http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/24/healthcare-barack-obamaObama's long-distance healthcare race
As the journey to healthcare reform has shown, Barack Obama knows how to pace himself better than the politicians around him
Barack Obama has had to fight hard to see his healthcare reform bill clear Congress.
Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP
Pacing, in politics, as in sports, is oftentimes everything.
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The old adage that a year's a long time in politics is proving hopelessly inadequate to describe the country's and the media's relationship to Barack Obama. When Obama was elected, it was heralded as a breakthrough moment for America. Almost all commentators, across the political spectrum, reveled in at least part of the Obama-drama and the 44th president's approval ratings skyrocketed into the mid-seventies.
A few months later, the gloss fading, Obama began to be pilloried – he was a fallen messiah, a doomed false prophet. By the summer, the Tea Parties were mobilising and the tenor of the political debate was becoming nastier and more bitter by the minute. By the late autumn, Obama was being castigated by his own supporters as a sell-out, as someone who was sacrificing a once-in-a-century opportunity for transformative progressive political change on the altar of "bipartisanship". He was a stooge of Wall Street, a fake radical, a man more concerned with his image than with substantive governing accomplishments. By February, he was being compared to Carter; ineffective, pontificating, destined to be a one-term failure.
And Sunday night, suddenly, he was reborn. Peruse the liberal blogosphere this week and one sees a celebration of Obama-dom again, a pride in his accomplishments, a desire to be a part of a movement once more. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the charismatic, sure-footed, candidate Obama has arisen once more to shunt aside the technocrat who has been living in the White House these many months.Did Obama himself really go through all of these incarnations over the past year? Obviously not. Instead, he hued to a course that he laid down early in his presidency; worked hard to build coalitions; showed both courage and tenacity in not giving up on healthcare reform after the Massachusetts election debacle; and demonstrated confidence – that innate confidence that has guided Obama throughout his extraordinary political career – that in the end his political tactics, his methodology, would generate results.
In interviewing scores of people around Obama for my book,
I came to think that what made Obama peculiarly fascinating was not so much his idealism but that the veneer of idealism provided camouflage for an extremely effective, wily, player of the game of politics. While in some ways he is intensely idealistic – and clearly many of his supporters during the election campaign were desperate to believe he was all idealism and no Machiavelli – he has never been a purist for purism's sake. He knows how and when to compromise, and he knows how and when to draw lines in the sand. And, as the long, slow, march toward Sunday's healthcare reform vote shows, above all he knows how to pace himself better than the other politicians around him.
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