“From Lincoln to Obama,” CNN headlined one of its stories during
the early days of euphoria over the new president. Obama encouraged
the comparison, tossing out such modest asides as Lincoln made “my
story possible.” For others, Obama loomed even larger than Lincoln.
He was a “Lightworker,” as San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Mark Morford put it in 2008, “that rare kind of attuned
being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign
policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help
usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and
connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.”
Now that the Lightworker has fallen to earth and the
glorious new way of being on the planet turns out to be a lowered
credit rating, some of his prominent supporters have fallen silent
or resentful. Heady Lincoln comparisons have given way to Carter
comparisons, sotto voce: “We are watching him turn into
Jimmy Carter right before our eyes,” an anonymous Democratic
Senator said to New York Times columnist Maureen
Dowd.
To the Richard Cohens of the press, he is no longer cool
but cold. It is now safe for them to say that he lacks any special
gift for “leadership.” Washington Post columnist Dana
Milbank acidly observed about his speech on Monday, “He delivered
his statement on the economy beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln,
but that was as close as he came to forceful
leadership.”
While they decry the “obstructionism” of the Tea Party,
they condemn Obama for not displaying obstructionism of his own.
The issue of his inexperience has once again resurfaced, at the
very moment this week’s loss of SEALs in Afghanistan dims the
accomplishment of killing Bin Laden that had put, so Obama thought,
concerns about his inexperience to rest.
A turbulent stock market has added to his troubles. His
speech on Monday about the credit downgrade accelerated rather than
arrested the slide. His protestation that the U.S. “always will be
a triple-A country” was hardly reassuring, a line to be remembered
only for its feebleness. He has managed to make America sound like
a minor league team.
Obama considers the credit downgrade a consequence not of
the debt itself but of the debate about the debt. Yet the Treasury
Department’s triumphant discovery of a $2 trillion “error” in the
math of Standard & Poor’s belies that analysis: Were the size
of the debt not the fundamental reason for the downgrade, why would
that error even matter? Moreover, if “political dysfunction” had
the power to scare Standard & Poor’s into lowering the credit
rating, why did Obama and company stoke that fear by describing the
Tea Party as a collection of hostage-takers and terrorists? Why
didn’t White House officials, as sudden experts on the rationale of
S&P’s scoring, anticipate the possibility of a “political
dysfunction” downgrade and tone down their rhetoric?
The “Tea Party downgrade” claim is the sort of desperately
superficial explanation one would expect from pols who consider the
appearance of solving problems to be more crucial than the reality
of solving them. Blaming the Tea Party for America’s lower credit
rating is like “blaming firemen for fires,” as Senator Rand Paul
puts it.
Yet to the chattering class, America’s fundamental
weakness is not staggering debt but the absence of an easygoing
style of bipartisanship that accepts it. “We can always print
money” to pay our debts, as Alan Greenspan says. The critics of the
Tea Party didn’t want a dime cut from the budget and are in fact
calling for a resurgence of Keynesianism — a “massive second
stimulus” and so on. “Jobs,” not debt, is the issue, they say, and
government hiring is the answer. Perhaps if Obama added a few more
trillions of dollars to the debt through a second stimulus America
could one day enjoy the low unemployment rates once seen in
Communist countries.
It used to be just a metaphor to say America is going the
way of Rome. Now it can be said literally, as the U.S. moves toward
European-levels of debt. As promised by his starry-eyed supporters,
Obama has indeed ushered in a new America, but it looks more and
more like the legacy of a lightweight than a
“Lightworker.”
