One of the mini-classics of the ’90s was the James Brooks movie As Good as It Gets. It’s about a slightly deranged writer played by Jack Nicholson and the title comes from a scene in which Nicholson’s character walks out of his shrink’s office into the waiting room and mischievously asks the other patients, “What if this is as good as it gets?”
I thought about that a lot last week as I was bouncing around the Caribbean on The Weekly Standard’s annual cruise: It was December and I was floating in the warm, turquoise waters of Grand Turk, with my kids digging in the fine white sand on the beach and our luxurious ship sitting anchored a few hundreds yards in the distance. And what I thought was: This is as good as it gets. It can’t possibly get better.
That was the pervading sense of our cruisers, too, I think. In general, they seemed to regard this moment—Republican president, Republican Senate, Republican House, soon to be a conservative SCOTUS—as an unexpected gift, a stolen season.
A few of these folks were early Trump supporters; most of them were reluctant Trump supporters. But they all saw a vision of the next two years that went something like this:
Two smart, conservative Supreme Court justices are confirmed. Obamacare is repealed. Major tax reform is passed. Thousands of federal regulations—that hinder the economy and were never enacted legislatively—are rolled back. Illegal immigration is curtailed through enforcement of current laws. (Not a single Trump supporter I spoke with believed he will build The Wall, regardless of who’s paying for it.)
Now maybe that’s how it really will play out. I obviously don’t own a crystal ball. But it did strike me that this moment—the pause before the governing begins—is usually the high point for an administration. This is as good as it gets. Because after January 20 there are votes and hearings; the other side gets to fight back; events intercede. Whatever you think of Barack Obama, he has been tremendously successful in the application political power: And it took him the better part of two years to accomplish just two major initiatives: his stimulus and Obamacare.
