Sparrin’ Words

by Hendrik Hertzberg February 8, 2010
The New Yorker

President Obama’s first State of the Union address came at the end of the most harrowing nine days of his young Administration. On January 19th, a Republican won the Massachusetts seat that had been held for nearly half a century by Edward M. Kennedy, thereby depriving the Senate Democrats of the sixtieth vote they need to pass legislation. A headline on the Web site of the Village Voice summarized the situation tartly and smartly: “SCOTT BROWN WINS MASS. RACE, GIVING GOP 41-59 MAJORITY.” In the aftermath, as the Brookings scholar Henry J. Aaron wrote in National Journal, “the White House and many Congressional Democrats seemed almost as shattered psychologically as the Haitians were physically after their catastrophic earthquake.”

The President doesn’t do shattered, but he was plainly discombobulated. When he was asked by George Stephanopoulos about the fate of health-care reform, he shilly-shallied. “The Senate certainly shouldn’t try to jam anything through until Scott Brown is seated,” he said. “People in Massachusetts spoke. He’s got to be part of that process.” He added, feebly, “I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on.” (Perhaps he had momentarily forgotten that it’s the Senate that’s supposed to advise, if not necessarily to consent. A President is supposed to lead.) A few days later, he proposed a three-year “freeze,” beginning in 2011, on discretionary, non-entitlement, non-national-security spending—about one-eighth of the federal budget. Aides quickly explained that the freeze would not be “across-the-board”—that funds would be shifted from ineffective programs to effective ones. Even so, just about everyone outside the Republican congressional caucus recognizes that, with unemployment at ten per cent, the near-term need is for more public spending—more stimulus, not less. The proposal had the look of a political gimmick and the smell of political fear.

By the time he glided into the House chamber on January 27th, Obama had recovered his balance, and then some. He looked and sounded like a trillion bucks—surplus, not deficit. He appeared to be in an unusually relaxed, even bouncy mood. He exuded confidence. The speech he delivered was no literary masterpiece (though by State of the Union standards it was downright Nabokovian), but it was a small triumph of tone and subtle theatrics. Despite the grandiosity of the setting—the curlicued proscenium, the massed dignitaries, the absurd aerobics of the endless standing ovations—the President managed to create a surprisingly intimate, almost conversational effect, as if the well of the House were a fireside and he was having a chat. With humor, reasonableness, and a touch of sarcasm, he invited the Republican grandees in the audience to play the role of straight man, so to speak, and they obliged: row upon row of pale, middle-aged white men, unmoving and unmoved, frowning or smirking at every Presidential request for coöperation.

(Read more here.)

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