Drew Westen's game-changing essay, "What Happened to Obama?," landed in The New York Times' "Sunday Review" section on August 7 like "a rhetorical nuke dropped on ground zero in the liberal heartland," according to the blogger Andrew Sprung in a post titled, none too gently, "A Lover of Fairy Tales Casts Obama as Villain in Chief."
Westen's essay hit two liberal heartlands, and its effect in Obama's Washington was nothing like its impact everywhere else, except for some blocks and media studios in Manhattan and Brooklyn that are attached umbilically to the Beltway.
Elsewhere in America, Westen's broadside was reprinted dozens of times and quoted at length hundreds of times more. A full week after its publication it remained among the top ten most-emailed Times articles. At a reception on Cape Cod on August 14, I met a Boston middle-school secretary whose spirits had soared on reading it and was still enthusing about it with co-workers and friends.
Not so the liberal Beltway operatives, whose Weltanschauung, or world-view, I hereby immortalize as the Beltanschaunng. Never mind that some of them, like Sprung, share Westen's frustrations with Obama; most were desperate to discredit Westen's message, for reasons both understandable and objectionable. These deserve more scrutiny than they've gotten from Obama's defenders themselves.
What's understandable to all liberals is that the President is in peril and that the likely alternatives to him are worse. What's objectionable is that his writerly defenders, truth-tellers by profession, aren't any more candid than he's been about the unsustainable premises and practices they've all ended up defending. So they're rushing to damn Westen for making "the best the enemy of the good," as Fareed Zakaria clichéd this chorus' complaint.
What the U.S. needs now is a Tom Paine to explain why the "good" of the Invisible Hand, liberating though it was when he wrote Common Sense, has morphed into a casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-bamboozling juggernaut that's just as false and destructive as the divine right of kings and mercantilism were when Paine found the courage and clarity to shred them.
Westen, an academic psychologist and political consultant from Emory University and author of The Political Brain, doesn't expect Obama to be a Paine. He does want him to address Americans' hunger for jobs partly by addressing their hunger for political narratives that explain what happened to those jobs and what it will take to create new ones.
On Charlie Rose on August 12, Westen sketched some battle strategies and story lines that are well within what his Beltway detractors laud as "the mainstream." He has as much experience with political trench warfare as they do, in and out of Washington, and a better understanding of what presidential story-telling can do.
Zakaria's collection of neo-liberal truisms about the inexorability and inescapability globalization won't meet Americans' hunger for jobs and clarity. And none of the other musicians in the orchestra of high-minded opinion has interrupted his conducting of its perennial medley, "This is the Best of All Possible Worlds."
I got a bit nasty about this last week here, when Zakaria tried to dodge Westen's arguments and pull rank as a political expert. So let me now simply quote the expert critics and highlight the awful precedents and premises they're leaning on:
1. Westen's lengthy, attention-grabbing Sunday New York Times op-ed is not a strong criticism. It's parody of liberal fantasizing.
I think liberals have a hard time holding on to power and being comfortable with ... the compromises it takes to hold with power. I think it`s something in the liberal psyche.... I am not the psychologist here, but liberals turn against every single Democratic President with regularity. That was what the whole Nader campaign in 2000 was about, this fury that Clinton was a sell out.[Westen's] argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science... The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama's failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.
-- Jonathan Chait, in The New Republic and on Charlie Rose
2. Over the last week liberal politicians and commentators took to the airwaves and op-ed pages to criticize the debt deal that Congress reached. But their ire was directed not at the Tea Party or the Republicans but rather at Barack Obama.... because of his persistent tendency to compromise.
As the New Republic's Jonathan Chait brilliantly points out, this criticism stems from a liberal fantasy that if only the President would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry. In this view, writes Chait, "every known impediment to the legislative process--special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion--are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech.This has been a running theme ever since Obama took office. I think that liberals need to grow up.
I'm not going to get into the what-ifs of a professor, you know, who has never run for dogcatcher advising one of the most skilful politicians in the country on how he should have handled this.
-- Fareed Zakaria, on CNN, on Charlie Rose, and again in two blog posts, one of them entitled, "What Liberals Fantasize About."
3. Perhaps most notably, Andrew Sprung scrutinized Westen's piece and discovered that Obama has publicly and repeatedly stressed some of the identical messages Westen wanted to hear from the president. Maybe the professor missed those speeches; maybe he didn't check.-- Steve Benen, The Washington Monthly
4. Obama has been left playing defense, playing to get the least-bad deal... That's what's producing all the 'What happened to Obama?' talk and its silly variants.... It's all nonsense. Obama is smart, decent and tough, with exactly the right instincts about where the country needs to go. He has accomplished a lot more than he's gotten credit for -- with an opposition dedicated to making him fail. But lately he is seriously off his game....-- Tom Friedman, trying to square the circle of his confusion by blaming both Westen and Obama.
5. The substance of Westen's attack boils down to Krugman Krugman Krugman: the stimulus was too small. Westen conflates this original sin with an alleged rhetorical/political sin that begs the question of how, or whether, Obama could have gotten a large stimulus through Congress. The implication is that he could have done so by attacking the villains...."-- Andrew Sprung, xpostfactoid
