Obama and the Ship of State

In Obama's efforts to steer the ship of state towards the successful realization of his legislative agenda, he seems caught for now in the gap between Scylla and Charybdis. In case it's been awhile since you've cracked Homer's Odyssey... in it, Odysseus has to sail past to twin monsters, Scylla, who attacks ships overtly, hoping to cause them to drift into Charybdis, a monster with a mouth so big it functions as a whirlpool destroying everything that gets too close.  Odysseus ultimately decides to hug close to Scylla’s cliff because “it is better by far to lose six men and keep your ship than lose your entire crew”.  

We've seen this Scylla/Charybdis dynamic over and over again since Obama came into office. Scylla here is the Right Wing Attack Machine, which will seek to score points off of Obama however it can, whether it's distorting the contents of a phone call with the NEA, lying about "death panels" and "socialized medicine" or intentionally stirring up dangerous and deep-seeded racial resentments within white voters to try to win at the ballot box. Charybdis, meanwhile, is a totally distracting whirlpool of irrelevant argument, where the substance of Obama's policies mattes not one bit, and 24 hour news networks, horserace-prone reporters, advocacy groups and political staff members get caught in and endless he-said-she-said-but-wait-he-said where the ultimate end result is that nothing gets done, and no one understands or has any reasonable way of understanding the actual policies before our Republic and what their impact will be.  

Either way, Obama's agenda could get completely derailed and-- as we saw in August-- the derailment of his agenda (Even though that agenda is quite popular and he has a mandate to enact it) will cause both the agenda and him to lose serious ground in popularity. At the same time, Obama is the elected leader of the nation and the Democratic Party.  The Democrats hold control over all the major levers of legislative and executive power.  Health Care Reform's passage, for example, is all but guaranteed. It might not contain a public option. It might be too incrementalist in its approach, but it will pass. 

Given all of this, why  not feed Van Jones or Yosi Sargent to Scylla? Why not feed Scylla the reassurance that its attacks aren't racist when they blatantly are?  If passing a legislative agenda is your top priority by a long shot, this strategy makes sense. After all, it is better to lose six men and keep your ship than to lose everything. But are there other priorities the President should also be considering beyond his legislative agenda? Is the sanity of our national discourse his responsibility? As the first black President, does he have a responsibility to not deny the racism of the Tea Party movement and to explain to this nation the racist roots of the anti-government movement? Or is it just that we have grown so used to George Bush's mode of never backing down from a fight, and fighting everyone all the time over everything that we want a guy on our side to do the same thing? 

I have no idea how to navigate these waters myself. it seems detrimental to the overall mental (or even in a secular humanist way spiritual) health of the nation to avoid the issue of race entirely. It seems like the Obama administration is frequently willing to trade far more than seems necessary when you are dealing with a partner who isn't playing fair and just wants to defeat you at all costs.  At the same time, the "No Drama Obama" strategy has been remarkably effective. It won him the Presidency. It won him the stimulus package. I may win him the Health Care debate. But at what point do you overlearn from your successes?

Comments

[J.]

Don't forget the gravitional suck of an undereducated, easily scared and often lied to electorate. Many good ideas are wrecked on those shoals (to keep up the nautical metaphors).

I feel like the sanity of the discourse is so far out of his hands, it's almost foolhardy for him to even try. Our media is so compromised by the push for ratings and the pull of corporate interests, they're just going to say whatever they want anyway. He's got to be sensitive to that, but also not give in to it. It's a fine line to tread. I seriously don't envy that part of being president.