On his 10-day trip to Asia and in his 10th month in office, Barack Obama is beginning to encounter limits on his ambition to change the world. Even as he bowed to the king of Saudi Arabia last April and to the emperor of Japan last week, the world refuses to bow back.
Barack Obama told the House Democratic Caucus before the roll call vote on health care on Nov. 7 that they would be better off politically if they passed the bill than if they let it fail. Bill Clinton speaking to the Senate Democrats' lunch on Nov. 10 cited his party's big losses in 1994 after Congress failed to pass his health care legislation as evidence that Democrats would suffer more from failure to pass a bill than from disaffection with a bill that was signed into law.
Anniversaries are opportunities to reflect on the past and on what it might mean for the future. Monday saw the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, even if Barack Obama could not find time to travel once again to Berlin to attend the commemoration there. And Wednesday is the 91st anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.
In November 2008, 658,000 Americans under 30 voted in New Jersey and 782,000 did so in Virginia. In November 2009, 212,000 Americans under 30 voted in New Jersey and 198,000 did so in Virginia. In other words, young-voter turnout this year was down two-thirds in New Jersey and three-quarters in Virginia.
As the final votes were being counted, it was possible to draw some lessons from Republican Bob McDonnell's victory in Virginia and the close, three-way governor's race in New Jersey, never mind that White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has taken to saying that the elections don't mean much.
The recession is over, we are told. The Commerce Department announced Thursday that the economy grew in the third quarter of 2009 by 3.5 percent. Great, huh?
Five days from now the voters of New Jersey and Virginia will elect governors. Voters in the 23rd district of New York and the 10th district of California will elect new members of the House of Representatives to replace incumbents, a Republican and a Democrat, who were appointed to positions in the Obama Defense and State departments.
Barack Obama, who found time to go on a 24-hour jaunt to Copenhagen on Oct. 2 to seek the 2016 Olympics games for Chicago, apparently cannot find the time for a 24-hour trip to Berlin on Nov. 9 for a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Well, we all have our priorities, and the president can't be everywhere at once, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will surely represent the United States ably in Berlin.
"His father was a great friend of my father." The reference to William Ayers' father was how Mayor Richard M. Daley began his defense of Barack Obama for his association with the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist. Daley's father, of course, was Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976. Ayers' father was head of Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago-based utility, from 1964 to 1980.
An interesting paradox. Last year, America elected a president who, in attitudes and policies, is closer to the elites of Western Europe than any of his predecessors. Yet in the nine months that he has been in office, ordinary Americans have been moving away from those attitudes and policies and have increasingly embraced positions that over the years have made Americans distinctive from those in other advanced Western democracies.
The legislative process can also be a learning process, and as Congress considers health care legislation -- the latest act being the Senate Finance Committee's vote in favor of Chairman Max Baucus' bill, or "conceptual language" -- we have been learning something useful. It's that legislators would like to provide generous, even gold-plated health insurance coverage to almost all Americans, but that no one wants to pay for it.
Some of the headlines in recent days are not worthy of belief. No, I'm not referring to the headlines that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, however odd that many seem to many (including, it seems, Obama himself). I'm referring to the headlines earlier in the week to the effect that the health care bill sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus will cut the federal deficit by $81 billion over the next 10 years.
In trying to understand what is happening in the nation and world, we all employ narratives -- story lines that indicate where things are going and what is likely to happen next. We can check the validity of these narratives by observing whether events move in the indicated direction. If so, the narrative is confirmed. But if things seem to be moving in an entirely different direction, it's time to discard the narrative and look for another.
As Sen. Max Baucus tries to squeeze a health care bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, and as Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry race to meet their latest deadline to introduce a bill to reduce carbon dioxide, some Democrats wonder whether their congressional leaders and the president who has deferred to them have sought only limited changes rather than more fundamental reform on both health insurance and carbon emissions.
"It is my deeply held belief," Barack Obama told the United Nations General Assembly, that "in the year 2009 -- more than at any point in human history -- the interests of nations and peoples are shared."
In the early 1980s, while planning a vacation in Latin America, I went to bookstores to look for histories of the region. All I could find were Marxist tracts arguing that "the people" were exploited by greedy corporations and military dictators, all propped up by the United States.
It is an interesting phenomenon that the response of the left half of our political spectrum to criticism and argument is often to try to shut it down. Thus President Obama in his Sept. 9 speech to a joint session of Congress told us to stop "bickering," as if principled objections to major changes in public policy were just childish obstinacy, and chastised his critics for telling "lies," employing "scare tactics" and playing "games." Unlike his predecessor, he sought to use the prestige of his office to shut criticism down.
"The level of unemployment is unacceptably high. And will, by all forecasts, remain unacceptably high for a number of years."
The dwindling number of readers of The New York Times were treated Wednesday to a column by Thomas Friedman extolling China's "one-party autocracy," which, he told us, "is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people."
The resignation over the Labor Day weekend of White House "green jobs" czar Van Jones tells you some interesting things about the Obama administration.
