The Obama explainer, explained
I haven’t cross-posted anything from my “actual” political blog for a while but I thought this one was appropriate. James Fallows got his twelve-thousand words in The Atlantic to explain the first term of the Obama administration. Now here’s my two-thousand word (or so) response. The link at bottom will show you to the rest of the piece at the Minneapolis Examiner. Thanks for reading.
Barack Obama has entered the final year in his first term as President of the United States. It is hard to believe four years have passed since the heady days of the 2008 presidential campaign in which Obama vanquished the Democratic establishment’s candidate and would go on to defeat Sen. John McCain by one of the largest margins in years. When a president reaches such a milestone the usual response from the media is to create a series of articles assessing the first term: what has the president accomplished, what he has not, and why. This is somewhat akin to the halfway-point stories that showed up around the mid-term elections in 2010. After a president’s first four years there is an observable time line in effect for journalists to follow to deduce just what Obama has done for the country and his party at large. The most recent entry into this department is the March 2012 cover story in The Atlantic by James Fallows entitled “Obama, Explained.” Fallows is generally a phenomenal reporter and has written a myriad of great articles for this magazine over the years. This one, unfortunately, is not one of them. While a masterful attempt at deciphering the meaning of the first term of the Obama administration it leaves out as much insight into the president’s accomplishments as it includes. It focuses (as many opinion makers are wont to do) on the foreign-policy “achievements” of the Obama administration as the sole bright spot but also relies quite heavily on Democratic mandarins of years past as points of reference. While Fallows’ obvious ingratiation with the establishment in DC should be known, it still seems odd that he counts as his sources here Larry Summers, Walter Mondale (notable for losing the presidential race disastrously in 1984), and Michael Dukakis (notable for losing the presidential race disastrously in 1988).
