Liberal pundit Jonathan Chait has a new book coming out in a few months titled Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Transformed America. The Scrapbook doesn’t necessarily intend to plug the book, but if he’s reading this, you’re welcome. Anyway, galleys are now being sent out to reviewers, and we couldn’t help but notice that the very first person Jonathan Chait thanks in the acknowledgments of his book is . . . Jonathan Chait:
We will give Chait the benefit of the doubt that, as the title promises, he makes his case for Obama fully elsewhere in the book. But dare we say that this paragraph explains a lot about liberalism in the Obama years? Liberals decided early on that he was their champion, and no amount of failure would stop them from spending his entire presidency confirming their own biases.
However, despite maintaining a degree of personal popularity, Obama brought electoral ruin to any number of his colleagues in the Democratic party. Congressional Democrats and the Clinton campaign aren’t even pretending that his signature domestic policy achievement, Obamacare, isn’t on its deathbed. His major foreign policy achievement was, for reasons known only to him, a one-sided “deal” with Iran that required lying to Congress and the American people about plans to rapidly hasten the arrival of a nuclear-armed theocracy in Tehran, while funding the mullahs’ terrorist activity with taxpayer dollars.
Meanwhile, the economy has seen the worst post-recession recovery since the end of World War II, and in the twilight of the Obama era, we’re hardpressed to think of a time in the modern era when the country has been more politically divided and angry. What would qualify then as an Obama success? Cash for clunkers? Reinterpreting Title IX to pretend it demands an end to same-sex bathrooms and locker rooms? Unilaterally entering into climate change agreements? Forgive us if we don’t see the need to call on the muse of Gutzon Borglum and start dynamiting a new space on Mount Rushmore.
Indeed, the rush to canonize Obama while he’s still in office doesn’t tell us much about the success of his presidency. But as Chait has made painfully clear, it does tell us a lot about liberal America’s desperate need for self-satisfaction.
