INAUGURAL

Transitioning
by Hendrik Hertzberg January 19, 2009
Barack Obama’s campaign for President, which was as much about old-fashioned grassroots politicking as it was about high-tech dazzle, was big on paraphernalia—lawn signs, T-shirts, baseball caps, bumper stickers, and, of course, buttons. It may have set some sort of record for campaign buttons, including at least one meta-button: tiny pictures of old buttons—“I Like Ike” and the like—with the legend “BUTTON COLLECTORS FOR OBAMA.” But where Obama enthusiasts have truly broken new ground is in the emerging field of post-campaign buttons. The polls had barely closed when the first “YES WE DID” buttons hit the streets, and since then there has been a profusion of pins—one shows the Obamas with their daughters under the words “AMERICA’S FIRST FAMILY”—that likewise seem designed to reassure their wearers that, yes, Obama’s victory really happened and, yes, his Presidency is really going to happen, too. It’s as if people haven’t wanted to let go of their amazement.
At the moment, hard-core Obamaphiles are clicking on video clips from “Check, Please!,” a Chicago public-television show that, each week, features three different local citizens sitting around a table with the host and talking about their favorite restaurants. The clips are from an early episode, taped in August of 2001, in which one local, a skinny state senator from Hyde Park, praises the comfort cuisine of the Dixie Kitchen, a neighborhood favorite. “I’m not looking for some fancy presentation or extraordinarily subtle flavors,” Barack Obama explains. “What I’m looking for is food that tastes good for a good price.” The episode will be broadcast for the first time a few days before the Inauguration; it wasn’t aired at the time, the Chicago Tribune reports, because Obama “was too good—too thoughtful, too articulate, not enough of an amateur.” For the Obama-besotted, the message is clear: This guy can do anything. He even reviews restaurants.
It has been widely said that never has so much been expected of an incoming President, but that’s only half right. The public clearly expects quick action, but the outlook for the near future is so grim that few expect quick results. Obama himself has been stressing the urgency of the first and the need for patience with regard to the second. Speaking on the economy last Thursday at George Mason University, he called for “dramatic action as soon as possible” to deal with “a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime, a crisis that has only deepened over the last few weeks.” Resolving that crisis, he added, “will take time—perhaps many years.” What the public does anticipate is not miracles but competence, and its confidence in Obama’s abilities has grown. In the most recent survey—a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released on December 24th—eighty-two per cent of those questioned said they approved of Obama’s performance during the transition. Of course, the esteem in which Presidents-elect are held always increases as the rancor of the campaign begins to fade, and feelings of good will are always plentiful at Christmastime. Still, Obama’s ratings are unusually high—fifteen points higher than either of his two predecessors’ at the corresponding moment in their transitions, and arguably higher than anyone’s since the modern era of polling began. “Obama walks in with nearly twice the support on the economy that President-elect Clinton had in January, 1993, and he beats Ronald Reagan as well,” Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director, said.



Obama’s transition has unspooled in much the same way his campaign did: smoothly, calmly, and on time. His choices for Cabinet and White House staff positions have been impressive overall, some of them—that of Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for example—inspired. With his appointments, Obama has demonstrated, among other things, self-confidence (he picked his most formidable rival, Senator Hillary Clinton, to be Secretary of State), a determination to unify his own party (ditto), a willingness to recruit from the other one (he is keeping Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense), and a healthy regard for the prerogatives and sensitivities of Congress (his choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, the former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, will also head a White House office on health-care reform). If his selections for the top legal, intelligence, science, and environmental jobs are any guide, he is serious about ending the American government’s sickening embrace of torture, its hostility to science, its subservience to polluters, and its suicide-bomber approach to global warming. As the day of the transfer of power comes closer, Obama has run into some choppy weather—most recently, crosswinds over the size and composition of an economic-stimulus package—but the effect on his popularity has been minimal.
The President-elect’s performance can’t fully explain the public’s welcoming view of him. Part of it, surely, reflects an eagerness to be rid of the incumbent. A gangly Illinois politician whom “the base” would today label a RINo—a Republican in Name Only—once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many “some” is: twenty-seven per cent. That’s the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job. The wonder is that this number is still in the double digits, given his comprehensively disastrous record. During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation’s economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined. What role the Bush Administration’s downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America’s influence, prestige, power, and moral standing.
The televised “legacy interviews” that Bush has granted have been notable for the interviewee’s shruggings-off of responsibility for what he has wrought, abroad and at home. He’s sorry about the inartfulness of “dead or alive” and “bring ’em on” and “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” but not about the war or its conduct. And in a discussion of the economic catastrophe he is about to bequeath to his successor, there is this exchange, with ABC’s Charles Gibson:GIBSOn: Do you feel in any way responsible for what’s happening? BUSh: You know, I’ve been the President during this period of time. But I think when the history of this period is written people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over, you know, a decade or so before I arrived as President, during I arrived as President. I’m sorry it’s happening, of course. Obviously, I don’t like the idea of people losing jobs or being worried about their 401(k)s.
A nice epitaph for “compassionate conservatism”—feckless to the end. And the end, at long last, is nigh. ♦