Unfortunately for the powerful, the plight of the biblical Job is a story with perennial resonance. A man seemingly rich in the gifts life has to offer, happy and blessed, finds himself — unjustly, from his perspective — bereft. Protected and apparently invincible one day, he is buffeted as God turns his back on his former beloved, producing rage, confusion and self-pity. In the history of the American presidency, reversal happens time and time again: Lyndon Johnson declining to run four years after his landslide victory in 1964, George H. W. Bush losing re-election after winning the Persian Gulf war of 1991, Bill Clinton in the 1994 midterms, and now Barack Obama…
Outside politics, President Obama thinks of himself less as a professor or community organizer and more as a writer — a man who observes reality, interprets it internally, and then recasts it on the page in his own voice and through his own eyes. And he is a reader of serious books.
Given that, he might find Alter’s new book congenial. John Boehner is not exactly a case of boils, but the president may feel differently at the moment, and thus the story of Job could be of some use to him.
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