I’ve been a fan of Megan McArdle’s since way back in ’02, when we blogged using nothing more complicated than an abacus, smoke signals, and a well-trained chimp. (Don’t ask exactly how that worked — my memory has dimmed through the years.) So it’s not without some small amount of disappointment that I read this from her:
Having defended Obama’s candidacy largely on his economic team, I’m having serious buyer’s remorse. Geithner, who is rapidly starting to look like the weakest link, is rattling around by himself in Treasury. Meanwhile, the administration is clearly prioritized a stimulus package that will not work without fixing the banks over, um, fixing the banking system. Unlike most fiscal conservatives, I’m not mad at him for trying to increase the size of the government; that’s, after all, what he got elected promising to do. But he also promised to be non-partisan and accountable, and the size and composition stimulus package looks like just one more attempt to ram through his ideological agenda without much scrutiny, with the heaviest focus on programs that will be especially hard to cut.
Honestly, Megan — there’s any shock at all that this is the behavior you’re getting out of a politician? When McCain campaigned as a social conservative and a fiscal UFO, at least I kept the courage of my convictions and voted for Bob Barr.
I have a nasty case of Loser’s Remorse, but everybody suffers that from time to time. Buyer’s Remorse, however, I would hope comes with a wet, hacking Cough of Shame.
The saddest part is that even those of us who did vote for McCain could have told her to expect something like this (okay, maybe not quite this bad this soon) — and I’m sure many did.
This is just more evidence that our President is what we sci-fi geeks would call a “shape-shifter”. People seem to see whatever they want to see when they see him. He seems to feed off of our brain waves taking our most pleasant memories and projecting them on to his own image. To one person in the audience, he’s Che Guevara, to the next person in the same audience, he’s Ronald Reagan.
One day he talks about abusive corporations who must be reigned in and government is the only solution, the next its how corporations and small business make the majority of jobs and must be given support. One day its that ‘presidential signing statements’ are bad, the next day he signs one. One day, the economy is the worst ever, the next day its really not as bad as we thought.
Its a good time for someone to pull a Shatner.
Not that my respect counts for much, but I’ve lost a lot of it for McCardle, Althouse and a few others. The details may be surprising, but the broad outlines were entirely predictable. Megan is surprised only because she closed her eyes and told herself pretty lies about the new man from Hope.
She pretended the clothes had an emperor in them because she lacked the courage to admit the truth.
Frank Martin, you give too much credit to Obama and not enough to McArdle’s willful blindness. Plenty of us took a giant step back and ID’d him as a shape-shifter while others just . . . followed the shapes, dazed.
It’s only 53 days in. Plenty of time for this drama to develop. The next step is for McArdle, Brooks, Clive Crook, Buckley (he WILL come around), Marty Peretz, et. al. to ask themselves why they fell for it and how it is that others saw through the messiah all along.
It’s soret of like when gals (and guys) fall for the bad boy/girl, who turns out to be an abuser. Meanwhile their friends were warning them all along.
Its just the start of the Presidents administration and in many ways he is enjoying an unprecedented “wind at his back’. But let is all try to imagine how fun this will be when the wind, at first stops and then becomes a headwind. All that tacking back and forth from position to position can really take all the fun out of things. When this happens out on the water, suddenly your dreams of “sailing around the world solo” end, and all you want to do is make it to port in one piece and never set foot on a boat again.
Most people don’t understand that the office of the executive branch is designed on purpose to not work very well. People tend to think of it as a sort of Democratic king, or a more democratic version of ‘prime minister’ but in point of fact, the person that holds that office very often finds himself as being the “scapegoat-in-chief”. Some men accept this fact, others slow roast in their own juices and go slowing inexorably insane and bitter. Johnson? Carter? Nixon? Sure. I too have seen this movie before and I don’t like how it ends.
This is why all presidents come into office looking like a bright shiny penny and leave 4 to 8 years later, looking like a bag of freshly hammered dog crap.
If the Presidents party loses congress in 2 years or 4 years, be prepared for a very different sort of personality to show up behind the podium during the ‘state of the nation’ speech.
Did you use Chimp and Obama in the same story although unrelated? Shouldn’t the thought police be at your place by now?
To be candid, I’m both impressed and disappointed. I mean really, what is the surprise here. The dude is a friggin’ socialist. Well, duh. The fact that dear Meg is surprised by that disappoints. On the bright side, at least she’s honest enough to acknowledge her lack of insight.
The real question, is why should we respect her views in the future if they’re as poorly conceived as her endorsement was?
When you don’t vote for the only guy that could have beaten Obama, don’t you have to share some of the blame for the consequences?
In both the elections Megan has blogged through, she’s been an undecided voter until fairly late, with a lot of disdain for both candidates. In both cases, she’s thought it through fairly thoroughly, figured out which one she expected to be less bad, and voted for them. It’s not like she was even an enthusiastic Kool-Aid drinker, for either Bush or Obama. She had more faith in Austan Goolsbee than most would consider sensible, but given the times, there were a lot worse things one could judge a would-be President on than economic advisors.
Also, direct defence of Megan aside, how can a Barr voter really criticize someone for taking a well-considered position that voting McCain was the greater of two evils?
Alsadius –
Apparently, I wasn’t clear enough.
I didn’t criticize Megan’s vote. Lord knows there were no good choices in 2008. As I’ve joked (not so jokingly, really) many time before, the only thing I’ll never forgive the Democrats for is making me vote for George W. Bush. Twice.
What I find fault with is the credulity of Megan’s reasons for voting for Obama. By her own admission, she really thought he was going to be a “different kind” of politician.
Imagine if, in Casablanca, Captain Renault really *had* been “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on. You’d laugh and point and say, “what a fool!”
And on the basis of his economic team — even though Obama revealed himself to be a Johnson-style redistributionist during the primary campaign. His promise, which apparently Megan either dismissed or refused to believe — was to soak the rich, even if it meant a decrease in tax revenue. In the interest of “fairness,” candidate Obama told us. What part of “I, Barack Obama, am going to tax and spend you bastard back into the Stone Age” did Megan not understand?
Megan, one of the brightest people I’ve ever met in real life, made two genuinely very stupid calls.
There were no good choices in 2008, but there were good reasons for picking your bad choice (including choosing to sit out the election). Megan missed, and by a mile.
Thing is, Obama took so many contradictory positions that he was obviously lying about something. She believed that he was lying about the things she didn’t want to hear, and had some semi-reasonable reasons for doing so. Turns out she was a victim of her own wishful thinking, as were a whole pile of other libertarians I know, but it was never so implausible that I’ll write them off as fools. Suckers, perhaps, but not fools.
Alsadius –
Well, no.
Obama was invited several times to revise his statement about taxes, and he demurred each time. It’s one position (that and his equally ill-conceived debate promise to meet with Iran “unconditionally”) where anyone paying the smallest amount of attention knew where he stood.
And you seem to think that stating Obama was “obviously lying about something” serves to defend Megan’s silly conviction that Obama was a different type of politician. In fact, taking all kinds of opposing positions — again, obvious to anyone with ears — proves that Obama was nothing but typical. Hell, he wasn’t even especially clever about it.
So, yes, I think Megan was indeed very foolish. Although how that differs from being “victim of wishful thinking” or a “sucker,” I have no idea.
I basically agree with you, but in qualified defense of someone like McCardle– or perhaps more to the point, Althouse (who I read more consistently in the run-up to the election):
Between the shapeshifter who invites wishful projection, & the willfully blind to something patently before their eyes, there’s a more “nuanced” (*cough*) delusion that ensnared a number of moderates, centrists, conservatives, libertarians: the idea that Obama was a *pragmatist*.
His contradictions were taken, not as lying per se, but a matter of rhetorical flexibility given different audiences (how Aristotelian)– doing what he needed to do, pragmatically, to win the election (e.g. to shore up his left-wing base, as well as appeal to the moderate center). Cf. what Palin highlighted in her speech, about saying one thing in SF (“bitter clingers”) & another in Ohio (or wherever). Instead of seeing these inconsistencies as a sign of rank dishonesty, they optimistically took this to indicate a lack of ideological rigidity (something like the “nuance” mocked in Kerry– except in that case it augured weakness & paralysis, and in this case appeared a quality that would facilitate smart, flexible, undogmatic decision-making, in a complicated world).
Those inclined to vote for Obama, even *craving* to vote for Obama, for other reasons– e.g. (1) the understandable desire to partake in a grand, noble, romantic, epochal historical Event (electing our first black president), dreading the thought of appearing on the “wrong side of history” to future generations, and (2) elitist distaste/ revulsion for Palin, exacerbated by cultural peer-pressure (NB I didn’t really see this in Althouse)– convinced themselves that the *real* Obama, deep down in his soul, was the centrist, un-ideological, pragmatic figure they’d dreamed up. (And the “pragmatism” they visualized was not the petty cynical Machiavellian opportunism we see in the Rahm-run White House today, but the noble Dewey-ian kind… empirical/ experimental / functional/ instrumentalist, yet all for the Good of our country, as these various Obama voters saw it).
It was fascinating, if ultimately dispiriting, to see this play out on Althouse’s blog (who like McCardle, was for a long time “undecided”): on the one hand, finding reassurance in every utterance by O which jibed with her own political values/ideas, construing it as yet an another piece of evidence for O’s centrism; on the other hand, interpreting the many utterances which suggested (i.e. patently, blatantly, obviously expressed) ideas & values inimical to hers (often directly contradicting the former) as the rhetorical flexibility, the necessary discursive leeway, of the Rortyesque pragmatist. In other words, as long as he’s (benignly) sorta fooling the left-wing base (or more charitably, using their language, their tropes, without being dogmatically committed to their ideas), while subtly disclosing his “real” intentions (a prudence & moderation readable, of course, “by us”), it’s all right. And it’s an all-too-human fallacy to think: someone (who appears) so very intelligent and reasonable *must* think much like me, at least when it comes to the gravest & weightiest of matters. Like, oh, the well-being of our nation.
And then, eerily, this came to appear (to those of us rubbing our eyes in disbelief at what was happening) as a kind of folie à plusieurs: Brooks, Buckley, Noonan, Frum, Powell, Buffett, Althouse, McCardle, quite a few Reason libertarians (etc. etc. etc.) were so convinced of Obama’s pragmatic centrism, so mutually (re)assuring, forming a blanket consensus among the “bien-pensant” center-right, that it is *we* who looked like the deluded, paranoid ones… falling for the alarmism of simple-minded bigots like Palin or Joe the Plumber.
In Althouse’s defense, her appraisal of Obama & final decision to endorse him did not have the quality of smug assurance, supreme confidence, some of those others had. It always appeared (and was frankly acknowledged to be) a kind of leap, a risky bet. No less blind, but perhaps a little more self-aware. E.g. she admitted once (risking ridicule) that in making up her mind, she couldn’t help but worry about the effect on African-Americans (“what they would think”) if Obama lost. And she was always a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued observer of Obama’s contradictions, ambiguities, hypocrisy. Who/what O “really” was remained a matter for conjecture, an uncertainty. Nevertheless: the centrist (or slightly left-of-center) pragmatism she intuited, through all those layers, at his core– against all the evidence– felt safer to her than the all-over-the-map erratic-ness she saw in McCain.
“In other words, as long as he’s (benignly) sorta fooling the left-wing base…”
Everybody who knows the man’s history, as well as his past and present associations, knows it was never the Left he was looking to fool. That penchant for wishful thinking — read: gullibility (is that a word? gullibleness? I dunno) is just another reason why so-called moderates never won a war — and never will.
The non-threatening nature of Obama’s personality which allowed him to be elected in the first place, and which allowed him to be many things to many people, make him an unlikely candidate to lock horns with his party’s core supporters, who are on the left side of the political spectrum.
If he’s going to be rolled ideologically, Obama’s going to be rolled by the people who he has to have to maintain support within the Democratic Party. Any buyer’s remorse here comes from people who thought Obmaa would use his approval rating to go against his base (while on the other side, Barack’s ongoing petulance over criticism on his performance stems from the idea that his poll numbers would force people on the conservative side to either shut up or get with the program).