Obama’s New Semester

The political year is sort of like the school year, only longer and more depressing. Both begin–after a summer recess–in September. Barack Obama will begin his new semester tonight, with his jobs speech. This is a curious moment for the President and last Sunday, the New York Times took a look at the two sides of the Obama coin, style and substance, with pieces by the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait and Maureen Dowd.

Both are right and wrong about the President. Chait is a humorless policy sort, with zero appreciation for the practice of politics. Dowd, as we know, is a devastating stylist whose interest in policy is, shall we say, something less than intermittent.  Chait defends the President against his left-liberal critics, which is shooting ducks in a toilet bowl. Dowd attacks the President for being a lump. Her last line is a brilliant stiletto:

Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for.

My natural bias is similar to Chait’s, but with an appreciation for fine political maneuvering even when it represents lousy policy. But it’s interesting that Chait spends most of his energy–or the dyspepsia that often passes for energy at TNR–making hash of the left, rather than making the argument that Obama has really accomplished a lot. In fact,

Ideologues in Extremis

One of my guilty pleasures during this year has been to check out the neoconservatives over at the Commentary blog as they attempt to…explain…what’s…happening. Like, why Jews–who should really just, uh, get it about who this guy really is–seem to favor Obama at about the same rate as they favored other Democrats in the past. Or why Joe The Plumber has really struck a chord. Or why I am a terrible person. (Answer: because I called them out on their conflated and wrong-headed misapprehension of Israel’s and America’s best interests.)

Anyway, the last time I indulged my perverse pastime–before our servers crashed–I found a truly heinous piece of false dudgeon concerning…me. It was a response to a posting I made here last week, about the friendship of John McCain and my friend David Ifshin, a former anti-Vietnam radical.  The thing was written by a person named Jason Moaz, who made the argument that I had established a moral equivalence between my beloved, mourned and very much missed friend David–and William Ayres, whom I have loathed from a distance for 40 years and who, by any true standard of justice, should have spent serious jail time for his acts.

This…genius Moaz argued–brilliantly (I mean it took an awful lot of analytical power to see this)–that there was no moral equivalence between David and Ayers since David had apologized for the antiwar speech he gave in North Vietnam and Ayres hadn’t apologized for the bombs he had set. Also–again, an observation blinding in its lucidity–it was noted that giving a speech isn’t as serious as setting a bomb. 

Of course, this kinda missed the point: my post really was about the character of John McCain. I was remembering my friend, but mourning the loss of the John McCain who was large enough to forgive and love David. I was lamenting the current, miniscule McCain, a man who would take a passing–and deeply irrelevant–acquaintanceship between Barack Obama and Ayers, and try to make it a central issue in this absolutely crucial campaign, with the accompanying canard from the Embarracuda that Obama had “palled around” with terrorists. I was thinking, though I didn’t write this, about how David would have had a tough time balancing his regard for McCain against his loathing of the gutter politics–the robo calls, the questioning of Obama’s patriotism, the intimations of sympathy for terrorism–that McCain has practiced this year. 

The idea that this…Moaz would think that I’d ever compare my late friend, for whom I said kaddish and sat shiva, to William Ayers is an example of the myopic arrogance and slovenly thinking that marks the neoconservative tendency. What an embarrassment they are, and this…Moaz is.

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