This kos diary by brooklynbadboy is probably the best Obama diary I’ve read since the election. The set up is worth reading, but I’ll cut to the chase.
President Obama is a good man in a bad system. Despite his best campaign wishes, the Washington that he came to change has gotten the better of him. Even before his inauguration, he chose to be a part of the very system he told us was broken. Appointing their Brahmans to important positions within his administration. Negotiating with their lobbyists. Appeasing their media. But the insider game isn’t played for the people he came to address in that conference room four years ago. It is played for the people who sat quietly in that hall last week. Once you become part of a broken system, you too will be broken. He may have thought that he could make this system work for common folks, being the institutionalist that he is. Unfortunately, it won’t. If you don’t break it, it will break you.
Instead of being the public leader, the transformational leader, that many of us expected, the leader he campaigned to be, he’s shrunk. He’s just become another Washington insider playing the insider game. The insider game has him making choices between shutting down the government and stepping on the poor. The insider game has him choosing between tax cuts for the wealthy or declaring war on the unemployed middle class. The insider game has convinced him there is almost nothing he can do about the housing crisis. The insider game has him appointing a corporate CEO who ships jobs overseas as the head of his domestic jobs council. The insider game has him appointing the very same people who ran the economy into the ground as his principal economic advisers. He told us of a Washington that was broken, but he was quite mistaken. Washington works just fine. Just not for regular people.
Perhaps we should be grateful for what he has delivered, for the crises he’s averted. As presidents go, in spite of the systemic problems in Washington, he’s done some good. As a manager, he’s run a relatively clean government with no major scandals. He’s kept the country safe from foreign invasion or attack. He’s gotten up every day, done the job. In his speech this year, he noted many of these accomplishments. All of them were politely applauded. I don’t think a single person in the room, including myself, would deny him his due on the good he’s done given the circumstances.
But somehow, there is sense that this whole thing was supposed to be…bigger. He was the one who said changes he was seeking were akin to the American Revolution, women’s suffrage, and the civil rights movement. He was the one who likened his ascent to a fundamental, realigning, meaningful, transformative event. Instead, he has been mainly tinkering with the establishment, except when the establishment fights back hard and demands no tinkering. We have had nothing akin to any of the major historical events listed above. We instead have a sort of work-a-day, normal, caretaker president. Doing the job, managing the status quo. There is no capital letter movement in this administration.
We approach an election where Barack Obama’s name will be on the ballot for the last time. I believe everyone in that room, including me, is going to vote for him. He’s been okay as far as presidents go. Considering what came before him or what could come after him, we should probably be grateful he’s even choosing to bother. But still, watching him up on the stage made realize how different this event could have been had he only decided that small-ball insider dealmaking isn’t how you make fundamental change. If only he realized that the system he’s working within isn’t designed to work for regular people. That his whole project as a leader wasn’t about passing bills and administrating departments, but leading people to change how they think about this country, their government, and each other. Larger in scope. Deeper in meaning. Historic in proportion. That is what this presidency should have, and could have been.