The Iraq speech
Passion over the wrong-headedness of the Iraq misadventure, more than any other single factor, was what got Obama elected in 2008. Given that the economy won’t change significantly in two months, Obama’s speech last night marking the “official” end of the catastrophe was the best, maybe only, chance to reawaken that passion in time to do something about the looming catastrophe that is the midterms.
(Never mind that the war isn’t at all over–as last week’s bombings across Iraq remind us–or that 50,000 soldiers and over 100,000 mercenaries remain. That’s another issue. So is the cogent argument Alexander Cockburn makes–at the end of his Glenn Beck column elsewhere in ETS!–that the continuing US presence is Iraq really doesn’t mean much.)
The White House and Obama’s apologists seem to consistently underestimate the anger many–not just on the left–have for Obama and what they see as his failure to deliver on his 2008 promises. It’s not a totally rational response, both because there has been substantive improvements over Bush-era governance in a lot of areas and because Republican intransigence, especially in the Senate, is preventing all but the most banal legislative fixes, but that doesn’t make the anger any less real. One of the biggest reasons isn’t any of the substantive policy betrayals (public option, Guantanamo, etc.), many of which were unavoidable, but Obama’s consistent refusal to even acknowledge the validity of his base’s concerns and desires–the ones that got him elected, the ones that lefties devoutly fooled themselves in 2008 into believing Obama shared.
Maybe he actually shares those concerns deep in his heart, maybe not. It hardly matters if he never voices or acts on them. And so, last night, instead of saying something nuanced like “Iraq was a policy mistake, but that doesn’t make the work and sacrifices of our armed forces any less admirable”–something that combines what Obama has to say given his role as Commander in Chief with an actual critique of what nearly everyone acknowledges was a policy train wreck–Obama’s again trying to satisfy folks who want Bush vindicated, people who will never, ever support him.
This is what Obama does. Always. And people are really tired of his acting like a legislator rather than a leader, trying to mollify dedicated opponents rather than outflank them.
It’s a sickening prospect, but the Democrats, flawed as they are, are all that’s standing between today and the world’s most powerful country being ruled by Christian neo-fascist nutcases like Beck, Palin, and Michelle Bachmann. Anyone who wants to see the US do anything to ameliorate crises like the economy or the potentially civilization-ending disaster of climate change has no choice but to prevent those people from taking power. But it’s not enough to ask people to vote against an agenda. They have to have hope (as Obama seemed to know in 2008); they need something to vote for. Otherwise they stay home.
This speech, with or without the caveats that Iraq isn’t actually over, was maybe Obama’s best chance, on a substantive issue (rather than a faux-controversy like Ground Zero), to give his 2008 supporters a reason to rally behind the Democrats this year. Didn’t happen. His impulse toward inclusivity and bipartisanship makes him an honorable man, and is going to lead straight to paralysis for the next two years and, if it doesn’t change, a one-term presidency. Alas, I see no evidence that he can, let alone will, change that tune. It seems to be who he is: a fundamentally good man at a time ill-suited for his talents, a reformer at a time when we need a revolutionary.