Andrew Sullivan expounds on Obama's now clear pattern

by Susan Marie Kovalinsky | January 31, 2010 at 03:46 pm

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A Fatherless generation will not have to bid farewell to its surrogate father, Sullivan assures us

Since I first began following Andrew Sullivan back in the heyday of his New Republic editorship, I have looked to him as a sort of elder brother in things cultural and political.

Then in his blogging heyday, and his support of W Bush, I kept a wary eye on him. As the author of the beautifully written Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality , and upholder of the late great Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, I had come to love Sullivan, and to trust him. But also something more: I had come to trust him as a bellwether of shifting American cultural and political changes.

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On Tuesday night Obama stood between them all, like a teacher entering a classroom with spit balls flying and desks crashing. He cannot discipline; he does not have the constitutional power to dictate to Congress what it must do, and he is also determined to reverse the imperial style of presidency that has corroded the constitutional balance in the past few decades and especially the past few years. There is no headmaster to send the children to — just an argument that certain things simply have to be done.

Andrew Sullivan on Obama's State of the Union address

One of his most profound passages in Virtually Normal is his anticipation - a decade early - of a backlash against the gay marriage movement, after a peak. 'Not only we we decline', Sullivan says, 'we may even be reversed'. He says this because he sees, he comprehends, what is a cultural moment, an empirical flash in the pan, and what is transcendent and ideal, full of moral suasion and thus built for permanence.

So when Sullivan speaks, I listen closely. His opinions are stunningly precise in their prophetic overtones.

Obama is the real deal, Sullivan says. He is the same Obama of the Hope and Change mantra during the campaign days. He is the "Yes, We Can" man we fell in love with, for a host of reasons they will never understand. What is transpiring says more about America, about Americans at this juncture, than it does about our brother Barack.

Remember his electrifying rise with the win in Iowa, followed by the loss in New Hampshire, Sullivan clucks. Recall his drift back to obscurity when he was lagging 30 points behind Hilary. Recall when the Jeremiah Wright scandal broke, when the bitter comments came out, and when he made that gaffe in the Ohio speech.

And then think, what always happens next? The comeback, Sullivan says, like the father who never lets you down, though he leaves you hanging until the 11th hour. Like the line form the old gospel song, He may not come when you want him, but he's right on time. This is our Obama. The one who cried out, "I love you back"

We should know the pattern by now. Barack Obama has a way of seeming to let things drift, even dangerously so. His supporters start to panic; his enemies start to sniff confidence like a junkie out of a brown paper bag. Scott Brown’s remarkable victory in Massachusetts provided the glue, and the Republicans and the media almost passed out with the rush — and still the president remained somewhat aloof; distant.
As health insurance reform looked dead in the water, Obama seemed equally inert. The mood on the liberal blogs went from depression to panic. His presidency was over! Liberalism’s revival was a mirage!

The atmosphere — and I wasn’t entirely immune to it myself — reminded me of the autumn of 2007, as Obama remained mired 30 points behind Hillary Clinton and seemed to be drifting back into obscurity; or when in 2008, after his stunning victory in Iowa, he lost New Hampshire and allowed the race to drag on for months. Or how healthcare reform seemed massacred by last summer’s town hall meetings, or how he chose to stay removed from the Iranian revolution last June.

And then there’s the comeback. This time, the setup was almost perfect: an already scheduled grand political speech playing to all of Obama’s strengths. And yet what was striking about the speech was how unlike Obama it was. It was conversational, self-deprecating, sometimes funny, intermittently aggressive, occasionally moving, conciliatory in tone. But what struck me most was not the delivery but the reception. I’ve listened to dozens of state-of-the-union speeches and I have rarely heard such a quiet talk meet such silence. It was the kind of silence that greets the truth.

The truth is that America’s problems have not been this grave since the 1970s. The long-term fiscal outlook is not grim; it’s catastrophic. The healthcare system fails to insure 40m people and offers stratospheric increases in costs for everyone else. Most Americans live with a gnawing anxiety that they are one serious illness away from bankruptcy. US hospitals provide some of the best medical care in the world — but the system makes the NHS look efficient. Slowly it is strangling the US economy and government.

[. . . ]

ust as liberals refused to believe in the 1970s that their approach to government had become outdated, so today conservatives proclaim the almost theological need to return to a parody of Reaganism instead of adjusting their ideas to new realities. And the purists are growing on both sides.

[. . . ]

I do not know if Americans will respond to Obama’s reasoning, or if the short-term political posturing will dissipate. In the depressed economic climate, where tempers are high and anxiety is endemic, the odds of Obama succeeding seem remote. But what came through last Wednesday night, past the gentle conversational tone, was a determination to stay the course he set out in the campaign. “We don’t quit. I don’t quit” was his version of “the lady’s not for turning”. On Thursday Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, gave a similar pep talk: “You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get healthcare reform passed for the American people.”

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Rory Cripps

at 16:00 on January 31st, 2010

Very interesting piece . . . .

YankeeJim

at 17:25 on January 31st, 2010

If the President and Congress have a flawed management approach, and if their processes are incorrect, the outcome, whatever it is, will not be achieved.