Why is the evaluation of Obama by the press so lackluster? Here he has, in the space of a year, brought the economy back from well beyond the edge of the cliff, though without the restructuring of the economy that would have been expected to have been necessary if he were to do so. He ploughs ahead with a jobs program to deal with the fact that unemployment is still much too high. He is closing Guantanamo, though not as quickly as some of his critics would like and which other of his critics would not like him to do at all. He has forged a new Afghanistan policy, though there too people nibble on both edges, some saying it is too much, others that it is not enough. And he is moving every day closer to the passage of a truly historic health care reform bill, one which will benefit everyone, from oldsters to insurance companies, and yet it is a bill which seems to satisfy no one. So why not more respect for his accomplishments?

The first likely culprit for the lackluster coverage of the movement towards the passage of a health care reform bill is the press itself. The press is an always available target because it is always there, out front, and so people, especially those who do not go beyond headline news, find it easy to blame because the press is one of the few institutions outside their own lives with which they have a passing familiarity. The case against the press, however, is a reasonable one. The movement to health care reform has been steady and, yes, has been broadly covered by the press. Yet health care reform has not, so far, been made into a particularly dramatic story even though it would seem to be a natural for dramatic media coverage. The journalists themselves regularly remind us when they say health care has been on the Democratic agenda for sixty years. A story so long in the making would seem to have a trajectory. There would seem call for additional excitement as the passage of the bill draws near. Yet the press is treating this as another Democratic vs. Republican battle rather than, as is often their wont, a drama which becomes ever more of a preoccupation as one draws to a climax. Look at the way they take two years to do a presidential election. By the end, you know every disfigurement on McCain's face. Look at the way they built up the Teddy Death Watch. Look at the way they once built up the drama to pass the Civil Rights Acts of the Sixties.

It has been suggested to me that the media are indeed building drama by keeping track of each of the milestones overcome on the way toward health care reform. It was reported, for example that this was the first time a health bill had come out of committee, something never achieved by the Clinton health bill of fifteen years before. It is reported that the health care bill has reached the floor of the Senate, and who were the “moderate” Democratic senators that made that possible by sticking with the party in what was a straight party line vote. But the media people don’t really think this bill will go all the way and also do not have much heart for the impending defeat, because if they were to enjoy the drama of the coming defeat the way they do the fall of athletic champions, then they would crank the drama up to a higher pitch. Moreover, the press has been so cowed by Republican phone calls that they can only treat it as a political drama lest they be accused of favoring one outcome over another. If everything is about the political infighting, then nothing is about the issue or what is at stake for the nation in the fight.

Other evidence that the press is not giving much credit to Obama for his accomplishments and those that are only in prospect is the spate of bad press he has had coming his way until this past week when he announced his Afghanistan policy. The press portrays him as a do nothing and lackluster leader, all talk and no cattle. But that was to be expected. The press decides when the honeymoon is over if for no other reason than that it needs a new story to tell, at least briefly. A story of disappointment replaces one of high hopes. What have you done for us lately?

The press try to call it down the middle, wherever is declared to be the middle on any given day, and so give up looking for a commanding narrative. Only the cable stations dare do so. Fox News offers Obama as a President trying to leverage a socialist dictatorship, however implausible such a claim might be. MSNBC offers Obama as a reluctant hero, not nearly as progressive as they had hoped he would be, given his life story, yet understandable in his reluctance to take the full force of the crazies on the right whom MSNBC pictures as the soul of the Republican Party: Palin, Chaney, Glenn Beck. (And is MSNBC that wrong about who is in charge?) Only CNN and the traditional broadcast networks run away from all narratives as being inherently unobjective. CNN smothers the viewer with demographics and NBC covers the ups and downs of health news as if it were Entertainment Tonight. The “mainstream” media think that approach is the high road and that it is in their interests to treat the news as one day at a time. And their ratings have plummeted. People want narrative, and so do I. I can judge myself whether the facts are being squeezed beyond recognition so as to suit the narrative being peddled.

A second way to explain the lackluster coverage of Obama is to blame the temper of the times, another culprit easy to invoke to explain just about anything because it is so general. “The culture” seeps in everywhere, producing poor school performance and road rage, as well as floor debates that are obfuscating. In particular, we live in a mean age of partisanship, no one willing to acknowledge the humanity of those who disagree. There are the know-nothings on the right, as that includes Palin but also all those Republican Senators who have never learned anything of Keynesian economics except that it can serve as a term of derision for those who believe that the market is self-regulating, never mind that the venerable Alan Greenspan has abandoned that faith. Republican politicians get elected by invoking the clichés of meanness that require you to give money to the rich and take it away from the poor and they will go down fighting for their clichés, unless the people take out the extended recession on the Democrats. You never abandon your clichés, success or failure; that is all you have to pass off as thought. And then there are the Democrats, smug in their righteousness, as that is buttressed by the knowledge that they better be right because the midterms are not that far off. Everybody wishes for the good old days when people picnicked and went to dinner with members of the opposing party, when people voted their consciousnesses or at least the needs of their local constituencies, rather than cast their votes in ways that show they are beholden to the Congressional and Senate election campaign committees.

Yet remember those bad old days when some people crossed the aisle and a lot more formed a coalition across party lines to block civil rights and other progressive legislation? There were those of us back then who wanted more party discipline. That way the party’s point of view would get a decent hearing and even a vote. There would be narrow party line votes, not just on the organization of the House and Senate at the beginning of each term. That is the way it works in the House of Commons, and no one suggests that is not a democratic body. Politics would be either/or rather than a matter of the degree to which one was left or right. Bernie Sanders and Blanche Lincoln will both vote for the health care reform bill. Lincoln is up for reelection and needs the support of her party. The good old days were not that good legislatively, and if you think about it, neither was the tone of the country. Remember McCarthyism or the Willy Horton ad or any number of demonstrations that the American public, not to speak of their legislators, can be mean and ignorant?

There is a third, more complex explanation for the lackluster coverage of Obama and his program, and it is also right there out in front of you—so much so, in fact, that it gets neglected entirely when pundits explore either generalities of culture, why everybody is in a bad mood, or else the minutia of party politics. Rather than the dynamics of the press or the dynamics of legislative bodies, this explanation concerns the nature of the issue that is being addressed. Consider, first of all, health care reform. Heath care is an unpalatable topic to deal with politically precisely because it strikes so close to home. People scramble to find a way to deal with it, and so resolve in their minds what stand to take on health care out of the intellectual and cultural resources at their command, their political position possibly but not necessarily cognizant of their personal experiences. It is a point often made about health care that experts think people need less health care because they are subjected to unnecessary and dangerous tests and procedures while the ordinary person wants more care, perhaps to salve their consciences by doing everything they can for grandma. The negative reaction, however, to recent reports that there is too much mammography and too many cervical examinations suggests that more is going on here than the difference between expert and lay opinion. It is not as if we go to another muffler repairman to secure an extra opinion. A muffler is only a muffler; here, we are talking about grandma’s life—or one’s own.

How do people maintain—rather than resolve—the dissonance between their own perceptions of what should be done in health care with the expert view of what should be done when those are presented to them? It would be too easy to say that they engage in a populist rejection of all that is expert in favor of what they know as “common sense”, which is the received sentiment of a population. That is because people are also almost always willing to defer to experts, especially in medicine, where they take drugs and undergo treatments that are painful and debilitating because doctors have assured them that enduring those drugs and treatments is “for their own good”.

Again, let’s make a list. Three alternative ways of dealing with the dissonance come readily to mind. First, most people just do not think statistically. They are aware that mammography detected their own breast cancers and that without the tests the cancer would not have been detected as quickly and a delay in detection would have resulted in, at best, more extensive therapies and possibly in loss of life. How can you deny people such a test? The statistical answer is that if the idea is to reduce risk of an undetected cancer to close to zero, then it would be necessary to test everyone, including men, who can also develop breast cancer. But if you decide to get rid of some categories as unnecessary to test, then you are simply saying there is a negotiable cut off line between those who have to be tested and those who don’t, and perhaps women in their forties fall short of the cut off line. Which category is of substantial risk is an empirical question. And that is to forget there may be adverse effects of testing: not just anxiety, but unnecessary and difficult procedures for people who turn up as false positives on the test.

That, however, does not do justice to the sentiment of the non-statistical, which is to operate in the concrete, with one’s own sense and judgment of what is acceptable risk. If I am horrified by cancer, should I not have a chance to be tested more often, and my being tested more often than recommended not be regarded as in itself a deviant act, the sign of a hypochondriac? The odds are for other people; I want control of how much risk to take with my own body. Something more than ignorance is going on here. I just don’t want to calculate the cost of taking a medical action, even if the government does—and even though, of course, in the back of my mind or to the shame of myself and those with whom I discuss the matter, I do calculate how long I can support grandma’s treatments.

A second explanation for how people deal with the dissonance between personal and public approaches to health care also resolves the dilemma always in favor of more care. People fear death to such a degree that they will try any expedient that seems to reduce the risk of dying. They eat peach pits or they have fantasies about how their tumors are every day in every way growing smaller and smaller. The irrational response to death, irrational in that there is no way to limit the worry once you indulge it, can only lead to ever more medical treatment. More tubes, more injections, more operations, to put off the inevitable, practical expedients having to do with the how of life and death replacing religious expedients having to do with coming to terms with the fact that people die. Medicine will not for a while be able to make good on the promise of medicine, which is not just to alleviate suffering and postpone death, but postpone death for a considerable period of time. The how of medicine that was supposed to be the functional alternative to the why of religion and philosophy has only barely begun to pay off its IOU’s. 

Yet that answer also seems specious, however much it does describe considerable contemporary sentiment about life and death. People do not think they will live forever if they get good treatment; they only think that they can delay the inevitable and that such a delay should not be rationed, apportioned to some and not to others. Death is too important to be left to the free enterprise system that doesn’t treat poor people or to a socialist system that, some believe, would inevitably engage in rationing of care so as to save health care dollars. Everybody needs a shot at extended life, and the health care debate reminds everyone that not much good lies down that road.

A third explanation of the disjunction between group and individual risk may be closer to the mark. People dissociate their political from their personal views. A legislator arguing that abortion is wrong may provide money for his daughter’s abortion. That does not make him a hypocrite, even if gay activists like to think of in the closet gay legislators as hypocrites if they vote against gay rights. But those legislators may indeed think homosexuality is wrong, a weakness they do not have the courage to address and therefore are ashamed of, or that what is good for society is not what is good for themselves or those with a similar bent, or that homosexuality does not have to be liberated from oppression because that has always been the flavor and texture of gay life. Any of these or some other reason will lead homosexuals to deny their nature in public and for the public just as is the case with those heterosexual adulterers who also think that marriage laws are sacrosanct even if they cannot live up to them.

In similar fashion, a conservative legislator may consider government to be reaching too far into personal decision making when it offers more or less pressing guidelines for what doctors can do. That will follow from a legislator’s general views about the relation of government to people: government should stay hands off as much as possible. That is a summary way of putting what the legislator has learned or absorbed over the years in the way of political philosophy or, at the least, political rhetoric. The style suits whatever cloth is to be cut. It is not ideology, for that is to suggest an organized set of political principles. Rather, it is the world of political words, suitable for town hall meetings and the well of Congress and bumper stickers. And so those legislators will oppose paying for advice to grandma on how to manage her last days. If the glove can be made to fit, then go with it, minding full well that this is the party’s point of view, at least for the nonce, and so to be advanced, even if it was a Republican who introduced the provision in committee.

Yet, at the same time, the conservative legislator is fully aware that he had his own grandma and has his own mother and, God forbid, has a wife and daughter who also might have to undergo drastic treatments. He knows that these circumstances have to be managed with great care so that people do not have to undergo unnecessary suffering and yet will be required to accept such suffering if there is any significant medical purpose to it. No matter what the legislator does, unless he is a moral midget, and I am not willing to say that legislators in their personal lives are any more limited than the rest of us, his choice will fill him with guilt for having done too much or not enough to alleviate the immediate pain and suffering. His personal knowledge is different in character from his political knowledge and the two spheres need not intrude on one another very much, though that does happen sometimes when there are matters of high moral concern before a legislature. The New York State Senate, not known for either its good sense or its moral depth, had a debate about gay marriage a few weeks ago in which Senators actually invoked what they knew about the issues from their personal lives. The measure to allow same sex marriage was defeated, in part because one Senator said people should read their bible. That was all they had to know. So some people are taken over by their political and religious rhetoric, but not everyone, and that is just the way it is in real life when people decide who they care for independent of whom they are supposed to care for. Huck cared for Jim even if Huck thought it would get him sent to Hell.

And to complicate things even further, sometimes principle or rhetoric should trump personal sensibility. The time was politically ripe for the Civil Rights Acts of the Sixties, never mind the personal preferences of Senators. The time is ripe for gay marriage, so its proponents avow, even if some state senators feel the idea rubs rub against the grain. But legislators by and large wait for their feelings and the rhetoric to catch up with one another. That is why they are in legislatures rather than writing op ed pieces. The same sex marriage debate is, at the moment, in considerable flux. New Jersey may do what New York State will not yet do. The compelling narrative that gay people just want to start families has not yet taken full hold, and that is not so surprising since just a generation ago gay rights meant that bath house culture had to be protected from middle class morality. The times, they are a-changing quickly.

Conservatives, to the consternation of Liberals, cling to the way Conservatives think. As Karl Mannheim said with great acuity long ago, conservative thought is not so much a choice of one policy in preference to other policies as that choice is guided by one view of economic and social reality rather than a different view of economic and social reality. Rather, conservatives think that their own politics are beyond politics; conservative politicians are representing the people or God more directly than other politicians, who consult policy analysis or what the polling data shows, and so they are closer to the truth, whatever are the arguments on one side or another. Conservatives know that health care reform is a bad idea. It will change the way things are done. That provides a sufficient sense of horror, whatever are grandma’s needs, which are treated, by definition, as beyond (or prior to) all politics.

What Obama is doing, to the consternation of Conservatives, is to say that grandma’s needs are a matter of public concern rather than an existential matter. And he is trying to change the terms of the debate by suggesting what a conservative may well know in his private life, that grandma’s fate can be improved by a better assortment of services, even though one does not like to remember that the service menu changes every few years anyway and is hardly ever, in the past few generations, a matter of a simple consultation between a doctor and a patient, but is the result of protocols that are modified sometimes well and sometimes badly. You can’t tell the public that, Conservatives think, so even Senator Dr. Bill Frist, when he was majority leader, just fudged about Terri Schiavo, claiming on the basis of video tapes that she was responsive when in fact she was not, while Liberals, who at least think they have to bring their constituents along, albeit however slowly, do not want to offend voters by reminding them that sometimes what a family wants to do is not in grandma’s best interests. Obama, in short, is faulted for introducing some reality into the health care debate by suggesting that what grandma needs (or his mother needed) is not all that clear except that whatever she does really need should be paid for.

The same requirement to change the terms of the debate that holds for Obama’s health care agenda and for domestic policy in general during the Age of Obama also holds true with regard to the issue of the war in Afghanistan. The old debate over Iraq was whether it was a war of necessity or a war of choice, the anti-war people suggesting that it was a war of choice, even that to fight a war of choice was unprecedented or, at the least, the previous wars of choice had been bad choices, the imperialist wars against Mexico and Spain seen in that light, though that means stretching the categories a bit, since our entry into World War I was hardly thrust upon us but was chosen for the supposedly good strategic reason that sooner or later the Germans would threaten our interests if England was no longer a buffer between us and them.

Obama has defended the War in Afghanistan as a war of necessity. That was the place from which our homeland was attacked and it is important to see that the enemy does not grow more secure there so that it can plan and train for and launch more attacks from there. In that light, the War in Iraq was a distraction. And Obama has come up with a plan that might even work if it is well executed. More drone attacks on Pakistan; more buying off of the non-ideological Taliban; more training of Afghan police and military while we secure the important towns and cities of the South and East. Moreover, our troops get over there fast and do what they do or fail to do what they are trying to do so that their success there can be evaluated in eighteen months time and we can decide whether or not it is necessary to go back to the drawing board. That brings us up to the midterm elections, when his Afghanistan policy would be a political issue anyway if it is not working. There is no mention of nation building or of the spread of democracy; just a war that serves the national interest.

Is Obama just fighting the last war, the one in Iraq, all over again? In that case, we are just leaving American soldiers out there to be hit by IUD’s while they patrol under the fiction that patrolling shows you control an area. That is what the left believes. Or he might be implementing a surge of the sort that worked in Iraq, and so is justified here, even though it was not the Surge so much as the Awakening and the resolution of the civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites, which left each in charge of their part of the country, that led to a downturn of violence. Last war thinking leads to bad thinking.

Or it might be that Obama has learned the lessons of the last war and so is not going to repeat them. This will be done quickly, not the labored buildup of American capacity that hampered the early years of the Iraq War. Remember the delay in retrofitting Humvees with armor? That task was finally accomplished by the time the insurgents had developed more powerful IUD’s. We did not stay ahead of the insurgents in the technology race, hard as that is to believe, nor even in the race to supply armored vests to our own troops—though that may have been a red herring, something parents could resort to as showing that the Army and the Marines were not doing enough for the troops. If Rumsfeld was not just foot dragging and had thought that the armor was just not that useful anyway, he should have said so. Obama, for his part, is introducing a little shock and awe into his attack plan by moving troops in quickly so as to make a visible difference on the ground rather than a gradually increasing force to which the enemy can gradually adapt. Moreover, the drones are indeed a technological breakthrough that, in combination with good intelligence and satellite surveillance, can indeed turn the course of the war and end it in reasonable time rather than turn it into one of those lingering events that the American people cannot and that American policymakers should not abide unless it is absolutely essential to do so.

Obama’s war is not catchy because he has altered the terms for its conceptualization. It is not an existential war, as was World War II and the Cold War. It is a strategic war in that it supports our interests against what might become an existential enemy, Islamic Fundamentalism. The same was true of Korea, where the actual struggle was a way to fight the Cold War by other and non-nuclear means. Truman got caught up on that because he could never find a way of properly identifying what he was doing. He tried to sell the war as a police action, and so to be distinguished from the sort of all out war that the Second World War had been, but that title did not catch fire. He might have been better off, in retrospect, to have identified it as a border war: a conflict far from the central parts of the two superpowers that were in struggle with one another, but a test of will and might nonetheless. Obama did not announce his Afghanistan War as some grand ideological calling, nor as one that required any new authorization from Congress. He regards it simply as a practical war, one worth pursuing, and outlines the reasonable measures for carrying it out. His non-jingoistic announcement of his policy will become noticeable over time as a departure in the way Americans deal with wars, though for the moment people on both the left and the right might find a war announced without great rhetoric not a properly declared one.  

It is not just old wars that present the choice of being either imitated or learned from. The same is true of old leaders. Republicans still invoke Reagan though you would have thought they would have learned by now that ideologues like Reagan and Bush make bad presidents. Leftish Democrats, for their part, wanted Obama to be a modern version of FDR. That would have meant a slew of proposals for structural change introduced right at the beginning of his administration, never mind that Obama doesn’t have the votes to turn those into legislation or the fact that all his administration can sustain are a few big fights carefully chosen. Obama has placed his bets on health care and Afghanistan, the economic recovery and the job recovery already taken for granted. And he has adopted his own subdued rhetoric style of the down to earth professor to replace FDR’s combination of high flying combativeness (“economic royalists”; “nothing to fear but fear itself) and down to earth folksiness (Lend Lease as a garden hose; “I can’t tell the Mrs. what to say.”).

What Obama does that is fresh is redefine issues in a way that is not politics as usual, however much his recalibration of political rhetoric is carefully crafted to meet his political needs. Obama doesn’t just advocate the opposite side, making a better case for the liberal side than his opponents make for the conservative side. That is what FDR did and LBJ, the New Dealer, did later on, advocating for the poor when Republicans advocated for the rich. Nor is it even that Obama just shifts issues, talking about health care now as a right, now as a cost saving measure, or whatever it is that suits the moment. Clinton did that when he championed intruding into fragments of the former Yugoslavia sometimes for humanitarian reasons and sometimes by saying that air power was a sufficient way to extend America’s power overseas. Rather, what Obama does is shift the rhetorical tone of public debate. Foreign policy is more or less openly arrived at and publicly explained rather than arrived at on a need to know basis. And domestic policy as well as foreign policy is justified for being practical rather than merely a moral imperative. Obama’s style is sufficiently different that it will people will take a while to notice how distinctive it is from what has come before. Obama presents a way of governing that is likely to enrich the American political process for generations after Obama has left office.