Barack Obama & The Revolution of 2009: Is America A Great Country Or What?

President Obama may yet fail and may yet fail spectacularly considering the enormity of the mess he inherited and his relative inexperience. But as we approach the five-month anniversary of his inauguration one of the two largest of those messes -- an economy in free fall -- has been slowed if not stopped, while the other -- ending the U.S. debacle in Iraq -- remains very much a work in progress.

But beyond those messes and jack-in-the-box crises that will dog Obama such as the Somali pirate hostage siege, North Korean's latest hissy fit and Israeli obdurance over its destructive settlement policy, there is a refreshing feeling of optimism abroad in the land. Refreshing because it has been a very long time since we have had reason to feel good about anything other than a favorite winning "American Idol."

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The photograph atop this post of Obama fist bumping with a GI on an April visit to one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces in Baghdad is my favorite of his presidency. There is a genuineness about it -- the expressions on the faces of Obama and the troopers, let alone the fact that the commander in chief is fist bumping -- that in its own way attests to why we have reason to feel optimism.

Yes, it seems corny, but Obama has begun to restore faith in a country we deeply love but have watched with horror and passivity as it descended into darkness over the last eight years.

That passivity ended on November 4, 2008 when we elected an African-American with humble roots whose race never got traction as an issue because, it turned out, voters were much more frightened of where years of conservative Republican hegemony had left them than a guy with a funny name.

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I have just finished reading The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas Ricks' inside account of how the Army plucked military (but not political) victory from the jaws of defeat through the Surge strategy in 2007-2008.

It is perhaps the 10th book that I have read on the war based on the accounts not of screaming antiwar liberals but the men and women, many of them the highest-ranking officers, diplomats and advisers, who toiled in Iraq, the Pentagon, State Department and White House.

Obama governs, while a common denominator in all of these books is that George Bush ruled, often through the hidden hand of an extraordinarily malevolent man, Dick Cheney.

Loyalty was the most important quality, dissent was not tolerated, policy was bent to fit political expedience, and candor was subsumed by anodyne pronouncements. In the case of Iraq, it took the 2006 mid-term election and the Iraq Study Group report to finally wrest custodianship of the war from an executive branch and defense secretary and commanders who equated invasion with victory and place it in the hands of a new defense secretary and new commanders who well understood the lessons of America's last great foreign-policy failure -- the Vietnam War -- and that the U.S.'s inability to apply those lessons in Iraq meant sure defeat.

Obama may be weakest when it comes to foreign policy, but in the case of Iraq (and Afghanistan) he is making the right moves: He persuaded the enormously able Robert Gates to stay on as defense secretary and has listened closely to Petraeus and other commanders, which includes heeding their advice that too precipitous a withdrawal of U.S. troops would undermine what progress has been made.

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While Sonia Sotomayor will not be the automatic liberal, let alone moderate, Supreme Court vote that many people assume she will be, her own humble roots are deeply inspiring, as well as a pie in the face of the dysfunctional Republican Party.

Sotomayor's "people;" you know, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and many Central and South Americans, are conservative by inclination and religion and were gravitating to the GOP at the start of the new millennium, but the party's determined anti-immigrant nativism has driven most of them away.

Say what you will about Democrats in general and liberals in particular. They seemed hopelessly adrift in the years from the Reagan Revolution to Obama's ascendancy and contributed nothing of substance to the Iraq war debate. But they have steadfastly supported inclusion and not merely paid lip service to it every January on Martin Luther King's birthday. How sad that inclusion is not merely a foreign concept to the withered, white-bread Republican base, this touchstone of our democracy is actually something that it fears.

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The headline over this post is bittersweetly tongue in cheek. America always has been a great country peopled by hard working and humble folk, although as I said very much out of touch with itself in recent years. To a substantial extent, and I believe this more true than other democracies, we are who our president is, and with a brief if sometimes troubled time-out during the Clinton years, our presidents were aloofly patrician for 12 of the last 20 years, their backgrounds privileged and anything but humble.

The failures of Bush père and his son lie in their own roots. The blue-blooded FDR and his great empathy for the common man would seem to disprove my little theory, but he was an exception in this respect and in so many other ways, as well. And while Barack Obama shows moments of aloofness, his own humility will hold him -- and hold the only national on earth who could have elected someone like him -- in good stead.

Top photograph by Pete Souza/The White House