Except when Republicans are in power, nothing gets done, and what
gets done by them is regressive and destructive of the public interest. We've become
virtually ungovernable when Democrats are in power.
If there's
any hope for the Obama administration, it seems to me, it lies in the expectation of something
unexpected–an unplanned-for game changer. That's how desperate our situation has become. Politics as usual is a slow-motion disaster, and unless some x-factor is introduced that wakes us us and
steels our will, we are in very deep trouble.
Here we are fearful that the Dems ineffectiveness will lose them seats in 2010. Are Americans not shrewd enough to understand that rewarding a rigidly oppositional GOP allied with conservadems and narcissists like Joe Lieberman is not the answer? Are Americans not shrewd enough to understand that the Democrats, as feckless as they might be, are the only hope? And that Dems can deliver on that hope only if they are strengthened by seating better Democrats? Does the American electorate really believe that the GOP offers any real answers for its problems? I'm not without hope that enough Americans are, indeed shrewd enough, shrewder than the puditocracy thinks they are, but we won't know until next November.
In the meanwhile, I have little hope otherwise for the Obama administration unless some x-factor is introduced. Our x-factors, alas, are usually delivered to us in
negative, if not tragic, packages. X-factors of recent memory are relatively common. The big ones in the last fifty years, in no particular order: 9/11, Katrina, Watergate, the Iran Hostage Crisis, the financial meltdown of 2008, the Kennedy assassination. With the possible exception of the financial meltdown, these have all been game changers. (Jury's still out on the meltdown–and Lewinsky/Clinton isn't listed because it was a manufactured crisis that had no consequences except to waste everybody's time.)
I wonder if, for instance, the civil rights
legislation of '64 and '65 would have been possible had Kennedy not
been assassinated. By the kind of political calculations now shaping
all Democratic thinking, Democrats pushing so hard for civil rights
legislation made no political sense. It caused in large part the
presidency to be yielded to Nixon in '68 and the South to be lost to
the Democrats for decades and still counting. Yet a southern Democrat
steeled his will to do what had to be done to get it done.Would that have happened if Kennedy lived out his term and was re-elected? Doubt it.
I suspect that the financial meltdown is a disaster still in progress, and if there's to be an x-factor in the near future, it might be related to it, or it might be related to something completely unexpected. Obama, so far, has not exploited the one x-factor opportunity given to him. Will he exploit the next one? What would it take for Obama to become another LBJ rather than just another Tony Blair? What will it take to galvanize congress to act in the public interest? Certainly not politics as usual.
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