Soar Loser

The fine line between cynicism and naiveté.

By JAMES TARANTO

"Life seems to lack rhyme or reason or even a shadow of order unless we approach it with the key of converses," Saul Alinsky observed in "Rules for Radicals":

Seeing everything in its duality, we begin to get some dim clues to direction and what it's all about. It is in these contradictions and their incessant interacting tensions that creativity begins. As we begin to accept the concept of contradictions we see every problem or issue in its whole, interrelated sense. We then recognize that for every positive there is a negative, and that there is nothing positive without its concomitant negative, nor any political paradise without its negative side.

A nice example comes from Kevin Drum of the left-liberal magazine Mother Jones in a blog post titled "Next Year's Big Bout: Real Obama vs. Fantasy Obama." He borrows liberally from our Aug. 8 column, in which we observed that Obama's erstwhile supporters were struggling with "the disconnect between the fantasy Obama and the real one."

Drum begins by quoting a Los Angeles Times op-ed from Spike Ward, an artsy type who swooned for Sen. Obama in 2008 but suffered as her husband's business took a hit in the Obama recession (among other things, they dropped their medical insurance). She got "pretty mad" at the real Obama, dropped her Democratic voter registration, and changed her "Got hope" bumper sticker to read "Got nope."

But an unlikely turn of events brought Ward back on board. Diagnosed with cancer, she learned that she is that rara avis: a beneficiary of ObamaCare. Despite now having a pre-existing condition, she was able to buy insurance to cover her treatment.

Drum's response to Ward, however, is what we find interesting:

And there you have it: Obama's core problem with his supporters from 2008, the ones who listened to his soaring rhetoric and believed he really was going to transform Washington--and have since been bitterly disappointed. This has always been something I could understand only intellectually, since I never for a second paid any attention to his stump speeches. Of course they soared! Of course they promised a new era! That's what politicians always promise. Why on earth would anyone take this seriously, when every single other piece of evidence showed him to be a cautious, pragmatic, mainsteam [sic], center-left Democratic candidate?

Beats me. But lots of people did take it seriously, and now Obama is stuck trying to convince them in very practical, non-soaring terms that he really has done a lot for them.

At one level, Drum is breathtakingly cynical--so much so that his brazenness in admitting it is almost refreshing. Here's an Obama supporter acknowledging what we Obama skeptics have long known to be true: that all that "soaring rhetoric" was just hot air. Even the denunciations of cynicism were cynical.

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Reuters

"Fantasy Obama" in 2008

But here's where the duality comes in: From another angle, Drum is breathtakingly naive. He has gone through the past four years assuming that all that "soaring rhetoric" was harmless fantasy--that no one, presumably including Obama himself, took it seriously. Now he has lost his innocence with the realization that Obama toyed with his supporters' feelings and left many of them hurt.

Here's a question, though: If one assumes--as Drum did, and as he apparently assumes politicians, including Obama, do--that no one takes "soaring rhetoric" seriously, why do pols bother with it at all? It's a puzzle but not a mystery. After all, the pleasure one takes from a novel, a play or a fictional movie is not diminished by the knowledge of its unreality. Less charitably, we might analogize an Obama speech to a pornographic movie or a romance novel--a fantasy that is designed to arouse desire (and that has been criticized for fostering unrealistic expectations).

Drum goes on to make a case for the real Obama, offering an enumeration of his putative accomplishments:

That list is pretty long and includes a big stimulus bill, a landmark healthcare reform bill, student loan reform, an end to the Bush torture regime, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a hate crimes bill, a successful rescue of the American car industry, resuscitation of the NLRB, passage of New START, the death of Osama bin Laden, withdrawal from Iraq, a decent start on rationalizing Pentagon procurement, repeal of DADT, credit card reforms, unprecedented gas mileage improvements, a second stimulus in 2010, and passage of financial reform legislation.

Problem solved, right? If a single ObamaCare regulation was enough to woo Ward back, there's something for everyone in Drum's list. Having done so much for so many people, the president ought to be able to top 60% next November. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich might as well just go home and spare themselves the humiliation.

OK, maybe not. It doesn't really work that way. Ward, who was predisposed to favor Obama in the first place, came back not because she admires his policies but because one of them provided her with a tangible personal benefit (albeit one she is probably overestimating; as J.E. Dyer points out, Ward's premiums are likely to skyrocket in a couple of years).

As he rattles off his list, Drum again naively assumes that the electorate is made up of people like him--i.e., liberal policy wonks. He ignores the costs of the policies he favors; he ignores the unpopularity of some of them; and above all, he ignores the dismal economic conditions that have persisted either in spite of or because of Obama's policies.

In that regard, we're especially amused by the very first item on the list of things for which voters are supposed to be grateful: "a big stimulus bill." We got a big bill all right: $731.9 billion and counting, according to the ironically named Recovery.gov. What we didn't get was the promised benefit: keeping unemployment from rising above 8%. It just dipped below 9% for the first time in many months.

Here we see the duality of cynicism and naiveté. Drum is too sophisticated to take soaring political rhetoric seriously, but he's foolish enough to boast of an abjectly failed policy as if it were a success. He's like an atheist who thinks only a dolt would believe in God but has no doubt that faith healing works.

Fooled Again 
All that said, President Obama does seem to be solidifying his political base. Yesterday he gave a speech in Kansas that is drawing plaudits from lefty pundits. The headline from The American Prospect tells us all we need to know: "Obama Takes Cues From Occupy." Maybe he plans to win independent voters by erecting tents and organizing drum circles in their backyards.

Robert Reich, at the Puffington Host, gives the Obama speech a reverse fisking (a reiching?). That is, he quotes it extensively, interspersed with his own comments about how awesome it is. Reich's conclusion is the funniest part:

Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008. Since then we've had a president who has only reluctantly stood up to the moneyed interests Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin stood up to.

Hopefully Obama will carry this message through 2012, and gain a mandate to use his second term to take on the growing inequities and game-rigging practices that have been undermining the American economy and American democracy for years.

So the Obama "many of us thought we had elected in 2008" is one who gives speeches that excite left-wingers. As noted in the preceding item, that is the Obama of 2008. Obama has now convinced Reich that he's good for more than delivering speeches--by delivering a speech! That says more about Reich than about Obama.