So the year ends with the media pushing the notion that Barack Obama — having had one of the worst years in presidential history — has salvaged both his presidency and his re-election chances with his stunning “comeback” in the dwindling hours of the lame-duck session.
Don’t believe a word of it.
If generals are always fighting the last war, then the pundits are always reaching for the last cliché. Did Bill Clinton face a similar dilemma back in 1994, after Newt Gingrich and the Republicans ate his lunch? Did he not come back to marginalize Gingrich and — that little impeachment trifle aside — depart office still popular?
Very well then, all Obama has to do is “triangulate” — i.e., pretend to agree with both sides — and the great unwashed “centrist” electorate will flock back to his banner. After all, it worked for the original “Comeback Kid.”
For starters, this ignores several major distinctions between Clinton and Obama. Slick Willie learned his skills growing up in the crime-syndicate town of Hot Springs, Ark. Say what you will about those old gangsters, they knew how to run an effective political operation, by turns tough and solicitous, happy to raise money for the widows and orphans their trigger men had just created.
By contrast, Obama is a displaced person adopted by the far cruder Chicago machine, which turned his superficial charm and his palpable animus against the American ideal into a winning combination in the perfect storm 2008 election.
More important, it’s unclear that Obama has it in him to compromise and pretend to like it. No one could fake sincerity like Clinton, but Obama is a far different sort of political animal. His tax-deal press conference was a remarkable glimpse behind the Wizard of Oz curtain at a scowling man who believes his political opponents are “hostage-takers” and enemies — not just of the people, but of him personally.
So try as the media might, there’s simply no way that a few lesser legislative victories translate into a refreshed political potency. When you’ve been humbled on taxes by the minority Republicans and failed to pass an omnibus budget, you’ve been beaten soundly on matters of domestic policy — a clear signal that the incoming Tea Party-infused Republican majority in the House is already having an effect. And when one of your great victories is the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” a Bill Clinton initiative . . .
None of this stops the left or its media cheerleaders from spinning a horrible year for both the president and the country into a triumph of the human spirit. Obama’s “victories” in the “productive” lame-duck session may not be the end of “High Noon,” but for now they’ll have to do.
What’s next? Look for the media to start laying the groundwork for the 2012 campaign. The new House GOP majority will be tagged as “extremists.” Reporters will circle the incoming freshmen, hoping to pick off enough of them to dilute the ferocity of their mission. Speaker John Boehner will be implored to find “common ground” and, if he doesn’t, will get the full brunt of the Gingrich treatment as the primaries heat up. Of course, the slightest uptick in the economy will be hailed as the proof of the rightness of Obama’s policies.
Finally, every move Obama makes as he confronts the reality of the 112th Congress will be hailed as a Machiavellian masterpiece. It won’t matter whether it’s good for the country: To the media as well as to the Democrats, the only thing that really counts is electoral success.
Still, unless Obama undergoes a vast personal metamorphosis, it probably won’t work. He’s too inexperienced a politician and too starchy a man. He himself has said he’d rather be a good one-term president than a failed two-term president, but the way things are going, he may end up having it both ways, minus the “good.”
Obama’s worst enemy is not Boehner, or Sarah Palin, or any Republican; it’s himself.
Michael Walsh, a former associate editor of Time , is the author of “Hos tile Intent” and “Early Warning” and, writing as David Kahane, “Rules for Radical Conservatives.”