We are seeing baffled admirers and anguished dissidents analyze President Obama's behaviour at a furious pace, like the fate of the country depends on reading him right. Camps are forming around two seemingly disparate opinions. The two most common conclusions are that Obama is overwhelmed or just doing what he prefers. What if both of these are correct?
President Obama is certainly up against it, like few others before him. There are relentless international and national troubles, just as domestic tranquility is looking more and more like a thing of an institutionally homogenized past. Much of this was foreseeable.
Still, who among us would have guessed in 2008 that domestic hostility to Barack Obama's presidency would become such fevered dementia that a viable contender for the Republican Party's 2012 nomination would sign an oath committing her, in part, to the notion that the children of African-Americans were better off born into slavery than they are born "after the election of the USA’s first African-American President"? It's appalling, not that you would know it from an inured public's reaction. But it really is so socially offensive, viciously partisan and demonstrably false that it only warrants calls for Michele Bachmann to suspend her campaign for the presidency and resign her House seat.
Read More