Failure of the Avignon Presidency

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

05 May 12

ll the smart people in the room have declared this Saturday to be the official, no-kidding, honest-to-god Opening Day of the president's re-election campaign. He will speak in Virginia and in Ohio. (The new jobs report undoubtedly has at least partly harshed the mellow of the day.) Still, the president will tell us that things are looking up, that we should all stay the course, and that electing the Romneybot 2.0 will send us back to the policies that set the country to reeling in the first place. (He likely will not say that it's "Morning In America" again, if only because the president and I have a firm agreement that he will not go out of his way to make me throw up.) There will be some more talk of the killing of Osama bin Laden, surely, and probably no little vainglory about our strategic partnership with the Afghanistan that exists only in the minds of the president and his advisors. He will point out that he inherited a mess, and that's he's done god's own work cleaning it up. He will point out that the job would have been easier had the Republican party in Congress not given itself over to obstructionists and vandals, most of whom have the essential civic conscience of a 12-year old with a can of spray paint. The president will not necessarily be lying about any of this.

He also will be too late.

The time to talk honestly and ferociously about the abject failure of the Avignon Presidency was in 2009. The time to demonstrate that failure by investigating the incredible panoply of crimes and blunders that were committed by the previous administration on almost every possible issue was shortly after he took office, when he still had at least theoretically congressional majorities and, in any case, could have, by executive order, released documents detailing at least some of what went on. The time to talk about the sheer sociopathic disregard for political norms illustrated by the new Republican majority elected to the House in 2010 was in 2009, when that disregard was on display at rallies, and in the disruption of town hall meetings, and when the manic energy that has forced the Republican party to abandon reason was at its highest levels. The time to talk - nay, holler - about the disinclination of the opposition to do the business of the people was every damn time they refused to do it. The time to do all of this effectively, alas, has passed.

There was too much conciliation, too much presumed good faith, a continuation of the haughty disdain for what raw, bloody partisan politics can achieve that we saw in the last campaign. There was too much reaching out, too much pre-emptive compromise, too much thumb-sucking about the "shellacking" in 2010, and not enough of grasping the American people by the shoulders and shaking them, saying, "Do you see what you've done? Allen Fking West?" There has been a lot of argument over the past three years about the limitation of the "bully pulpit" given the nature of the way things work in our government, and most of it is valid. But there is an educational component to the presidency, too, and part of that component is to remind the people that extended tantrums are not self-government, that electing the unqualified and the half-bright simply because they say the things that you also hear on your radio for 12 hours a day is not a recipe for moving the country forward. The partnership in government didn't "break down." The Republicans broke it and then walked away from the splinters. Period. There was nowhere near enough of that kind of talk over the past three years.

The people who argue that this was not effective are going to have to explain why the president seems to be doing an awful lot of this kind of talking now, when he's running for re-election. He seems finally to realize that the complete dementia of the modern Republican party, from its presidential primaries down to the lowest levels of city government, is an issue of national importance and a danger to the future of the Republic. He seems willing, if not entirely happy, to hang all of this crackpottery around the neck of Willard Romney, who had to pay fealty to it in order to get nominated, and who continues to have to pay fealty to it if he doesn't want half his party to stay home next November. This is more than a campaign issue. This is a serious threat to intelligent self-government and a deadly threat to the continuation of a viable political commonwealth, the latter of which is something you must defend, and something for which you have to fight, and not something that exists organically because "There are no red states. There are no blue states. There is only the United States of America."

Absent being granted all that they want, the opposition has no interest in being a partner in the governing of the country. Much of the country agrees with them. The president has made a complete dog's breakfast of the job of explaining to that part of the country that it's being played for a sucker by forces that would sell every one of them for spare parts to the Chinese for four more points on the Dow. He also made a complete dog's breakfast of educating them as to how those forces came to control the government in the first place. I still think the finest moment of his presidency came when he looked down at the justices of the Supreme Court and told them to their faces how they had screwed up democracy in the Citizens United case. That was a moment. That was more like it.

So, it begins this weekend, the president's last chance to educate the country as to what's happened to it over the past 30 years and who has primarily been responsible for it. Personally, at this moment, I think he's probably going to lose. I see the same kind of thing happening this year as I saw in 1980, when it all slid away from Carter in the last three weeks of the campaign. Out in the states, in Nebraska and in Indiana, the Republicans are doubling down on extremism, chucking out perfectly respectable conservative senatorial candidates in favor of tea Party blowhards. They're certainly not afraid of paying any price for it. And the economy is going sideways on him. But, mostly, I am not optimistic because I think he waited too long to take it all back, that speech to the convention in 2004. Does he see it yet? Does he see how wrong he really was?