Some perspective….
Obama may well also be suffering the punishment of an impossible and impatient age, in which the loudest and most outrageous (and, yes, let’s say it, the most idiotic) voices loom disproportionately large. Christine O’Donnell’s concession speech in Delaware last night merited more airtime than the victory speeches of any number of ordinary Democrats, who won the old-fashioned way: by earning it.
The president’s presumptive chief adversary, Speaker-in-Waiting John Boehner of Ohio, has shown admirable signs of treading humbly. He may have the marbles, for now, but he is wary of overreach, and he is no Newt. He knows that leading is infinitely hardly than blocking, and he has signaled, insofar as it would be possible for any modern Republican, that he would like to get things done.
Just what Boehner and Obama might get done is another question. On foreign policy, they share some clear goals. There is abundant room for compromise on tax policy. Obama’s bipartisan debt-and-deficit commission—due to report December 1—might yet provide some political cover for politically tough decisions. Whether Boehner can bring the foamers-at-the-mouth in his own caucus to actually make laws remains to be seen.
One other note: We seem to be in a period of political volatility unequaled since the tumultuous years following World War II, when control of Congress changed hands violently between 1946 and 1952, in the face of terrifying challenges abroad, economic dislocations at home, and shameless fear-mongering by a guy from Wisconsin named McCarthy.
In 1952, the nation elected a previously nonpartisan but newly affiliated Republican named Dwight D. Eisenhower—the Supreme Allied Commander of the European campaign in World War II—who would today be reliably denounced as a Quisling by the purists in the party he so proudly led. Two years later, the voters took control of the house away from the G.O.P, which would remain in the wilderness until the Gingrich revolt of 1994. In 1960, John Kennedy displaced Eisenhower, and just eight years after that—seemingly against all odds—Richard Nixon replaced his old frenemy, J.F.K.
In between those events came the disastrous 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater against Lyndon B. Johnson, and predictions of the “death” of the Republican Party. To-and-fro, back-and-forth has been the norm, and not the exception, in American politics over the long haul. What may have changed—in this, as in all other aspects of our common life—is the shortness of the cycles of difference.
But to those who would predict a new defining age in our national life, the lesson of history is more sobering and subdued: Meet the new politics. Same as the old politics. Sort of. I think.
Lost in the 21st Century 