro-war Democrat insisting that the base activists stop whining.
Mr. Obama, of course, is not an activist but a politician held accountable by a broad national electorate. He is thus charged with the admittedly difficult task of nudging the country forward, even as he reflects it. That mission necessitates appreciating the art of compromise, but not fetishizing it. Mr. Obama need only look to his hero for an object lesson. Parcel to emancipation, Abraham Lincoln, against the howls of radicals and black leaders, pushed for the colonization of blacks in Africa or the Caribbean, as middle ground between full equality and slavery. The scheme ended in embarrassment; Lincoln’s point man was exposed as a con artist who attempted to effectively re-enslave the blacks he was charged with leading. A Congressional investigation soon followed. It was a fiasco — and it was a compromise.
Obama has been much praised for the magnanimity he shows his opposition. But such empathy, unburdened by actual expectations, comes easy. More challenging is the work of coping with those who have the disagreeable habit of taking the president, and his talk of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” seriously. In that business, Obama would do well to understand that while democracy depends on intelligent compromise, it also depends on the ill-tempered gripers and groaners out in the street.
The Party of Lincoln, whatever its present designs, has not forgotten this.
Now here’s Mr. Bruni:
Just three months ago, for at least a little while, everything felt so different. You were triumphant, the audaciously hopeful gambler who had rolled the dice and vanquished Bin Laden, even though some of the experts advising you had put the odds well below 50-50. For showing extraordinary nerve, you were repaid with exceptional luck.
Even three weeks ago, you were in a better place. Unbeknownst to most of the partisan warriors and nearly all of the cynical scribes around town, you and John Boehner had been huddling in the White House, talking trillions, tracing the heady contours of a grand bargain. It was another big bet, but with odds no worse than the last one, or so you calculated. And in Boehner, you believed, you’d found a similarly motivated accomplice with a similarly long-range view. Despite your customary reserve, you experienced the stirrings of a real fondness for him.
Then . . . breakdowns. Standoffs. Near chaos on Capitol Hill. And, now, a piteous basket of pathetic final-hour fixes that could yield a downgrade of the country’s credit rating and aren’t durable solutions: Band-Aids where a tourniquet was once discussed. Even if default is averted, the nation’s mountainous debt will likely remain a source of anguish and acrimony through and even past the 2012 election. Will there ever be any money or oxygen for actually getting stuff done?
That was part of what a grand bargain was supposed to accomplish: not just badly needed fiscal discipline but badly wanted Obama liberation; one emphatic, enduring push past this constipated juncture; a changed discussion before Election Day; enough cutbacks and revenue to permit some spending again down the line. Republicans sensed all of that. It gave them added incentive to stop you, not that they needed much more. They don’t trust you. No matter how reasonable a face you show them, they’re convinced that a raging liberal lies beneath, biding his time.
What a crew they are, tarring you as the Spendthrift-in-Chief, though the fiscal crater in which Washington languishes was dug in enormous measure by an economic slowdown that preceded you and by the tax cuts and military campaigns of their president. You got stuck with the mess. That’s your cinching, suffocating, unjust reality. Your campaign had all the romance of history in the making; your presidency has all the drudgery of a toxic cleanup. You orated your way into janitorial work.
Into a ceaseless, tedious blame game, too. That’s Washington’s default pastime, and it’s a blood sport, which you and Boehner were playing during your rival addresses Monday night, when the battle wasn’t just about the debt ceiling but about images and reputations in the aftermath. On Tuesday and Wednesday, it was the Republicans who looked more incompetent and immature, as Boehner fought to subdue the obstructionists in his ranks, purists who won’t brook even the most picayune compromise, let alone the tiniest tax increase. Some of them don’t fear default. They somehow regard it as a fleeting, instructive purgative.
But if the country winds up there, and even if it doesn’t, it’s hard to see how this embarrassing mess doesn’t taint you. There will be questions about whether you put your marker down at the right time, with enough specificity and force. There will be assertions that you didn’t make a persuasive and coherent enough case to voters.
At least a majority of them still blame your predecessor for the gasping economy. But that can last only so long, and it’s not a refrain you can tote onto the campaign trail, swapping “Yes We Can” for “Not My Fault.” Your fortunes may well be manacled to an unemployment rate that, to your thinking, is more reflective of dynamics beyond your control than of any tinkering you can do. So you watch. You wait. The aloofness observers ascribe to you could just as accurately be described as fatalism.
It has been a challenging few years, and not just politically. Michelle wasn’t as prepared for the airlessness and isolation of “the bubble” as some of the first ladies before her. It’s one of Washington’s worst-kept secrets that she has known happier times. The coming campaign won’t thrill her.
But you’re still catching breaks. Your field of Republican challengers is weak. None have your personal narrative, your symbolic power. Even Americans unsure of you remain invested in you. A second term could be yours.
Would it be much better and freer than the first? With the $4 trillion package that you and Boehner once discussed long gone, will you ever be able to govern during a chapter free of limits, ceilings, boxes, constraints? You got health care reform, and then you got heartache. What you must worry that you’ll never get is a sustained, true chance.
As Mr. Coates pointed out above getting that second term might be very difficult as long as the base keeps getting shat on. I know that I’ve closed my wallet, small though it may be.
