Paul Starobin: Don't Expect Obama to be Superman
[Paul Starobin, a staff correspondent for National Journal and a contributing editor to the Atlantic, is the author of "Five Roads to the Future: Power in the Next Global Age."]
...Americans like to read politics and history as a tale of the Great Man -- they are eager subscribers to the Hercules myth of how the world works. Obama in particular plays to this seductive but fanciful notion. In electing him president in 2008, Americans seemed to think that "yes, we can" would become, almost overnight, "and so we have done," with a charmed figure -- all the more so for his astonishingly rapid rise to the top -- replacing a spent one, the stoop-shouldered George W. Bush.
Liberal partisans were quick to offer parallels between Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- the most successful and beloved president of the 20th century, with an unapologetic faith in activist government. FDR, though, was not a magician either. It took an economy on war footing to end the Great Depression -- and it took Stalin's Red Army to mete out a lethal blow to the Nazis, on the icy grounds of Stalingrad.
As for conservatives prone to be skeptical of Obama, they might be reminded that the world was not exactly plastic to the touch of Ronald Reagan, their model of a heroic leader. Reagan's efforts to broker a peace in Lebanon -- occupied by Palestinian guerrillas and the Israeli army, among other combatants -- ended in disaster, with the suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983 eventually leading to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country (which remains fractious and prone to violence, 27 years later)....
Read entire article at WaPo
...Americans like to read politics and history as a tale of the Great Man -- they are eager subscribers to the Hercules myth of how the world works. Obama in particular plays to this seductive but fanciful notion. In electing him president in 2008, Americans seemed to think that "yes, we can" would become, almost overnight, "and so we have done," with a charmed figure -- all the more so for his astonishingly rapid rise to the top -- replacing a spent one, the stoop-shouldered George W. Bush.
Liberal partisans were quick to offer parallels between Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- the most successful and beloved president of the 20th century, with an unapologetic faith in activist government. FDR, though, was not a magician either. It took an economy on war footing to end the Great Depression -- and it took Stalin's Red Army to mete out a lethal blow to the Nazis, on the icy grounds of Stalingrad.
As for conservatives prone to be skeptical of Obama, they might be reminded that the world was not exactly plastic to the touch of Ronald Reagan, their model of a heroic leader. Reagan's efforts to broker a peace in Lebanon -- occupied by Palestinian guerrillas and the Israeli army, among other combatants -- ended in disaster, with the suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983 eventually leading to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country (which remains fractious and prone to violence, 27 years later)....