While delivering the eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney in Charleston, South Carolina, President Obama sang 'Amazing Grace.' VPC
Lest his tenure be described as many sox/rux posts in DK as "centrist"/"not progressive enough", PBO has been part of a larger structural move left, despite RW resistance that more often than not ends in tragedy these days. As with the Reaganite mantra "
Let Reagan be Reagan", PBO's inner Bulworth has expressed itself in ways that make the significance of his administration brighter in the last 600 days.
Yet Mr. Obama also expresses exasperation. In private, he has talked longingly of “going Bulworth,” a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought. While Mr. Beatty’s character had neither the power nor the platform of a president, the metaphor highlights Mr. Obama’s desire to be liberated from what he sees as the hindrances on him.
“Probably every president says that from time to time,” said David Axelrod, another longtime adviser who has heard Mr. Obama’s movie-inspired aspiration. “It’s probably cathartic just to say it. But the reality is that while you want to be truthful, you want to be straightforward, you also want to be practical about whatever you’re saying.”
The cinematic allusion seems striking given Mr. Obama’s rejection of Hollywood’s version of the White House, what one former aide calls “the Harry Potter theory of the presidency,” which suggests that he could wave a wand and make things happen. At the White House Correspondents Association dinner last month, he bristled at the idea that he should pattern himself after Michael Douglas’s assertive character in “The American President.”
The New York Times reported Thursday that President Obama frequently fantasizes to close aides about "going Bulworth," a reference to the 1998 movie in which Sen. Jay Bulworth, played by Warren Beatty, drops all pretense and begins saying exactly what he thinks. So I asked a number of ex-Obama aides and political consultants what the president would say if he went Bulworth. This post is based on those conversations -- it's what the people who have heard Obama vent about Washington in private believe he wishes he could say in public. That said, this is the Internet so let's be crystal clear: This is a work of fiction. Informed fiction, but fiction nevertheless.
OBAMA: Look, I wanted to change Washington. And I think that the legislation we passed has changed America. But to be honest, so far as the way Washington works goes, Washington has changed me, and I don't like it. That's one place I broke a promise to the American people. And today is part of my repentance.
Q: But Mr. President, if LBJ had taken that attitude, would we really have gotten the Great Society?
OBAMA: Oh, Jesus Christ. [drops mic]
Ezra Klein