I mean this in all sobriety, and in full knowledge of our nation's history: Barack Obama is our FDR or Lincoln - few alive today have seen a better presidency, and few alive today are going to see a better one later. Every moment that we have leadership of this quality is catalytic and rapidly fleeting, being replaced with each passing instant by the nostalgia of impotent peasants who take no responsibility for shaping history as it happens. When we once again have Presidents who are merely products of politics rather than agents - passive reflections of a cynical and depraved status quo whose true depth we are currently being insulated from - I don't relish the kind of whimpering we'll all be subjected to. We can and should engage with the President as part of a team for positive change, but listen and listen good: Leadership by human beings does not get better than this, so we either seize this moment and raise our expectations of ourselves, or we admit that we aren't even capable of using the quality of leadership we already have, let alone asking for better.
Furthermore, the urgency of this moment isn't merely in the strength of our presidential leadership, but in the weakness of Republicans. They are richer than ever, but they are in transition - they haven't quite figured out yet how to actually rule as oligarchs, however insatiable their desire for power is. Call it the vestigial shadow of patriotism (or at least overriding cowardice), but for all their Satanic fetishes they still haven't found the iron within themselves to exercise power in the ways their international counterparts often do with far less money on the line.
For all the self-important whingeing of some activists, Americans don't confront elite interests in the expectation of being kidnapped, murdered, or framed, even if it occurs from time to time: We have the protection of our own expectations, and the consequent fear we inspire in those who would take away our freedom. But restraint built on assumptions has a way of eroding when tested, and sooner or later they're going to figure out they can get away with the kind of crap their counterparts do. That's the whole point of their chipping away at the legal system, taking away Americans' access to recourse against injustice - outside of law, everything is decided either by money or violence, and they would overwhelmingly dominate both. Republicans can't wait until they can act like their Russian, Mexican, or Brazilian oligarch counterparts - it's their version of the American Dream, to no longer be anything resembling Americans.
But right now, they're still afraid. Right now, their organized crime has become disorganized. Right now, the psycho teabagger brownshirts who may some day be massacring people in the streets at the urging of Rwanda-style media still believe they can subjugate this country while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy. The interests that fund those lunatics have not yet brought out the Long Knives, but nor has the mob managed to successfully overthrow their zookeepers; and the result has been an incoherent mess, with the most energetic among them becoming totally estranged from political reality - the only form of reality the power-hungry cannot afford to ignore.
Rest assured, their doubled-down fury and destructive resurgence is guaranteed to happen eventually. They want what they cannot have, and could not have even if every man, woman, and child in America were their willing slaves - they want things that don't even make logical sense in our universe, and would strain even the credulity of a Lewis Carroll character. The question is how much power will be in their hands when they realize they're not getting what they want - how dangerous will they be when they begin blaming entire categories of people for the failure of their ideology, and contemplate how to remove the influence of those people from society? Will they have been fought back into regional citadels, futilely clinging to power through cheap Jim Crow-style tactics, or will they be Cheney-to-the-nth-power unleashing nightmare after nightmare on a daily basis because we sat on our asses when they were weak and we had the best President in two generations in the Oval Office?
I don't expect people who make a career of denigrating this administration to be helpful in this regard - their choicest acid is always reserved for members of their own alleged team, based on standards they invent out of thin air with zero reference to actual history. But then again, people like that don't usually stick around long enough to feel the consequences of their own shallowness - they're the first to flee, often with a smug grin on their faces at the plight of the unworthy countrymen who had failed to live up to their standards. So it's really up to the rest of us: Are we capable of benefiting from leadership, or is the American liberal finally a joke at our own expense? Are our true leaders the people who do things, however humble the reality may appear to some, or do we follow self-important rhetoricians who would be ridiculing us from some foreign cafe if they were ever asked to take on real responsibility?
I've said this before, and nothing I've seen so far has changed my mind: Barack Obama is among the best of us - I'm not aware of any positive quality in the American psyche that does not at least appear convincingly potent in him as a person, or any intellectual and philosophical quality of American liberalism that does not at least appear convincingly potent in him as a leader. So either my senses consistently deceive me - and consistent deception is almost an oxymoron unless you're proposing a superhuman deceptive ability on the President's part, or total and unremitting stupidity on mine (and I am never that consistent, stupid or otherwise) - or that base is well-covered, and the main jobs left undone are ours.
It is our task to not merely reelect this President, but finally, for the first time give this President a working Congress. It is our job to finally, for the first time be able to say that we gave President Obama the tools to enact the agenda we elected him in 2008 to pass, but unfortunately neglected to provide a sufficient Congress to pass. Until we do that, the only job we are allowing him to do is fight a holding action, and all criticism to that effect is beyond absurd. We have a job to do, so let's do it.