In his victory speech on November 4th Barack Obama talked about people putting "their hands on the arc of history" and bending it "once more towards the hope of a better day." Mr Obama and his fellow Democrats now have that arc in their grasp. But where they are going to bend it is still being debated.
Many liberals would like to turn it towards a "new New Deal." Washington is currently buzzing with talk of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Members of Mr. Obama's inner circle are reading up on FDR's first 100 days. No political conversation is complete without a knowing reference to the squire of Hyde Park. Both Time (on the cover) and the New Yorker (on an inside page) feature pictures of Mr Obama as FDR, smoking a cigarette, driving an open-top car and looking very much as though he has nothing to fear but fear itself.
Such Roosevelt-mania is hardly surprising. America is in the grip of the biggest housecleaning since the Depression -- a housecleaning that has already closed investment banks and shrunk pension portfolios, and is now rippling through the real economy. The political playing-field has also tilted leftward. Mr. Obama received a higher proportion of the popular vote than all but one Democratic presidential nominee since FDR (though Republicans have often done better). The Democrats will have bigger majorities in both the House and Senate than the Republicans in their glory days of 1994-2006. As for the Republicans, Eric Cantor, a member of the Republican leadership in the House, laments that they are no longer "relevant" to the average Joe.
Mr. Obama and his allies should nevertheless beware of pushing the FDR comparison too far. Many on the left believe that they have a mandate not just for a stimulus package but for a wholesale reinvention of government. They see the dawn of a new era of activism in which the government re-regulates business as well as finance, fixes health care, promotes "green growth," restores equality of opportunity and generally brings order to the chaotic capitalist system. Ronald Reagan created a period of Republican dominance by bringing "order" in the cultural sphere after the liberal excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, argues Peter Beinart in Time; Mr. Obama has a chance to create a period of Democratic dominance by doing the same in the economic sphere.
[Bobby] Jindal is, above all else, a political meteor, sharing Obama's precocious skills for reaching the firmament in a hurry. It was just four years ago, after losing a gubernatorial election, that he won election to Congress, and only this year that he became Louisiana's governor, the first nonwhite to hold the office since Reconstruction. And now, 10 months into his first term, the talk of a presidential bid is getting louder among his boosters.
What is a "Clinton person"? Apparently, it's any Democrat under about fifty or fifty-five years of age who has had work experience in the executive branch of the federal government.
The theory seems to be that a "Clinton person" would be inclined, at best, to reproduce the policies and actions of the Clinton Administration, including the accompanying mistakes, or, at worst, to serve the interests of "the Clintons" should they prove divergent from those of the Obama Administration and the nation.
This is the sort of reasoning that led to needless unhappiness the last two times Democrats were in power. Jimmy Carter’s circle regarded [Lyndon] Johnson, who mired the nation in Vietnam and then handed the White House to Nixon, as a failure. They weren’t about to have any "Johnson people" in their White House. Clinton's circle regarded Carter, who allowed himself to be paralyzed by a few hundred Iranian "students" and then handed the White House to Reagan, as a failure. They weren’t about to have any "Carter people" in their White House.
It didn’t seem to occur to either crowd, Carter's or Clinton's, that old hands, far from being eager to repeat the errors of the Administrations of which they had been a part, would be especially keen to avoid them. Also, they would know in detail what those errors were.
[T]here is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.
-- NEAL GABLER
George Bush is neither the source of all our ills nor the worst president in our history.
-- V.D. HANSONIt says something that even Bush's die-hard defenders implicitly concede that assessing his legacy is going to be a matter of wrangling over the semantics of "worst."
-- JOHN HOLBO
I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn't going to sacrifice those values.
-- GEORGE BUSH
Loyalty is a wonderful human quality and a necessary political one. No president would think of moving into the White House without known and trusted advisers such as David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett. At the same time, the recurrent presidential obsession with forms of disloyalty, including leaks, disobedience, and private agendas, is a marker for executive failure. Those presidents who fixated on personal allegiance, such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush, tended to perform far worse in office than those, such as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, who could tolerate strong, independent actors on their teams.
The demand for absolute loyalty is a relic from the age of patronage, when political appointments were tied to the delivery of votes for a sponsor. A modern media politician does not depend on this kind of machine for his existence and has political control over only a thin sliver of top-level government jobs. The vast majority of public employees is protected by the Civil Service and can't be vetted for loyalty. As the complexity of the government has increased, so, too, has the importance of expertise and experience.
Cartoon by KAL/The Economist
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