Today on Meet the Press, presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin distilled the essence of what makes Obama a new kind of president:
I think the great thing about Lincoln is not only what he did--which Obama has also tried in some ways to emulate by putting powerful people around him who are going to argue and question him, so he's going to get a lot of options--it's who Lincoln was. There's no better person to summon the spirit of than somebody who had the emotional intelligence of Abraham Lincoln, and I think we see hints of it in Obama: not wanting to demonize the opposition, bringing people like David Brooks and other people around him to--and Reverend Warren in, who may not agree with him on all occasions, but wants to listen to them.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
We are all so proud right now, of our party, of our country and our president elect, but this passage captures something more important that the obvious changes of the Obama election: we are entering a new era of politics, and ushering in a new generation of politicians.
I must admit to a certain impatience with our next president, something I've felt throughout the campaign as he withstood one withering, unfair, absurd attack after another: I wanted him to fight back, tit for tat. But as Goodwin points out, what we have here is a new generation of politician and a new mode of politics. I'm not saying that Obama isn't an extraordinary man, nor am I so gullible to believe the world will change as a result of his example. Instead, what the emotional intelligence of Obama shows is that this is a time of both subtle and not-so-subtle change in our politics, and it is that which makes this a time when, for a moment perhaps, we can all believe that anything is possible.
Now Obama is nobody's fool and he is surrounded by a pretty tough team who can play hardball. So I hope I don't seem too much like the people his admistration replaces to compare and contrast what the future holds with what the stolen election of 2000 has wrought.
In Think Progress' January 16, 2009 Progress Report, the Progress Team bring us "The 43 Who Helped Make Bush the Worst Ever". It's a remakable journey of hubris, slander, sleaze, lies, greed, and unaccountability, the worst quality in any leader. In this amazing week, as we simultaneously wallow in the filth that was our 43rd president's legacy and look to the future with pride and hope, it's useful to remember that a careful reckoning of history is all that prevents the same catastrophies and crimes from happening again.
What we look back upon is not simply a matter of incompetence, arrogance, foolishness, pride, ignorance, or greed, it is a boiling cauldron of all these traits working simultaneously upon a groupthink cadre of yes-men, neo-con expansionists and a posse of corporate raiders posing as old school Republicans who somewhere along the way forgot to keep acting like they cared about small government, lower taxes, or the middle class. Surely one of the people in the "dirty 43", or someone working directly under them coined for us the wonderful, pregnant phrase that perfectly encapsulates the mindset of the Bush era and its supporters: "The Reality Based Community". One of the best renditions of this story can be found in the wonderful, hilarious Al Franken book "The Truth, With Jokes", from which I hope I will be forgiven for quoting at length:
A senior Bush adviser summarized the Bush team's way of thinking to journalist Ron Suskind in the summer of 2002:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Doesn't that sound like the kind of speech a Bond villain would make just before falling into his own shark tank? Bad screenwriters get paid good money to come up with monologues like that. But this is real. The Bush inner circle sees the world has having spectators and participants. Almost everybody - you, me, Scott McClellan - is a mere spectator, trapped in the reality-based universe...
http://www.amazon.com/...
This Tuesday, January 20th, 2009, when the world watches America inaugurate its first African American president, let's remember the many changes this election represents. It's not simply a new day in American, filled with new ideals and hopes and dreams, new achievements and possibilities, it is something maybe even greater than all that. To paraphrase our new President, it is the day of which one day we will look back and say this is when our politics changed, and Americans got real.