Obamamania Two Years Later: The Difference between Campaigning and Governing

posted at 9:22 pm on February 16, 2010 by CK MacLeod
[ Obama ]   

In a post on the topic of “Executive Deficiency,” which has increasingly become a theme on the left as well as the right, Jennifer Rubin links to an April 2008 piece by Peter Beinart, “Obama at the Helm,” intended at the time to counter skepticism about then-candidate Obama on just this score. It makes for amusing reading – as long as you look away from the dangers a non-executing executive may pose to the country, and as long as you’re not a Democrat up for re-election this year…

Beinart takes a long look in the column at the Obama campaign, which around that time was finishing Hillary Clinton off, then moves to the argument that became familiar to all close observers of the presidential race:

It is this remarkable hybrid campaign, far more than Obama’s thin legislative résumé, that should reassure voters that he can run the government.

Beinart proceeds without transition to a sentence that, with Obamamania a distant memory, today reads as a non sequitur:

As president, he’ll need to keep his supporters mobilized: It will take a grass-roots movement, breathing down Congress’s neck, to pass universal health care.

If Beinart ever believed this sentence, then he should have been among the first people to declare ObamaCare dead.  In part because the President himself never pursued the kind of strategy likely to engage the leftwing grass-roots, but more because a fad and a fervor are not the same thing as a political movement, and just as much because the political terrain had rather radically shifted between April 2008 and January 2009, there was no prospect of sustained neck-downbreathing  of the sort Beinart was imagining – except, as we have seen, coming from people a lot more agitated about the economy and fiscal madness.

But in dealing with those very supporters, he’ll also have to be ruthless so as not to get caught up in the kind of side skirmishes, such as gays in the military…

…or maybe detainee treatment and interrogation?

…that weakened Bill Clinton early on. Obama’s experience whipping up support on MySpace while simultaneously tamping it down is exactly the kind he’ll need in the Oval Office.

Uh… yeah.  Persuading overenthusiastic sympathizers to shut down a web page… truly a profile in courage, vision, and executive decision-making that George Washington himself could have learned from.

Approaching the finale:

…if Obama can come across as idealistic without being moralistic, if he can keep his supporters’ spirits high and their expectations in check, if he can fuse exuberance and discipline, he might just run the government pretty well.

Instead, Obama has come across as cynical and hypocritical, built up his supporters’ expectations while leaving the hard work to everyone else and agitating the opposition, fused overexposure and underperformance, and set all-time records for loss of popularity in a first year, leaving his party in disarray.

That won’t be easy, but then, neither is running for president. Just ask Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Looks like figuring out the difference between running a campaign and leading a nation may not be very easy either… if you’re mesmerized by your own wishful thinking.  Just ask Peter Beinart.

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Epilogue, for old times’ sake:

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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