1 Boring Old Man

Obama the Great – if he does say so himself
Washington Post
By Dana Milbank
December 23, 2010

^{It took President Obama fewer than 50 days to go from shellacking to swashbuckling. Seven weeks earlier to the day, the president faced harsh questions about his leadership as he took responsibility for Democrats’ loss of the House in the previous day’s election. But the man who faced reporters Tuesday afternoon in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building was treated by his questioners as a conquering colossus – and Obama didn’t mind wearing those shoes. "A lot of folks in this town predicted that, after the midterm elections, Washington would be headed for more partisanship and more gridlock," he said to a roomful of people who had predicted just that. "And instead, this has been a season of progress for the American people."}

^{He bestowed superlatives on his accomplishments:}

• ^{"The most productive post-election period we’ve had in decades."}
• ^{"The most productive two years that we’ve had in generations."}
• ^{"The most significant arms-control agreement in nearly two decades."}
• ^{"The biggest upgrade of America’s food-safety laws since the Great Depression."}
• ^{"Al-Qaeda is more hunkered down than they have been since the original invasion of Afghanistan in 2001."}

^{More! Most! Biggest! And when he wasn’t praising his accomplishments, he was praising himself: "One thing I hope people have seen during this lame-duck, I am persistent. I am persistent. You know, if I believe in something strongly, I stay on it."}

^{Careful, Mr. President. What got Obama in trouble in the first place were the extraordinarily high expectations that the nation had for his administration – and that Obama’s campaign had encouraged. The humility forced on him by the Republicans’ triumph in November served to focus Obama, leading him to cut a tax deal with the GOP that infuriated fellow Democrats but made possible the string of legislative achievements he rightly boasted about on Tuesday.}

^{The frantic worries of recent weeks of a "failed one-term presidency" were overstated. But now Obama’s return to messianic status – his campaign-style event to sign the "don’t ask, don’t tell" repeal on Tuesday was held in the Interior Department auditorium to accommodate the huge and raucous crowd – risks unlearning the valuable lesson in humility…}

My only valid comments about our President have to do with how I currently think of him. He’s a Congressman, a "community organizer," and he’s obviously really good at it. He saw an opportunity to get a lot of mileage out of caving in on the tax cuts. Had he stood firm, he might have been able to win that one and lose everything else. Time will tell if he played his hand correctly. All I know is that he’s not a criminal trying to bilko the country like Bu$hCo, and that’s enough for me for the moment. That’s why I defend him automatically. I’m not over the Bush years yet. I can’t just play things for politics as usual. I have post traumatic stress disorder – all of the symptoms. I want to "prevent the past." I am hypervigilant, jumpy, worried about whatever forces were at work that allowed our government to be inhabited by the dark side for those eight years. My opinions are too colored by the deceit of the past to care much about the fine tuning of the present.

All I know is that the channel selector is on the right channel and I want to keep it there. If Obama wants to crow – that’s fine with me. I’m not worried about hubris or humility. I’m worried about outright lies like "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"…