In Frank Capra's 1948 Tracy/Hepburn film, "State of the Union", the charismatic, straight-talking political phenom Grant Matthews, played by Tracy, at the end of a campaign swing comes back to his home town and he's confronted with the fact that those who know him don't recognize him anymore. He was no longer the person they knew, and they see him now as a fraud. In the beginning he was embraced by the nation because he spoke hard truths to those who didn't want to hear them. He spoke sense. He found ways to get adversaries to find common ground. He understood the greatness of the country and its ideals, and believed he could bring it back to its best self.
But there came a point in the campaign when it was made clear to him that he had to tone down this truth and good sense stuff, because while the people might love it, the insiders didn't. He was told that if he kept talking like that the "professionals" wouldn't support him, that it's one thing to have a high popularity rating, and it's another thing to get insider support needed to obtain the necessary votes at the convention. So he made his decision, and started babbling prepared talking points and sounding like the empty suit everybody loved him for not being. He justified it by telling himself that once elected, he would become himself again. But he was kidding himself and he knew it.
Listening to Obama for the last couple of weeks, I'm feeling about him a lot like the home folks felt about Grant Matthews. Here's a guy who wanted to go to Washington to change its culture, he wanted to talk sense to the American people, to return the country to its best self–but instead is co-opted by precisely the forces he wants to defeat. He makes compromises for the greater good, and by the time he's in position to do all those wonderful things he got into politics to do, he has become so deeply complicit in the sytem's fundamental corruption that he cannot do them. He's a constitutional lawyer who has become someone who now is either unwilling or incapable of defending the constitution and the rule of law.
I'm not a purist. I recognize that there has to be give and take. I understand that you have to compromise on little things to get bigger ones. But I also think that it's possible that you reach a point when you lose yourself and maybe you don't even realize you're lost. I thought Obama had the possibility to be the rare one who could play the game and not be played by it, but it's becoming clearer and clearer that Obama, like Grant Matthews, while he did not start out as an empty suit, has been turned into one. It's sad to see someone whom I believe to have been a good man ruined. I am eager to be proved wrong on this, but the evidence that has emerged so far is pointing only toward this interpretation.
To what degree this is Obama's fault, and to what degree it's just the "system" doesn't matter. If you and I sat down with Obama and had a candid talk, I'm sure he would tell us how complicated it is, how differently things look when you're inside, how it's one thing to talk about principle when you're a candidate and another when you're governing. How there are trade offs and that all a politician can do in most situations is make the better of two bad choices. He'd tell us that if we got to stand in his shoes for 24 hours, we'd see that we would have been forced to make the same decisions he's had to make. And I'd sympathize and maybe feel better about him as a human being, but my sense of ruin would be the same.
Because all the short-term concerns about bailouts, and healthcare, abortion, and wars in the Middle East are small potatoes compared to the long-term effect of allowing the Bush-era abuses of power and evisceration of the constitution to be covered up and, as it's looking more and more, to be extended. It's a question of setting right the foundation upon which every thing else is built. If the foundation is not sound, anything built upon it will founder sooner or later. We've become the Roman Empire on the downslope. If Obama can't get behind exposing and prosecuting Bush-era abuses either because he doesn't want to, or if he does want to but can't, we're lost either way. It's just that the country, like Obama, doesn't realize it yet.
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