Written by Robert S. Becker   

How telling our liveliest, most enduring public debate obscures endless war or economic misery, debt ceilings, size of government, even Obamacare. Forget about climate calamities, pandemics or food shortages. The raucous national discord, curious after his half a decade at center stage, comes down to Obama himself: who is he, what does he believe in, if anything except reacting to crises, and will his cult of personality offset countless lost chances?

For rightwing propaganda, a deteriorating Obama is bad news: how can a weak leader loom as towering evil, the epitome of all that is wrong with America? What redemption honors the right against a dictator who barely dictates, his administration adrift and his party coattails wearing thinner and thinner? Can a faltering lame duck qualify as an intimidating, demagogue pummeling Palin’s “real America,” the Illegitimate One sabotaging American exceptionalism?

The leftwing critique is not any friendlier, but far more evidence based: when Obama isn’t being Bush III, his real-world compromises alienate the liberal base that elected him, too often favoring millions of dollars over millions of voters. Not only has Obama failed to developed the legislative clout needed for hard times, worse still his steady rightwing tilt that normalizes reactionary politics, undermining the spirit and future of liberalism.

No doubt the right will update its fictions, but they must surpass Minority leader McConnell’s laughable slurs. By what logic does a distracted president orchestrate a “culture of intimidation” in which it’s “long apparent” his “speech police” ruthlessly reward friends and punish enemies. Droning on, McConnell invokes a phony “we” who all “saw the president’s reelection team using the politics of intimidation, with old-school “enemies lists” and explicit attacks on groups and other private citizens.” Is anything less credible than rightwing masters of underhanded intimidation whining about being victimized by far less odious tactics?

Paling around with leftists

Regressing to what failed five years ago, McConnell recasts Obama as devious leftwing outsider with an enemies list, the reworked version of “paling around with terrorists.” For here comes McConnell channeling Palin absurdities:

These tactics are straight out of the left-wing playbook: Expose your opponents to public view, release the liberal thugs and hope the public pressure or unwanted attention scares them from supporting causes you oppose.

Note the subtext driving the charade: Obama the all-powerful tyrant calling every tune, micromanaging the IRS and press violations, ruthlessly leveraging the federal juggernaut against his “old-school” (like Stalinist?) “enemies list.” Wait a minute! Dick Nixon holds the monopoly on demonizing enemies.

Ear to the wingnut whistle, Charles Krauthammer likewise assumes this omnipotent leader controls some backwater IRA office by osmosis:

When some bureaucrat is looking for cues from above, it matters when the president of the United States denounces the Supreme Court decision that allowed the proliferation of 501(c)(4)s and specifically calls the resulting ‘special interest groups’ running ads to help Republicans ‘not just a threat to Democrats — that’s a threat to our democracy.’

Then Krauthammer’s full-fledged FOX paranoia bangs away:

For years the administration has conducted a concerted campaign to demonize Fox News (disclosure: for which I am a commentator), delegitimizing it as a news organization, even urging its ostracism. Then (surprise!) its own Justice Department takes the unprecedented step of naming a Fox reporteras a co-conspirator in a leak case — when no reporter has ever been prosecuted for merely soliciting information — in order to invade his and Fox’s private and journalistic communications.

Ditto, the crazed Peggy Noonan, challenged to justify how the IRS scandal is “worse than Watergate,” manufactures invisible powers for the scheming pres “giving a dog whistle to people who could launch this thing.” Like old-style dictators forcing underlings to do their bidding, Obama simply had to blast opponents during the 2012 campaign plus the Citizens United decision. Absolute, unchecked tyranny alone caused Tea Party harassment thanks to intrepid decoding by the IRS of direct orders – this from the right flooded with nefarious code words.

Surprise! The same controlling meme pours out from FOX’s Kim Strassel: of course, an all-powerful Oz rules every corner of the government by mental telepathy. Obama “didn’t need to pick up the phone:”

All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he’d like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.”

How did everyone else miss the obvious? And then, Strassel’s jaw-dropping invention about a president in fact as little in charge of Washington bureaucracy (or Bush appointments) as his own blue dog Democrats: “The IRS is easy to demonize, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It got its heading from a president, and his party, who did in fact send it orders—openly, for the world to see.” But only if you have x-ray vision and your party really knows how to organize a culture of intimidating nastiness. Obama never had a chance in this competition.

The Master of All, or Nothing

How long will open, blaring contradiction last? Especially since this “all-powerful dictator” fails more often than he succeeds, on budgeting, debt ceilings, the sequester, even measures his own party pushes? Since 2010, Obama resembles the 90 lb. weakling getting sand kicked in his face. If Obama is an intimidating, self-aggrandizing tyrant, I’d hate to see a real despot draped in the flag of fascism.

For the more reality-based left, here’s a weak president under the gun, outgunned in the Senate and out-muscled by rightwing PR framing on gun control, immigration, and anti-terrorism options. Here’s a commander-in-chief who can’t close Gitmo, and liberals hardly ascribe limitless power to a shrunken president who’s abandoned them, alongside his core principles and promises. The Obama legacy and any leverage to affect the future are at low ebbs. No self-respecting tyrant leaves without at least anointing his replacement.

For most progressives, here’s a disheartening president whose tragic flaw is to normalize Bushthink, especially on economic policies (budget obsessions, halfway jobs measures, zero Wall Street indictments) and on endless militarism, as home and abroad. Furthermore, what would now motivate a lame duck facing midterm losses to reject the entrenched, moneyed constituency he still commands?

Okay, there’s a third option, but only from Obama apologists like E. J. Dionne who damn with faint praise: pity the poor “anti-ideological leader in an ideological age, a middle-of-the-road liberal skeptical of the demands placed on a movement leader, a politician often disdainful of the tasks that politics asks him to perform.” In fact, Obama sold himself as the reform “movement leader” and got elected by challenging bad Bush ideology. So why not finish the task, lay out better alternatives, and take risks – not turn away to avoid getting your hands dirty?

Perhaps failure was inevitable when a president, bragging about his “devout non-ideology,” failed to learn how to get things done as a Washington executive. Almost no one I read considers Obama to be in charge of his own destiny, with three long years to go. And a president buffeted by forces he cannot change, or effectively battle, falls flat, in line with low-achievers like Jimmy Carter.

If the rightwing pulls off this miracle, somehow commandeering history that makes Obama a formidable, negative force of nature – corrected by noble, rightwing opposition – then two quips from George Santayana are relevant. First, history is “a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.” And second, “history is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”