The Rorschach presidency

Last week, after I wrote about the role race plays in some of the apocalyptic right-wing hysteria about the health care bill, a friend who is a prominent liberal Obama supporter sent me an e-mail flipping my point. He theorized that race also plays a role in “the often angry and intemperate talk” he has been hearing from “left-liberal friends for the past many months about what a failure and a disappointment” the president has been. In his view, “Obama never said anything, while running, to give anyone the idea” that he was other than a “deliberate, compromise-seeking bipartisan moderate.” My friend wondered if white liberals who voted for Obama expected a “sweeping Republicans-be-damned kind of agenda” in part — and he emphasized “in part!” — because “they expect a black guy to be intemperate, impetuous, impatient” rather than “measured, deliberate, patient.”…

It’s not just the Tea Party right or some on the liberal left who see only the Obama they want to see. This phenomenon extends to moderate Republicans who refuse to believe that Obama agrees with them even when he does. Susan Collins, the senator from Maine, reacted to the news of the Christmas Day bomber with an over-the-top outburst accusing Obama of being soft on terrorism. Though Obama’s education reforms have increased Pell grants and nettled one liberal constituency, teachers’ unions, Lamar Alexander, the supposedly temperate senator from Tennessee, has characterized the president as pushing “a Soviet-style, European, and even Asian higher-education model where the government manages everything.” Mitt Romney has now started a full-tilt campaign to angrily challenge the indisputable reality that “Obamacare” resembles his own health care reform package in Massachusetts.

What’s clear is that Obama largely remains a fixed point even while the rest of us keep wildly revising our judgments, whether looking at him through the prism of partisan politics, race, media melodrama or any other we choose. It’s our recession-tossed country, not his presidency, that is rocked by violent mood swings.