The meaning of the Greg Craig "debacle"

Did Barack Obama jump the shark with his latest unceremonious bus-toss, or merely nuke the fridge?  Elizabeth Drew writes at Politico that the firing of Greg Craig, and especially the manner of his departure, has caused the scales to fall from the eyes of his supporters.  And if that’s one analogical bridge too far for an intro, let Drew pick it up a little more literally from there — and you’ll understand why it’s hard to take this too seriously (emphasis mine):

While he was abroad, there was a palpable sense at home of something gone wrong. A critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man. Most significant, these doubters now find themselves with a new reluctance to defend Obama at a phase of his presidency when he needs defenders more urgently than ever.

This is the price Obama has paid with his complicity and most likely his active participation, in the shabbiest episode of his presidency: The firing by leaks of White House counsel Gregory Craig, a well-respected Washington veteran and influential early supporter of Obama.

The people who are most aghast by the handling of the Craig departure can’t be dismissed by the White House as Republican partisans, or still-embittered Hillary Clinton supporters. They are not naïve activists who don’t understand that the exercise of power can be a rough business and that trade-offs and personal disappointments are inevitable. Instead, they are people, either in politics or close observers, who once held an unromantically high opinion of Obama. They were important to his rise, and are likely more important to the success or failure of his presidency than Obama or his distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team appreciate.

I’d challenge this argument as part of the real problem Drew misses.  The people who held Obama in such high esteem had indisputably romantic (in the classic sense) notions of Obama.  By definition.  What had Obama done before 2007 to earn “unromantically high opinion[s]” from anyone?  He won a few elections, but had no significant legislative accomplishments to his name, either in Illinois or in the US Senate.

Most of these high opinions and high expectations came from Obama’s two memoirs.  It’s almost impossible in this age to imagine any more romantic basis for the vast support Obama won for his quest to have his first executive job be the US Presidency.  His literary accomplishments, combined with his biography, trumped any sense of competence or experience as a consideration.  The entire exercise was nothing but romantic.  It was, like the Romantic movement itself, a rebellion against rationality and establishment borne by the arts.

Unfortunately, one cannot put aside that absurdity in Drew’s argument.  Her entire disillusionment is still based on her core illusion of Obama — that Obama was ready to be President in the first place, and that he was objectively the best candidate for the job.  Granted, we didn’t have a lot  of good choices by the time the primaries had narrowed the possibilities, but Obama was easily the weakest in the field of the final five or six candidates based on experience and accomplishment.  Hillary Clinton, who was weak herself on both counts, put it best when she said that Obama’s qualifications amounted to a couple of speeches that he gave.

And now Drew has a moment of disillusionment in Craig’s departure, and finds to her shock that Obama considers underlings expendable.  Now she talks about Obama’s Chicago environment, as if this is some great revelation, and somehow ignores the people Obama tossed aside to protect his own political standing over the last couple of years.  In other words, Drew is stunned to discover that, rather than the transformative memoirist she thought she knew, America elected a Chicago Machine politician with a good sense of political survival, if very little sense  — or experience or accomplishment — otherwise.

That shouldn’t get too minimized, of course.  Having the scales fall from the eyes of Obama’s True Believers is not necessarily inevitable.  But for that process to be complete, they will have to acknowledge that their Byron of the Beltway was always an illusion, an empty suit on which they projected all of their own Romantic notions.