Frank Rich on Obama's "squandered summer"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

From yesterday's op-ed:

In the meantime, a certain damage has been done -- to Obama and to the country. The inmates took over the asylum, trivializing and poisoning the national discourse while the president bided his time. The lies that Obama called out so strongly in his speech — from "death panels" to "government takeover" -- ran amok. So did all the other incendiary faux controversies, culminating with the ludicrous outcry over the prospect that the president might speak to the nation's schoolchildren on a higher plane than, say, "The Pet Goat."

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The 24-hour news cycle abhors a vacuum, and the liars and crazies filled it while Obama waited for his deus ex machina descent onto center stage.

That he let the hard-core base of a leaderless minority party drive the debate only diminished his stature. That's why his poll numbers on "leadership" declined.

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Obama would have looked stronger if he'd stood up more proactively to the screamers along the way, or at least to the ones not packing guns.

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Now that he has taken charge, Obama will speed the process and, we must hope, secure reform that may make a real difference for everyone, starting with the 46-million-plus Americans who have no health insurance.

I don't really get Rich's point. Was it a "squandered summer"? Yes, he says, but Obama has now "taken charge" again. So what does it matter that "the screamers" dominated the news?

Well, it matters, I suppose, that they essentially determined the narrative, with a media establishment more than willing to play right along with their propaganda, up to a point.

But wasn't that the point? To let the other side essentially shoot its load in an orgy of ever-increasing extremism? Well, it did that, frequently, and now the opponents and obstructionists, from Gang of Six Republicans like Enzi and Grassley to the hate-filled protesters of the town hall mobs, have been thoroughly discredited by thoroughly discrediting themselves with their own venom. Even the media, save for the likes of Fox News, have pulled back. Yes, it got too much even for them, the lies about "death panels," the guns at the town halls, and the comparisons of Obama to Hitler, health-care reform to a Nazi euthanasia program.

It's not that I fundamentally disagree with Rich -- indeed, he and I are in almost complete agreement here -- it's that I don't think Obama squandered the summer quite as much as he does. Or, rather, I think it was part of the larger strategy. Obama reached out to Republicans in the spirit of bipartisanship but must have known what was coming: Republicans, including the Gang of Six "moderates," showed that they weren't serious about meaningful reform, coming out either against it altogether or in favor of such concessions as to water it down significantly, to the point of near-meaninglessness. Meanwhile, the right-wing opponents of reform, from the punditocracy down to the mob, descended ever further into madness. Obama is a smart guy. Surely he anticipated this.

Yes, Obama probably does prefer bipartisanism to going it alone, but he's a realist, and a savvy politician. Now he can say that he reached out to Republicans in a genuine way, which he did, and that he wanted bipartisanism to succeed, but that the Republicans blocked him at every turn. It's not his fault, you see, it's theirs, which it is, and so, his opposition spent, the media back on his side, at least as much as it's going to be on this issue, he can assume his rightful position of leadership, promoting reform in public, including the public option, and, one hopes, twisting a few arms in private, trying to pull Democrats together to get this done.

A squandered summer? We'll see, in retrospect, but I think not.