Words.
"Time for an unreality check. Maybe all of us who think that making universal health care the law of the land is the most important issue of our lifetimes would not be feeling so angry and bitter if we took a step back and looked at the true cause of our rage: the liberals who raised such impossible expectations of Obama in the first place.
...if it weren’t for months of giddy rhetoric about the post-racial society, and the triumph of cosmopolitan values, and the dawn of a new golden consensus on everything that is socially just and decent—if it weren’t for all that good, old-fashioned American optimism that has such an egotistical, deluded underside, then we would have known what to expect when Obama started his health-care push and how to deal with it politically, intellectually, and emotionally.
...it almost goes without saying that many of the rapturous optimists, if not most, were people honestly, and in good conscience, wrung out by the badness and deceit of the previous eight years. They poured their despair into this one remarkably iconoclastic-seeming figure. Obama himself, in one of his books, acknowledged that he had long felt he was a screen onto which people projected their own aspirations. He certainly did his share to raise expectations. He had a million accomplices, though, who went even further than he did.
But November elections don’t usher in new epochs. Obama was elected by a freakish perfect storm of crises, not a sudden transformation of attitudes. The economic meltdown that made him now threatens to unmake him.
Obama’s own near-obsessive, Lincoln-like harping on the nation’s divisiveness throughout his campaign was both a warning of the coming storm and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
He has been, from the beginning, the most divisive president since Lincoln. As well he should be. In personal origin, public demeanor, and social agenda, Obama is the most original president the country has ever had.
...Liberals might be more tolerant of Obama’s patient maneuverings and brilliant gamesmanship if they tried to look beyond their surreal expectations. For what Obama is up against is not just stubborn political and cultural realities that do not obligingly turn with the election season. He is contending with something both more prosaic and more overwhelming: tax rates.
...Let him assure people that pre-modern tax rates for the wealthy—i.e., Republican reactionary tactics—won’t stand in the way of government funding, that just as anyone with a household budget knows how to take from here to give to there, health care will find its funding as a sound bill, once made law, finds its footing in society. Let him say whatever he has to say, so long as he keeps reminding people what is truly at stake. And let liberals stop punishing him for disappointing the moral vanity they once felt in declaring a black president the First Man of a New Age."
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