The New Yorker : Give ’em Hell, Barry? : by Hendrik Hertzberg - Abraham Lincoln is the admired model of Obama, but he did not have a Congress of Recalcitrant Confederate Cretins in Washington !

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The New Yorker
Give ’em Hell, Barry?
by Hendrik Hertzberg
September 8, 2011


Give ’em Hell, Barry?


Some excerpts :

The President spoke in strong, simple words, free of jargon—from the name of the bill (the American Jobs Act) to the blunt calls for action (“You should pass this jobs plan right away,” repeated many times in one form or another). It was, I thought, a startlingly skillful political and rhetorical exercise, delivered with stern energy. Obama’s penchant for “bipartisanship” had a different tone and feel this time. It was a challenge and a demand, not a plea. He looked like and sounded like—maybe even is in the process of once again becoming—a formidable leader. If he keeps this up, a lot of the discouragement and depression that currently afflicts almost every Democrat I know will surely lift.

The plan itself is modest compared to the need, but it’s big enough and well enough targeted that its enactment would make a real difference in relieving some of the suffering of mass unemployment. It would help the country, but at the price of brightening the President’s prospects for reëlection as well. It’s not hard to guess where most Republican politicians will come down in that particular cost-benefit analysis. Helping the country is unlikely to be enough of an incentive for Republicans to pass a bill, any bill, that Obama supports, even a bill, like this one, that is assembled mostly from refurbished spare parts collected from their own ideological warehouse. No doubt many of them sincerely believe that the end (upping the chances of defeating Obama and his nefarious agenda of turning America into a socialist hellhole like Western Europe) justifies the means (deepening the extent of mass unemployment, human suffering, and ancillary damage to the economy and to society).

Obama made a forthright argument that primitive individualism has to be paired with what he called “another thread running throughout our history—a belief that we are all connected and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.”

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