How is Obama doing? (1)

Whenever I contemplate this question, I’m tempted to recall what Chou En-lai said when asked what he thought of the French Revolution: “It’s too soon to tell.” After all, Obama is only one year into a four-year term and hopefully will have eight years in the White House. But there’s no doubt that he’s under pressure and this Tuesday the Democrats could lose the Senate seat held by Edward Kennedy until his death which would take away the power of the party in the upper house to force through legislation like the healthcare bill.
A friend with whom I recently discussed Obama’s performance has drawn my attention to this column which Andrew Sullivan wrote for the “Sunday Times” over Christmas. The piece concludes:

“It’s worth remembering that America is a vast and cumbersome machine, designed to resist deep change. That this one man has moved the country a few key, structural degrees in one year, and that the direction is as clear and as strategic as that first embraced by Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (in the opposite direction) is under-appreciated. But the shift is real and more dramatic than current events might indicate. I wouldn’t bet on its evanescence quite yet.”

This certainly reflects my views.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 12:33 pm and is filed under American current affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Comments

  • Nick
    January 17th, 2010 at 8:12 pm

    I’m not impressed by Cass Sunstein, Obama’s choice to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. See Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal. Only two years ago, Sunstein co-authored a paper which called for covert “cognitive infiltration” of groups that spread “false conspiracy theories” about the US government. In an orwellian (or should it be kafkaesque?) passage, the authors state:

    Recall that extremist networks and groups, including the groups that purvey conspiracy theories, typically suffer from a kind of crippled epistemology. Hearing only conspiratorial accounts of government behavior, their members become ever more prone to believe and generate such accounts. Informational and reputational cascades, group polarization, and selection effects suggest that the generation of ever-more-extreme views within these groups can be dampened or reversed by the introduction of cognitive diversity. We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity. Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.

    Yeah, trying to covertly influence conspiracy theorists is bound to dissuade them from conspiracy theories!
    It’s worth reading Sunstein and Vermeule’s paper — it’s less than 30 pages long and clearly written — to get an idea of the scope of their thinking. They really do think there are “imaginable conditions” under which the US government might ban and/or tax conspiracy theorizing. Let’s hope they have good imaginations!

  • Chris Graham
    January 17th, 2010 at 9:44 pm

    The loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat may not mean the death of healthcare. The senate has passed a bill, providing the same (to the letter) bill is passed in the house and signed by Obama, it’ll become law.

 




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