David Brooks, who has tried really, really hard to like Barack Obama, has had enough. In the orgy of Berlin Obama-mania, Obama finally turned off even Brooks. Those of us who have rolled our eyes, gagged at the infantile rhetoric and complained that there is no there, there will recognize this sentiment:
Obama’s tone was serious. But he pulled out his “this is our moment” rhetoric and offered visions of a world transformed. Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down. Obama used the word “walls” 16 times in the Berlin speech, and in 11 of those cases, he was talking about walls coming down. The Berlin blockade was thwarted because people came together. Apartheid ended because people came together and walls tumbled. Winning the cold war was the same: “People of the world,” Obama declared, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.” When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign. But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more.
But the reality is that all Obama can demonstrate is an inch-deep reservoir of platitudinous rhetoric. He doesn’t really know what to do about anything. (Because he has no record of doing much of anything.) Brooks writes:
The odd thing is that Obama doesn’t really think this way. When he gets down to specific cases, he can be hard-headed. Last year, he spoke about his affinity for Reinhold Niebuhr, and their shared awareness that history is tragic and ironic and every political choice is tainted in some way. But he has grown accustomed to putting on this sort of saccharine show for the rock concert masses, and in Berlin his act jumped the shark. His words drift far from reality, and not only when talking about the Senate Banking Committee. His Berlin Victory Column treacle would have made Niebuhr sick to his stomach. Obama has benefited from a week of good images. But substantively, optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.
The pundit class was never disposed to listen to Hillary Clinton’s complaint that Obama was “all words,” in part because they despised her and in part because she was not weighed down with accomplishments either. But what if Obama is finally running out of “just words”? It is hard to say meaningless fluff for almost two years without repeating yourself and getting stale. At some point not only David Brooks will notice.
