In the title as political metaphor, lifted shamelessly from Peter’s first epistle, there’s no question as to who’s who.
During the Obama administration’s genesis, Republicans wasted no time in erecting a wall of separation between their interests and the nation’s; the discipline was brutal -- there would be hell to pay if apostates were to break ranks and opt for the secular Good over the Hereafter ideological. Democrats solemnly gathered and indeed achieved a few remarkable victories in the nation’s interests; but now, saith Gallup, they wander with Dante’s Virgil in Limbo.
Enter the hermeneutic practitioners, who now assign the original sin of all this apocalyptic silliness to both Republicans and ... who else? ... President Obama. I quote from my most recent encounter, experienced just minutes ago, with the left’s St. Paul of Krugman:
“[T]here has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers. And this campaign has been effective in part because the Obama administration hasn’t offered an effective reply.”
Not now, not yesterday, not since the Beginning. An “effective reply” still awaits its presidential unveiling -- although given an electorate that tells pollsters that Republicans are responsible for current economic conditions and they trust Republicans more than Democrats to improve these conditions, the waiting may endure. That’s Obama’s cross to bare, misspelling intended.
At any rate, Krugman is incontrovertibly correct. Only with the midterms upon us has Obama gone in public search of an effective reply to Republicans’ “fact-free” skulduggery. Such is advocacy journalism’s first draft and it’s doubtful that political historians will much improve on it. I have no argument with the left’s critical assessment of what is rather straightforward chronology.
Yet I profoundly differ with the left’s counterfactual conclusion, which has, by now, ascended to the level of progressive Scripture: Obama should have publicly clashed with the right from the get-go. Had he acted the fire-and-brimstone FDR (of 1936, rather than the more accommodating FDR of ‘33, two vastly different and transitional presidential personalities which idolatrous progressives stubbornly confuse and conflate), he and his fellow Dems wouldn’t be suffering as underdogs now.
I differ, because the left’s counterfactual history is as damnable as the right’s regular offerings of unverifiable fairy tales -- “If only Obama had done this, done that, our way, we’d be much better off.”
With illegitimate ease, counterfactual history becomes perfect history. All imperfections are instantly vaporized by the power of faith and pure imagination. If only Obama had drawn an early line, say, with a larger stimulus, if only he had entrenched then and there and given Republicans what for, if only he had “effectively” tutored the ineducable electorate as to why it would be his way or the highway, well, Obama then and thereafter would have ruled supreme.
A nice, pleasant story, but also utter nonsense. Even worse complications could and probably would have erupted; for instance Obama would have instantly put the lie to his campaign promise of a kinder and kind of postpartisan Washington. Republicans would have been giddy. The electorate would have been outraged -- hoodwinked again, voters would have cried, and much sooner than they did, thus likely dooming both health-care and financial reform.
I’m not entirely sold on Tolstoyan fatalism as a universal axiom of history, but at least in Obama’s case I’d argue that events have played out in something of a destined, and even judicious, order.