by JOHN FEFFER
PHOTO/Wikipedia
Obama’s made a lot of Faustian bargains over the last seven years. But given his likely successors, what we got over the last two terms may be as good as it gets.
In fairy tales, the hero makes a wish. After a few trials the wish comes true, and everyone lives happily ever after. But only in this Disney version of fairy tales is wish fulfillment so straightforward.
In Goethe’s modern fairy tale, a scholar dreams of knowledge and power. A stranger grants his wish, but the ambitious Faust must pledge his soul to the Devil to seal the deal. In the famous short story “The Monkey’s Paw,” a distraught mother rubs the animal’s amputated limb and wishes for her dead son to return. When the knock on the door comes late at night, she realizes that her dead son has indeed returned, but not necessarily to life.
The moral? Unless you’re two-dimensional and Technicolor, be careful what you wish for.
Those who aspire to occupy the Oval Office, should their wish come true, are not guaranteed a fairy-tale ending. Indeed, few exit the presidency without giving up their soul (or large parts thereof). Some are even haunted by the dead who come knocking at midnight, demanding to be heard. Presidents watch their hair turn grey and their shoulders slump from the weight of the office.
Barack Obama became president of the United States seven years ago. He made many a difficult bargain in order to fulfill his wish to become America’s first African American commander-in-chief. In the process, he’s auctioned off parts of his soul to different vested interests and, as a result, disappointed many.
Some commentators on the left have blasted his presidency because it doesn’t conform to their Disney understanding of American politics (in which the fairy leftist waves a wand and all Americans suddenly become Swedish socialists). Many commentators on the right have dismissed the Obama administration from day one because it doesn’t conform to their Reaganesque understanding of American society (in which gummint shrivels up like a raisin in the sun leaving Americans free to choose, starve, and fire their semi-automatics).
But there are also plenty of people in the middle who have grown cynical of the Obama administration, because seven years is a long time to sustain hope and pray for change. This broad slice of the electorate expected peace, and they’ve gotten a lot of war. They hoped in the wake of the financial crisis for an economy geared to the 99 percent, and they’ve seen the raucous return of the rich. They expected a transformation of the way Washington does business, and they witnessed a continuation of business as usual.
It’s best, of course, to approach American politics with diminished expectations. Such realism applies double when the president himself is a realist. The Barack Obama who took office in 2009 was no revolutionary, though many mistook the radical fact of an African American winning the presidency for a radical agenda.
Obama promised to end one war (Iraq), not all wars. He offered a modest program of economic reforms, but he was also heavily funded during his campaign by Wall Street donors. And he was a centrist Democrat taking the reins of a government increasingly hobbled by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. Only against the backdrop of the president’s constrained ambitions and Washington’s dysfunctional politics do the first seven years of the Obama era make any sense at all.
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