For those who refuse to see or understand how awful is Washington these days and how, in fact, Barack Obama is just about the last sane man standing. Read this Vanity Fair story.
We think of the presidency as somehow eternal and unchanging, a straight-line progression from 1 to 44, from the first to the latest. And in some respects it is. Except for George Washington, all of the presidents have lived in the White House. They’ve all taken the same oath to uphold the same constitution. But the modern presidency—Barack Obama’s presidency—has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives. The sheer growth of the federal government,
the paralysis of Congress, the systemic corruption brought on by lobbying, the trivialization of the “news” by the media, the willful disregard for facts and truth—these forces have made today’s Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place. They have shaped and at times hobbled the presidency itself.
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His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, whose Friday-afternoon mantra has become “Only two more workdays till Monday!,” sums up today’s Washington in terms both coarser and more succinct. To him, Washington is just “Fucknutsville.”
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It’s easy to see why Obama wants to pick his own shots. He faces the most hyperkinetic, souped-up, tricked-out, trivialized, and combative media environment any president has ever experienced. The long-building trend toward coverage of the presidency and politics as pure sport has reached absurd levels.
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Journalists who should know better ask the damnedest questions, simply to get a rise, as when The New York Times’s otherwise estimable Peter Baker last year asked Obama, with a straight face, if he was a socialist—only to get the obvious denial, plus a follow-up phone call from the president, saying he couldn’t believe the question was “entirely serious.” Or when George Stephanopoulos, who knows more than most journalists about the trivialities and realities of politics, asked Obama to respond to Sarah Palin’s critique of his nuclear-policy review as a “Go ahead, punch me in the face!” posture, only to have Obama say, “Last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues.”
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The viral communities of the Internet make outright falsehoods nearly impossible to extinguish. Was Obama born in Kenya? Of course not, and his campaign put his “certification of live birth,” from Hawaii, confirmed as authentic by the state’s registrar of vital statistics, up on the Internet for all to see. And yet a recent New York Times/CBS News poll reveals that 20 percent of Americans believe Obama was born in another country, and that another quarter aren’t sure he was American-born. The mainstream media have published lengthy reports that, by any objective standard, should have thoroughly refuted the idea that Obama is a Muslim, or was educated in a madrassa, or favors the creation of “death panels” to ration end-of-life care. It doesn’t matter. A national Harris poll this spring found that 57 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is in fact a Muslim (and, for good measure, 38 percent believe he is “doing many of the things that Hitler did,” and 24 percent believe that Obama actually “may be the anti-Christ”).
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Obama has suffered for his patience, but he has profited from it, too, and whatever you think of his policies, his conduct of the presidency may be an object lesson in how to elude the loonier aspects of our age. From the day he declared his candidacy, the press—and, by extension, much of the Washington insider culture—has underestimated him, and that trend has continued in office. A New Yorker article, published just one week before the passage of the health-care bill, was titled “Obama’s Lost Year.” Dan Pfeiffer observes, “You’re weak and stupid until the moment you either win or accomplish your goal, and then you’re strong and brave. The difference between idiocy and genius is very short in this cycle.” And yet, to a remarkable degree, Obama has been consistent in pursuing the agenda he said he would pursue. In a speech at Georgetown University in April 2009, he said that he would address health care, access to education, the rules governing the financial system, and energy. He has won passage of significant legislation on the first three—together with the $787 billion economic-stimulus package and a rescue of two of the three big automakers. Rahm Emanuel took pains to remind me that the health-care overhaul, which seemed to go on forever, in the end was passed in just a year.
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much much more here:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/09/broken-washington-201009?currentPage=all
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