As he marks a year in office, President Obama has to deal with plunging opinion polls, repeated rebuffs abroad from nations as diverse as Israel and Iran, and now the loss of a Senate seat in solidly Democratic Massachusetts — a result only slightly more surprising than if the residents of Mecca had converted to Catholicism. That last setback has put his signature legislative initiative, an overhaul of the health-care system, in the critical-care ward.
I differ from the general disenchantment with Obama only insofar as I was never that enchanted to begin with. Yet I am still glad in retrospect that he won. And not because I doubt that John McCain would have been a better president; I don’t. But if McCain had won, he would have faced a poisonous environment in Washington with embittered Democrats blocking his every initiative and castigating him as a Bush clone.
An overly long period in opposition can drive any political party to extremes. We saw it with Republicans in the 1990s. Many Republicans opposed well-justified interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo simply because they were “Clinton’s wars” and spent much of their time in ever-more-bizarre scandal-mongering regarding the occupant of the Oval Office. Democrats went even more overboard during the Bush years; some went so far as to accuse the president of usurping our liberties and starting wars for profit. Even the more respectable center of the Democratic Party gave vent to views that were often fantastically irresponsible. They seemed to believe that every foreign difficulty encountered by the U.S. was due to Bush’s truculence, and that a president who believed in “outreach” could somehow bring about a miraculous rapprochement with nations from Iran to Russia.
A year into the Obama presidency, those illusions are rapidly evaporating upon contact with reality. Democrats are learning that negotiations alone will not end the threat from rogue regimes and that no sales job can stop al-Qaeda from trying to kill us. President Obama has actually chosen in many areas, ranging from the Patriot Act to U.S. dealings with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, to continue Bush initiatives, sometimes providing more resources and acting more aggressively than Bush had done. (He has, for example, ordered more Predator strikes over Pakistan than Bush did.) In those areas where he has tried to carry out the biggest deviations from Bush policy — e.g., closing Gitmo and dealing with Tehran — he has met nothing but frustration and disappointment. Now we can most likely add health-care reform to the list of leftist failures in Obama’s first term. Wise Democrats realize that a more centrist course is needed to prevent Obama’s first term from becoming his only term.
This is exactly how our democracy is supposed to function. The result will be, I hope, a president and a party that emerge wiser and more responsible in their policy prescriptions than they had been during the years in the wilderness.
