While Drew Westen’s recent opinion piece published by the New York Times – What Happened to Obama’s Passion? – makes some good points, I found it to be naive overall. My decision to post about this today is not to be critical of Dr. Westen; he does in fact seem to have a good grasp on what’s wrong with our country from a constituent’s point of view, as well as an awareness of the decaying cultural underpinnings which have allowed our problems to perpetuate. Rather, I wanted to highlight his piece because it’s a perfect example of the deep denial in which the Left has taken to cloaking itself lately.
The first three of four pages are spent making some pretty straightforward assertions which are easy to accept, and easy to argue. Things are pretty shitty right now, and it would help a lot if people really understood why they were so shitty, and in theory a great leader would tell us in plain terms why things are generally shitty. Our brains are adapted to narrative: stories matter, stories are how our culture has always transmitted ‘knowledge and values,’ and great leaders (FDR, MLK, etc.) have historically leveraged their achievements through strong narrative.
Westen laments that Obama, so clearly a charismatic and passionate speaker, chose not to exploit his own true strength by offering Americans a compelling narrative to explain how we had fallen into this deep economic trough, and the difficulties we would encounter as we climbed back out of it. He accurately assigns this negligence as a root cause of why Obama’s own stock has dipped, and shows us how failure to shine the simple light of truth on the economic disaster of the last three years has not only left Obama open to attacks from the right, but has also made his espoused agenda (re: healthcare, entitlements and taxes) nearly impossible to advance.
Thus, Barack Obama, a man who has repeatedly demonstrated impressive intelligence, knowledge and verbal acuity, as well as a deep, eloquent charisma which allows him to commune with the general public concern at a near-Churchillian capacity, suddenly and inexplicably dropped the ball when it came to laying the real groundwork for the Hope and Change he’d so convincingly prognosticated. Not likely.
Generally, the American Left these past three years has fallen into the trap of casting Obama’s apparent failures within a framework of “well, just look what he started with,” or “the Right has relentlessly controlled the media narrative.” In other words, the political machine that so consistently failed to dent the shiny armor of Obama’s rhetoric, and a Republican ideology that suffered a humiliating loss in 2008, has discovered a new recipe. Blink your eyes and hey, guess what? These career dumbasses are now exhibiting a masterful control of the public dialogue. Again, not likely. Sorry, but the ebb and flow of the political tides in our country do not mimic the turn-on-a-dime dynamics of a high school basketball game. Decades upon decades of corporate financing and profoundly lobbied fiscal policy have built a very stable, attenuated political environment (which happens to be at ironic odds with the economic environment, but that’s another story).
When people so readily subscribe to an idea that is ridiculous, there’s a very common explanation for this: that the actual reality is difficult to accept. No one likes to think they are wrong, even about small things. But it’s especially hard to admit that you were taken for a fool. Completely bamboozled. I’ll admit it, even though I don’t enjoy admitting it. I was completely wrong about Barack Obama. I thought he was legitimately different, and would be a real force toward change in American politics. In the context of everything I know now (and, to be frank, everything I knew then), that was pretty silly of me. This was a case of me wanting to believe in something so badly that I was willing to block out the obvious evidence to the contrary. Again, not something that feels good to concede. But it’s pretty hard for a reasonable mind to deny at this point. Barack Obama hasn’t made an accidental fumble at every one of the 3,487 opportunities he’s had to be honest with us in an important way. He simply doesn’t want to be honest. He is a supreme bullshitter, and a master of the political game.
I’m not going to bloat this article with a point-by-point analyses of how his corporate backers stand to benefit from his health care plan, the stimulus package, the debt-ceiling negotiations, etc. Suffice it to say that, broadly speaking, all of the results he’s obtained while in office have been very close to what he intended, and what he expected. In essence, the results he was paid to deliver. We simply cannot build, from the facts, a convincing narrative that such a competent and successful politician as been suddenly rendered impotent by the incisive cunning of the same inept band of morons who nearly burned the house down before he got there.
OK, I might have gotten a little off track here. While I’ve just described the fall-back position of a large sector of today’s Democrats, it isn’t precisely this position that Westen takes in his piece. His own special brand of naivete manifests itself in places like this:
“The real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit.”
I’d have a hard time finding a better example than that of answering your own question as you ask it. I involuntarily snort-laughed as I read it.
Westen offers some explanations for this “conundrum.” The charitable ones include political simple-mindedness, lack of experience, and “character defect.” The less charitable ones are that Obama doesn’t even know himself, or that is concerned only with his re-election. Then, near the very end of the article, he decides to allow for a bit of reality:
“…perhaps, like so many politicians who come to Washington, he has already been consciously or unconsciously corrupted by a system that tests the souls even of people of tremendous integrity, by forcing them to dial for dollars — in the case of the modern presidency, for hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Even here, by inserting the possibility of ‘unconscious’ corruption, he is hedging a bit for Obama by blaming our campaign finance system. In that bit, I would largely agree, though conscious vs. unconscious corruption by the system are not effectively different. I’m pretty sure most victims of sexual abuse (yes, perhaps I resort too often to sexual abuse, particularly of the anal variety, as a metaphor for what’s happening to the American people) make no allowance for whether their assailant may have had a bad childhood, etc. It can’t be said often enough or loudly enough, apparently: our entire political system is broken. The two parties are one party, and they fake-argue over mostly irrelevant garbage in the public eye, then retire quietly to chambers and collaborate in something they can all get equally on-board with: bending us over our high-def TVs and fucking us hard to the sweet, oblivious sounds of Jersey Shore, or whatever equally insipid shit we happen to find ourselves watching.
We shouldn’t be asking ourselves what happened to Obama’s passion. We need, rather, to figure out what happened to our own ability to spot patronizing bullshit.
Westen’s last paragraph starts with a sort of grand quote, an homage to MLK:
“But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise.”
I liked that quote as soon as I read it, but quickly became uncomfortable with it, and here’s why: the arc of history is cast as its own entity here. But that’s dumb, at least as far as we imagine such an arc as existing in some vaguely sentient form. It’s an abstraction. There’s no cosmic moral force that’s debating whether it throws its support behind this or that President, depending on how he or she might live up to words and expectations. I suppose whether you believe that depends on how spiritual you are, and I am not very spiritual. The so-called “arc of history” is our own to describe, a priori, rather than a pre-existing thing upon which we exert our ever-evolving supplication. Yes, there is an “arc of history.” We have built it entirely on our own, and it seems lately we’ve bent it into something like a Salvador Dali painting of a pretzel reflected in a funhouse mirror. Time to find a new arc.
