Charles P. Pierce's cynical defense of Obama

In Esquire, Charles P. Pierce puts forth a piece of pro-Obama literature that gives The Nation's editors a run for their professional-left earnings.

The preamble to "The Cynic and President Obama" catapults the propaganda before the epic even sets sail:

In an age of unprecedented obstructionism, there has been more of Machiavelli in the man than the author thought possible. But toughness isn't his failing; it's that he thinks we are a better people than we are.

Whether it was an editor's or Pierce's own distillation, this subhead crystallizes the piece's core premises:

• Failings in Barack Obama's first term should be more or less discounted, because Republicans are obstructing progress that—we are to presume—Obama seeks
• The cynical scribe was surprised to see a ruthless side to Obama
• The real story, though, is that Obama is an idealist, so noble-minded that he doesn't realize how unworthy of him the rest of America is.

The vehicle that trudges us through several million words on all this is the conceit that Pierce is a grizzled skeptic, immune to the giddy effects of hopium. He is The Cynic, cited in the title and throughout.

Pierce self-quotes generous portions of the 2008 piece where he initiated that conceit, rhetorically begging then-candidate Obama to be a source of hope in a jaded, fading world. "Convince me, convince me," he urged. A piece where he waxes Bidenesque, calling Obama "smooth and clean."

Along with swatches of "The Cynic and Senator Obama," Pierce devotes several quill-penned, sepia-stained paragraphs to kicking up some dust about southern racism and forefathers and whatnot. To paraphrase Rick Pitino, Gore Vidal is not walking through that door.

Pierce muses that perhaps Obama's (purported) idealism is mellowing:

He must be aware that the country is not the way he sees it, because its people are not the way he sees them. He has had his triumphs. The man whose crimes set the river of history over its banks in 2001 is dead, shot and killed by American soldiers at his command. The American involvement in the war in Iraq is over. The American war in Afghanistan is winding down.

In a theme that will grow excruciatingly familiar, Pierce suggests it's not Obama who's overrated and blameworthy for the flaws of his tenure, it's us! We are so not the ones we were waiting for.

President Obama had Osama bin Laden summarily executed (along the way, feeding a polio epidemic). He tried and failed to extend the Iraq War past the deadline Bush negotiated. And he's presided over four more years in Afghanistan (some of it with near triple the Bush-era force, and with a doubling of US fatalities), and he may drag it out for two more years... and beyond.

In the old days, liberals responded to such actions with shouts of "war pig" and the like. Now, we shout "triumphs!"

He pulled the nation away from the brink of a second Great Depression, and he managed to get passed a national health-care law, the first one ever passed after almost a century of trying.

Here's the popular claim that Obama's actions staved off Great Depression II. Democratic alt-reality is 20/20.

And yet in all of these things, including the achievements that had at their heart essential ideas borrowed from what once was a responsible opposition party, he was opposed by something very close to abject hysteria

After so much slack prose, this is tightly packed stuff:

• Sure, Obama's "triumphs" are substantially rightwing in nature
• But it's the good kind of rightwing, from the days when the GOP was "responsible." (Who knew the Republicans were such good stewards in their response to HillaryCare?)
• The opposition to Obama is rabid (read: racist).

Above (and later on, as well), the ACA is cited as historic.

It is not "socialism" to enact an insurance-friendly health-care-reform program, but enough people believed that it was to drive the poll ratings of that program into the ground.

Pierce finds Republican objections to the ACA a sign of mass hysteria. But what of Democrats' celebration of this GOP-designed plan, Obama's implementation of which was forged in corruption and the censoring of proven solutions?

As it happens, buried far down the piece, Pierce allows objections of this nature, while still characterizing the bill as "a considerable historical achievement."

The cynic wonders if he yet realizes the bottomless thirst the country has for snake oil.

There are few times the phrase, "Oh, that's rich!" is called for, but this is one. The politician known as "The One" and "The Lightworker" might be unschooled about snake oil.

He is a rational man. Even his closest friends describe him that way. A rational man can look at an irrational time and its irrational people and he can study them, and he can even, perhaps, understand them. But can he truly fight them without challenging that irrationality at its core? And can he govern without simultaneously wringing that irrationality out of the political process, directing the flow of history into a more controlled channel again?

Obama's friends consider him rational! Isn't that something!?

And he really really really wants to fight against what irrational, bad people want. We know this because...? Well, we just know it.

But how can he perform his good works if he can't expunge from politics the elements that Pierce considers crazy?

This is a most extraordinary get-out-of-accountability-free card.

Obama's failings aren't due to his agenda nor his execution of same. There's been a sea change from a history that used to operate in "a more controlled channel," so his hands are tied. It's not like he's The Most Powerful Man in the World or a respected communicator or anything.

Something else doesn't add up. If Obama is both rational and desiring of real change from Bushian policy, why has he hung his hat on left-disempowering narratives that exculpate proven-disastrous rightwing policy, Beltway-baked fables about both-sides-do-it gridlock and foodfights?

Oh, yeah. He's rational and good... but so guileless he doesn't know that conservatives are crushing the lives of Americans and America's victims abroad. If against all reason we accept that, why would we want such a blinkered fool as our president?

At long last, we reach the next phase of this opus. Well, following a few more paragraphs on the GOP being racist, obstructionist loonies, and Obama being perhaps too idealistic to confront this.

* * *

The second act of 2012: A Shallow-End Odyssey begins:

The cynic didn't count on his being this ruthless. That came as something of a surprise.

Pierce wrings his hands over Obama's drone program, kill list, war on whistleblowers, and other manifestations of the idealist's claim to and exercise of tyrannical power.

He's quite unflinching in describing the transgressions, and he makes no pretense that Obama has any right to such actions. But Pierce does grant little graces here and there.

Obama, he says, "made a tough call" re: bin Laden. His "deep reserve" about the Kill List makes him not a sociopath. The root of such actions is that "Congress grew too politically timid to stand up for itself." If Obama's ruthlessness was disappointing to those who bought his "transcendence" shtick, his harsh moves have the pragmatic gloss of "realpolitik" and a mastery of the politics of the possible."

And those obstructionist Congressional Republicans strike again, keeping him from closing Gitmo. No matter that Obama's plan was merely to relocate it to Illinois.

Having detailed many of Obama's ruthless (and illegal) actions, where is Pierce's call for him to be held to account? Hint: nowhere.

In closing out the section on ruthlessness, Pierce says of Obama's ACA shenanigans:

It was the act of a career politician who was more than willing to appear to have deceived people during his campaign — or, at the very least, to have encouraged people to deceive themselves. There was more of Machiavelli in the man than the cynic had anticipated there would be. It's really not about what he does, the cynic believes. It's about what we tolerate.

On the one hand, "it's not on him, it's on us" is a well-worn dodge (in this article, especially) that Obama apologists would never stand for under a Bush, McCain, or Romney.

On the other, Pierce is quite right: "It's about what we tolerate." Will we stand against these things, or will we vote for more of them? The suspense is killing us. Well, not us, so whatever.

* * *

By way of a very fancy pivot, the article's concluding part leaves concerns about Obama's ruthlessness behind.

After a jump-back to his 2008 item—a self-quote about Obama's longstanding look-forward-not-back policy re: elites' crimes—Pierce continues:

The cynic believes the president has been nowhere near ruthless enough. The cynic doesn't believe that the president truly has come anywhere close to surveying the actual wreckage or counting the real cost. The cynic doesn't believe that he has held up a true mirror to the country and demanded that it look at itself. There are still not enough people in handcuffs yet.

This is an ingenious diversion. Moments ago, Obama's ruthlessness was the stuff of cold-blooded killing and civil-liberties shredding. Now, with a deft turn of the keyboard, Obama's that pitiable Democratic archetype: the well-meaning man with a shortage of spine.

Put away your worries about Obama's imperial excesses. Turns out, he's not cruel enough!

Still, it's a kind of not-cruel-enough we should be thankful for. Because the called-for cruelty would involve forcing us to hold a mirror to our ugliness. The robber barons and civil-liberties abusers the merciful Obama lets skate are us. Somehow.

One might have, instead, concluded that Obama is yet another willing partner in elites' crimes, that he's protecting the Masters of the Universe from populist pitchforks because that's what he believes in and/or is rewarded to do.

But that would entail out-cynicaling The Cynic. Not only would that be wrong, and quite likely impossible, it would defy the article's raison d'être. Charles P. Pierce is cynical so you don't have to be... and ideally won't.

He has granted immunity to the country by granting immunity to many of the people who did that country the most damage, whether they were the criminals within the previous administration, who tortured without conscience or spied without warrants, or whether they were the criminals within the financial sector, who rigged the game, cheated millions of ordinary people out of their money, and then escaped back into the institutions that had been Too Big to Fail and that, remarkably, came out of the scandal even bigger than they were before.

It's not those plundering plutocrats and brutal warders who are to blame, it's the whole country. You, me, and everybody else.

Obama's not helping feed us to moneyed interests, he's "granting immunity" to us. Like a kindly doctor immunizing us to cancer by letting it metastasize, unchallenged.

Do we deserve such a good man? Seems unlikely.

Even so, the cynic has the temerity to second-guess Obama's (well, yours and mine, really) inaction against torture and financial fraud:

The cynic believes this all to be a capital mistake. One of our "core values" has to be justice. There is no way to apply justice "going forward." Reforms that make the crimes harder to commit do not mean that the crimes already committed should go unpunished. The country and its people, the cynic believes, can do two things at once. It can vow to reform itself while looking with an honest eye at where it allowed itself to go so wrong that criminals now forever unpunished could run amok within its institutions.

Once again, it's "the country and its people" that need to reform themselves, not a kleptocracy to be reined in by, say, the Department of Justice.

This is bizarro-world anarchism, holding the people responsible for their governance... while holding an imperial executive above reproach.

Sometimes, the cynic thinks to himself, he's more of a romantic about the American people than the president is.

If your eyes aren't getting misty here, you're just not human.

But, the cynic realizes, it's not about what the president does anyway. It's about what we allow.

The Teflon flows like water.

Pierce gears up for the big, soggy finish, returning to the frame story and its trenchant references to Madison and rain and stuff.

The cynic tells us, poetically, that he never fell for "the music" in Obama's fabled rhetoric.

He's witnessed scads of Obama's most notable speeches (probably in person, because he's a big-deal media guy). Mostly, he just remembered that during one:

he got heckled by some peckerwood from South Carolina.

Note to reader: South Carolina is in the American South. Where the racists are.

There, the cynic thought when he saw that, there's your red states and blue states for you. Even now, even after three years of unprecedented obstruction and unconscionable invective, he still reaches people at depths the cynic cannot fathom. The cynic did not ever hear the music, so he did not ever understand the man.

But during the speech in Charlotte, the president tossed off a single line that had a resonance and a purpose beyond all the poetry that the cynic could never hear. This, the cynic thought, this is ground on which to stand, this is a position worth taking and worth fighting for.

The cynic is having his skepticism and gorging on the hype, too.

His failing to hear the music maybe wasn't clear thinking after all. It kept him from understanding what the faithful have seen all along.

At long last, he catches a glimpse of Obama's grandeur, the "resonance and purpose... the cynic could never hear." This is the scene where the big galoot belatedly grunts "I love you," before the credits roll.

The president referred, in almost an offhand manner, to "... the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government."

Pierce proceeds to build a mansion atop this thin reed of civics-book prose.

All right, the cynic thought, this is something about which serious people can argue. The cynic believes in the hard, frustrating, and necessary work of self-government. He believes that it entails much of what the president believes it entails, but the cynic also believes that it entails bringing the guilty to justice, that it entails a refusal to move forward until the crimes of the past are punished, that it entails a people strong enough to look squarely at what they let happen on their watch and to see the people who did it brought to the bar of history and still be strong enough not to accept absolution without penance.

Yet again, the blank check Obama grants to the malfeasant mighty is our foible. It happened on our watch, not Bush's and Obama's. We can't handle seeing torturers and well-heeled thieves brought to justice. Why, us, why?

The only reasons any vaguely sensible person wouldn't laugh out loud at this preposterous, diversionary fabrication are the twin miracles of Democratic partisanship and logorrhea.

And while we're ingesting this "it's-our-fault" malarkey, we're also to assume that smarmy tropes from a convention speech are "what the president believes."

The cynic believes that the hard, frustrating, but necessary work of self-government includes demanding transparency in wartime, especially in wartime. What part of that hard, frustrating, and necessary work includes blind death from the sky? This, the cynic thought, is what he should argue with the president about. This is a battle worthy of being engaged. The cynic believes that the hard, frustrating, and necessary work of self-government cannot be done well without an honest appraisal of what happens when it is done badly, or not at all.

Presumably, this sternly worded argument about, oh, "blind death from the sky," takes place after we reelect the president. Charles, you were saying about accountability...?

Perhaps all our best presidents are the ambiguous ones, the ones hardest to figure out, because they force us to take more of the obligations of citizenship on ourselves, and not to look for some Great Man to lead us.

Another stellar bit of footwork:

• Side-stepping into the implication that Obama is among "our best presidents"
• Crediting Obama with and for some deep inscrutability
• For the infinitieth time, passing the buck from the Oval Office to we-the-people
• And doing all this while striking a pose of cynicism about "Great Man" adulation.

Hard not to grant that Pierce is an expert on dodges:

Too often, the president had been criticized for not being what other people made him out to be four years ago — the conservatives who fell for him were particularly lachrymose in this regard, the liberals more angry — and the cynic thought that was a dodge. He has no obligation to be what you wanted him to be, what you wished he would be. No person owes anyone else that.

Obama, evidently, has no obligations whatsoever. There are just a few things the cynic might wish he did more or less of. And those things ultimately reflect on and stem from you and me, anyway, don't they?

Quick, cue the snare drum, fife, and barf bucket.

The rain fell more steadily as the cynic sat there on Mr. Madison's back porch. Another guy, thought the cynic, who did his best with what was available, who hated "faction" so much that he designed a system against its poison, but who also helped found the longest surviving political party in the history of the world, the party that had just renominated Barack Obama to be president of the United States. Of all the possible presidents in 2012, Barack Obama was the best of them. But that wasn't the point anymore. The country needed more than a president. The country always had needed more than a president.

Let's see what the skeptic dragged in:

• Post-DNC convention reverie, the cynic on James Madison's veranda, pondering the national condition while looking out into the rain. Snark daren't gild this lily.
• Dr. Pangloss is in the house (well, on Madison's porch). Obama "did his best with what was available," and he's the best of all possible present-day presidents. Evidence daren't attempt to support this.
• And, as always, ask not what's wrong with the Obama presidency. Ask what's wrong with the president's country.

Ironically, the article's web-page header precedes the title with "Obama Presidency Assessed."

While acknowledging some of the president's sins, Pierce's "assessment" uses his supposed cynicism to persuade you to place the burden of Obama's failings nowhere but on yourself and your country and on racist, obstructionist Republicans.

But, to be fair, Piece has made an assessment. He welcomes Obama into the pantheon of "best presidents" and pronounces him the unequivocal best politically viable person among the nation's 300 million souls.

The prolix express finally chugs into the station, repeating the "convince me" refrain from Pierce's original Obama "cynic" piece.

And the cynic thought about all the things that had happened in the four years since he'd written about this guy the last time, and he thought that maybe he'd gotten the whole thing wrong back in 2008. He had asked the right questions, but he'd asked them in the wrong direction. And he looked off through the rain and the long green lawns and, past them, to the muddled, strange nation beyond.

Convince me, he asked of his country.

Convince me. Convince me. Convince me.

The four-years-wiser cynic has this message for you: don't ask if Obama has failed you, ask if you've failed him.


(h/t Lambert at Corrente)