The January Man

Peggy Noonan appeared on Meet the Press this past Sunday to promote her new book, Patriotic Grace, a plaintive cry for bipartisanship aimed at an American populace battered senseless by eight years of Republican misrule. Such anodyne political products (Unity '08, anyone?) usually hit the marketplace with a thud (although Noonan’s effort may fare better by virtue of its brevity and its lucidly maudlin prose), but that never stops our Serious Pundits from insisting that The People are clamoring for Magical Consensus. It's the Holy Grail of Broderism and still a force to be reckoned with.


Of course, we never heard any urgent calls for bipartisanship when Michael Isikoff was conspiring with Linda Tripp to lay a perjury trap for Bill Clinton, or when Ari Fleischer was telling us that we had to watch what we say in a time of war, or when John Kerry was being swiftboated. That’s because the corporate media doesn’t find anything scary about Republicans controlling all the levers of power. (Will the nightmarish Bush-Cheney years alter their calculus?) A Democratic president in 2009 is going to have to resist a phalanx of journalists pressuring him to compromise away every progressive proposal he puts on the table.


On that score, I think Tom Watson misses the point:

Now, I know we're all supposed to be singing from the same hymnal on the left these days - the positive plans of the Obama-Biden juggernaut and all that , the change brand - but I'm breaking ranks. To this Democrat, used to suffering through disastrous election nights in the full knowledge that the results will further ruin his country, Obama's instinct to go for the vicious final punch, the head-snapping lights out political blow, is a thing of beauty.

He goes on to quote the great James Wolcott:

My rooting interest is less about Obama himself than about how big a hurt he can put to the Republican Party. I don't want the Republican Party simply defeated in November, I want to see it smashed beyond all recognition, in such wriggling, writhing, anguished disarray that it can barely reconstitute itself, so desperate for answers that it looks to Newt Gingrich for visionary guidance, his wisdom and insight providing the perfect cup of hemlock to finish off the conservative movement for good so that it can rot in the salted earth of memory unmissed and unmourned in toxic obscurity.

That’s a little strong for me, though I share his basic sentiment. But let's face it: Engaging in vicious electoral politics has never been difficult for Obama. Just ask Alice Palmer or Hillary Clinton. The problem is this: After November 5, John McCain, in all likelihood, will be history, and Barack Obama will have to lead the country. Only then will we find out what "bringing people together" means in Obamaspeak.


I’m not optimistic.