Yesterday I termed the president's release of the already conspicuously explicit a "concession to madness." The NY Times similarly editorialized that Obama "stared directly into political irrationality." The Washington Post, too, said the White House undertook an "embarrassing" and "disturbing" countenance of "complete nonsense."
Those likeminded assessments, I think we can agree, represent a consensus of adult opinion on President Obama's extraordinarily dismaying yet perhaps necessary degradation. Obama, as the Times put it, "practically begged the public" to get real, get serious, and get off the preposterousness of a certain New Yorker's racist birtherism.
Yet from there the adult consensus seems to break down. Once we depart the essence of universal dismay and enter the field of political motivation, opinions begin to diverge.
Although yesterday I questioned the political wisdom of the president's veering from his customary course of ignoring ignorance and adopting instead the Clintonian war-room mentality, the Times editorialized that "Obama was tactically smart to release the certificate and marginalize those who continue to keep the matter alive."
I can't say that I at all disagree with that observation on the tactics, yet from Obama's point of view its object -- dispositive marginalization -- must appear rather unachievable. I mean, good lord, the line separating lucidity from skulduggery was drawn long ago, even as marginalized thinking went mainstream. Because you know what, NY Times? In America, racism is mainstream -- and birtherism was, is, and always will be about one and only one thing: race.
Nevertheless, in my opinion Obama tried -- with what I found to be remarkable and characteristically impressive sincerity -- to transcend the garbage and seek higher ground. In the Post's opinion "there was a certain amount of play-acting in Mr. Obama’s assertions of injury" that was politically motivated. "If anything," editorialized the Post, "the decision by ... Donald Trump to seize on the 'birther' issue played into Democrats’ hands: It allowed Mr. Obama to position himself as the sane grown-up to Mr. Trump’s 'carnival barker.' " The Post is far from alone here; its political assessment finds concurrence across adult lines.
Yet I protest those particular political grounds. Marginalization and "grown-up" distinctions had already been spectacularly achieved, to the extent they were ever achievable. Hence to the other extent that there were politics involved in Obama's actions yesterday, those politics -- and this is something that Beltway thinking has never comprehended and perhaps never will -- were precisely what Obama outlined. That is, they weren't the politics of birtherism: they were the politics of Medicare and the debt.
Both -- especially Medicare -- were being drowned out by thundering Trumpism. Not washed out, of course, but muted enough by comparison to do political damage to Democrats: damage, in the sense that Democrats were failing to reap the full benefit of the electorate's Medicare outrage. Political gifts such as the Republican House budget come along maybe once in a generation or two; thus for Democrats this is no time for distractions from the GOP's gift of Medicare-abolitionism.
In Obama's calculation, he could tamp down Trumpism by sobering the media. In my initial calculation, Obama's attempt at tamping would only amplify it. We'll see. Meanwhile I'll make my own concession -- not one to madness, but to Obama's heretofore unerring political instincts.