Dr. Obama and Mr. Hyde?

I GUESS it's unavoidable, people being people. Still, it is amazing to watch the pundits reduce a political development of import to a simple, this-explains-everything, narrative. Even the best of pundits do it. Take the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen, for example. Benen is one sharp cookie. He's always worth reading ― even when he succumbs to the DC meme du jour. Thanks to a pair of feisty speeches, the chattering class says the president has morphed overnight from Spock to Worf, the Klingon warrior. Suddenly, Barack ("You talkin' to me?") Obama is bestriding Washington with a bat'leth longsword looking for GOP blood. It's "no more Mr. Nice President," as Benen puts it. Really, guys? Are we really going with this trope? Just to cite one example, does no one remember Obama's "feisty" speech on race back in the '08 campaign? It's the historic one in which he slapped the incendiary Rev. Jeremiah Wright upside the head and set America straight on the nature of "slavery, black anger, white resentment, and the imperative to move forward," as Liz Halloran wrote. There is no Mr. Hyde to Obama's Dr. Jekyll. And like the 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, to extend the B-movie metaphor a moment longer, Obama is simply showing a facet of his, one we've seen before.

Yet, as the new meme goes, Obama has now "thrown out the old playbook." He is showing a "willingness to fight" like a true FDR fire-breather. And he has at long last recognized the Republicans for what they really are: grunting Tolkienian Orcs, the crazed spawn of Mordor who live solely to slay Democratic presidents. And for the love of Mike, the pundits huff, what took the White House so long to realize the true nature of his nemeses anyway? We pundits, the cauldron of wisdom, knew it all along, Benen implies. Now that the scales have belatedly fallen from their eyes, "the White House appears more invested in presenting what should pass, and less concerned about what might pass. It's the difference between following and leading," Benen writes.

It's a nice, neat Narrative for Dummies. But it's wrong. Pundits speak as though Mr. Obama has been flapping helplessly in the wind since Inauguration Day. It's conveniently forgotten that Obama has been the most productive president in half a century as most historians have noted. (And you can be sure this would not be the case had he taken a more partisan, less responsible approach.) Pundits and left-wing detractors have never liked the Obama Style, a throwback to the Age of Enlightenment, a time when reason and compromise were the linchpins of politics. No, they prefer drunken, bare-knuckled brawls. In PunditWorld, partisan emoting is "leadership." This is not to say that Obama has operated error free. The summer debt-ceiling fight was an unmitigated political disaster, and there have other bone-headed mistakes. But given the sheer number of accomplishments, Obama's approach has largely worked. (Does anybody recall, for example, that the president makes history at 12:01 a.m. tonight when "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ends?)

That said, the GOP has unquestionably taken intransigence to scary new heights in recent months. But rather than throwing out the playbook, Coach Obama has simply reassessed the GOP defensive line and adjusted his plays accordingly. His new offensive formations call for less razzle-dazzle or subtlety and more in-your-face play. In other words, Obama has rightly decided that it's time to play political hardball. As Benen observed, Obama's new strategy is designed to produce one of two winning outcomes: The Republicans either play ball like rational adults or Obama will blame them for Washington's failures (and make that fact the centerpiece of his 2012 campaign). With Congress' popularity cratering at 12% (a historic low) and Republicans not doing much better, it shouldn't be a hard sell. Yes, to paraphrase Plato, political necessity is the mother of invention. But real leaders know when and how to patent the idea into action.