Tell me a bedtime story, Daddy - Ctd

"Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings," said Richard II in Shakespeare's famous play. In last Sunday's NY Times, Professor Drew Westen told us his sad story.

Bestowed with a whopping 3,000 words to tell his tale, Westen decried, nay wailed over, Obama's purported loss of passion in the cause of liberalism. Dr. Westen, a psychologist, went to far as to lie the patient on the couch, stroke his Freudian beard and declare that Obama had "an aversion to conflict." Trotting out Franklin D. Roosevelt to further buttress his brief, Westen argued that Obama is a whimpering sell-out in comparison. FDR was never afraid to speak truth to power, did so in his first inaugural speech, and, thereafter, relentlessly brawled bare-knuckled with the monied interests on behave of the downtrodden. Yes, it was a narrative tour de force. But the yarn Westen spun is the stuff of fairy tales. Or as Jon Chait put it: "It's a parody of liberal fantasizing."

So I've chosen to rebut and explain Westen in the form of a simple bedtime story (albeit a dark one). It seems fitting as long as we're traversing Westen's Never-Never Land anyway:

Once upon a time, a brave knight in shining armor named Barrack Obama desired to become King. At first, the (Liberal) People were skeptical. Was he really one of us? But then Obama began to speak. He seemed to be The Three Kings of Legend (FDR, JFK and LBJ) combined. Yes, the (Liberal) People swooned: He was "The One." And in their rapture, they heard (or rather, imagined) his vow to slay the evil Conservatives with withering words alone. Obama the Great would revive the Old Liberal Dream, and usher in a New Camelot. And he'd do so in a mere fortnight. And so, as foretold by prophecy, Obama became King -- thanks to his alliances with clans much bigger than the Liberals. But soon, the (Liberal) People sensed trouble in the New Paradise. A fortnight passed with no sign of Camelot or the New New Deal. King Obama worked tirelessly with all around his Round Table. But the (Liberal) People saw only Collaboration, and could think only Vichy. Worst, King Obama simply ignored them, and their shouts of righteous indignation. And so, with the rot of Denmark thick in their nostrils, the (Liberal) People declared: King Obama was an Epic Fail. "Our revels now are ended," they cried like Prospero. For the (Liberal) People subsisted on emotion and "fireside chats" alone. But the King could only offer reason and compromise. And so they turned on King Obama. Let's stone him, the (Liberal) People cried in a pique of rage. And so the rocks flew. Yet King Obama remained strangely untouched. Stranger still, only those who hurled the stones were themselves pelted, or so the legend goes. It is said that the Liberal clan re-joined the King in the end. For not doing so might have meant a new reign, that of Queen Bachmann the Terrible. THE END.

Proving again that seeing "what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," as Orwell famously observed, Westin misunderstands the nature of politics and shockingly mischaracterizes both FDR and Obama.

Chait sums it up the rationalist rebuttal well:

"Before Westen ... Aaron Sorkin [of West Wing fame] has indulged the fantasy of a Democratic president who would simply advocate for unvarnished liberalism (defend the rights of flag burners, confiscate all the guns) and sweep along the public with the force of his conviction. ... Westen's op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen's telling, every known impediment to legislative progress -- special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion -- are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama's failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon."

Perhaps the most laughable aspect of Westen's op-ed is his attempt to employ FDR as a kind of improvised explosive device (IED) against Obama. UC-Berkeley political scientist Eric Schickler, who is currently writing a book about FDR, makes this intriguing observation:

"During FDR’s first three years in office, his version of the New Deal faced more serious challenges from populists and insurgents on the left than from Republicans. Far from the bold, unyielding advocate fighting off conservative resistance, the FDR of the first New Deal was navigating between competing ideological camps, attempting to build a broad, all-class alliance. Indeed, FDR was always surrounded by teams of advisers with widely divergent views of the government’s role and he kept them—and the public—guessing about which side he was really on."

Sound familar? Substitute "BHO" for "FDR" and "Obamacare" for "New Deal" and you've pretty much describing politics today. In other words, Westen's IED blows up in his face. By the way, Schickler take on Westen is impressive. Read it here. Anyway, I think this closes the book on the good professor for now.