Obama -- A Fallen Messiah?

Last November, I remember warning that Obama was coming to office with way higher expectations than he could ever hope to fulfill. I warned that when the crowd hails someone as a “Messiah” he can go from Palm Sunday (“Crown him!”) to Good Friday (“Crucify him!”) in a trice.
People expected Obama to walk on water, heal the sick and raise the dead. Well…, Afghanistan looks more dead today than it did last fall; a sensible health care bill looks beyond healing, and while Obama may not have fully fallen into the water with his Wall Street reforms, he is certainly up to his knees—and sinking.
The Independents have abandoned him; the Democrats are growing restive; and the Republican Right with its non-stop, drum fire of hatred has pulled itself up to the point of being a real threat in 2010. Obama doesn’t have a lot of reliable friends beside his dog and his kids.
Obama is limping from wounds that came from both sides. He allowed—partially in response to Republican complaints—his own health care bill to reach a thousand pages in length. That’s reading “War and Peace” just to get a hospital bill paid. Isn’t going to fly well.
Then his Democratic friends (very much acting on Obama’s own beliefs) larded the bill with provisions guaranteeing federal funds for elective abortions (killing the kid because he or she is inconvenient rather than because he’s a medical threat to mom), hitherto for illegal.
That motivated the daylights out of the Republican and Christian right—who, admittedly, would rather see a thousand babies die of medical neglect than one be aborted. This one provision is making the whole bill anathema to all sorts of people who might otherwise favor health care reform.
A sensible politician would have recognized that just to get health care reform passed initially, you leave things like elective abortions for later. You get the do-able done. Then you try for the moon. Watching Obama stumble on health care has encouraged banks and other institutions facing new regulations to start pushing back.
Nothing is going terribly well for Obama right now. Friends and foes are starting to call him “wishy-washy” as he backs and fills in the face of new objections and realities. I don’t think he’s so much a waffler as I think he’s a product of an elite law school.
That’s where they train you to argue all day and, like reasonable men, go out with your opponent for a drink in the evening. That’s how lawyers work. It may breed cynicism, but it keeps life sane. But it is no training for a man who must face uncompromising hatred from his opponents. That’s what’s permeating our political life right now. Obama wasn’t prepared for it.
Political hostility hasn’t been this bad since Joe McCarthy ran amok. It comes out of a basic flaw in the American character. We have a tendency to see our opponents not as someone to be convinced or compromised with but rather as persons SINFUL and to be DAMNED. Right or left.
I’ve used this historical comparison before but here goes again. When the British abolished slavery in their empire (c.a. 1830s), not a shot was fired. They recognized that, for all its moral undertones, slavery was primarily an economic and political issue.
The slave owner was simply a businessman caught in a changing economy. So they paid him for his slaves, educated the free men, and got on with new kinds of business. In America, slavery became a SIN, a “covenant with Hell”, and the owners were SINFUL beyond redemption.
The attitude cost us over 700,000 dead and left sections of the nation ruined to this day. The hatreds that came out of that war are with us yet. (Some of those are directed at Obama personally.) They don’t train you at Harvard Law to deal with such. Or how to gracefully slip from the role of “Messiah” to mere human being without getting nailed to something.
It’s poisonous out there.