There’s the preview, then the movie. There’s the courtship, then the marriage. There’s the political campaign that excites the imagination, that awakens all sorts of expectations, that makes the voter halfway suppose all that’s wrong can be righted by this candidate, and then there’s the actual job being done.
This much can always be said – the campaign and holding the office are not the same. Some believers will feel betrayed no matter what paths are chosen, and then come all the other inevitabilities, such as chance intervening with noble purpose or the limitations of human intellect. And I hereby make a prediction: President Barack Obama’s 80 percent approval rating will not hold up.
It won’t be because he lacks extraordinary gifts or has bad intentions, but because the modern office of president is immensely complicated even in the best of times and these are far from the best of times, because tough decisions are absolutely necessary, and because making those decisions is an entirely different process from making campaign promises when responsibility is not yours yet.
Already, some on the left are worried that he is leaning somewhat to the right, as in including tax cuts for – shudder, shudder – businesses as part of his stimulus package, and some Democrats in Congress are feeling antsy.
What’s this business of reaching out to Republicans, anyway, as if bipartisanship might be important at this moment? And has this guy forgotten that Congress has its prerogatives? Congressional members have all kinds of goodies they want in the stimulus package, and it doesn’t matter much to them that there is nothing the least bit economically stimulating about them.
How are the unions in the industrial states going to feel if President Obama goes along with free trade policies he denigrated in the campaign, but how’s the recession going to be cured if he doesn’t?
Over at NASA, the far-out, alarmist scientist James Hansen is saying global warming will destroy the world in four years if Obama doesn’t put serious restrictions on carbon emissions, but you can say goodbye to recovery if he listens to this side of the climate change argument instead of to those who say more cogently that catastrophe is hardly looming just around the corner.
But it’s not just that any decision is bound to alienate some. It’s also the case that you are frequently trying to figure out the lesser of two evils and that there’s always guesswork about consequences.
Closing down detention operations at Guantanamo, for instance, is mostly a symbolic gesture that still leaves the issue of how to handle people who may want nothing more than to join forces with others to destroy your civilization.
The great conundrum in the war against Islamic extremism is that it is a war – you have been pulled into a moral miasma – but that if you do not engage forcefully you could pay a price of dreadful loss, of cities being blown up or biological weapons wiping out many thousands.
If you do engage forcefully, you may become an object of great, indignant anger. It is easy to imagine how Afghanistan could become Obama’s war much as Vietnam went from being Lyndon Johnson’s war to Richard Nixon’s war.
All of us must wish President Obama well, for this is the same as wishing ourselves well, our country well – and we should understand, too, that while public support counts, it is not approval ratings that matter nearly so much as trying to do what is right and wise and effective. Obama was a great campaigner. We will now see if he is an able leader.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
