Obama's Lonely Road

--JJ

Everybody seems to be either in the process of headed on the way up or on the way down, as if we are all on a giant teeter-totter with only the occasional guy standing on the fulcrum standing steady.

Or maybe that's just my perception.

It can be a struggle to maintain perspective on a world that is filled with swirling images, shifting feelings, and confusing signals.

One can perhaps be forgiven for becoming disoriented.

***

Since perception has long since eclipsed reality in American public life, it is increasingly obvious that President Barack Obama's major problem is not what he is trying to do, or even how he is going about it, but how he has lost control of how his story is being told.

That would seem to be a media problem, but media only provides the pipe for the story-tellers and it is they who are the problem -- from all sides, from all political positions.

It's been said by some that America doesn't deserve Obama; he's too good for us. A brilliant Japanese blogger, Akihiko Reizei, noted recently that Obama is trying to be reasonable in an unreasonable political climate; a centrist where there is no center.

The rightists, for their part, are not even trying to appear reasonable. They are running against a left that barely exists outside their imagination, but nobody much cares about reality in the U.S., so the mere fantasy of a left is all that is needed to sustain these tea-party activists.

Obama's only path to success in this kind of environment, according to the blogger, would be to embrace the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which of course has been only lukewarm to his initiatives -- precisely because he is a centrist, not a leftist.

The blogger pointed out that if he at least builds the support from his party's liberal base, he will have some political perch from which to operate. As it is, he is increasingly isolated and unable to maneuver.

It seems unlikely that Obama will migrate left, at least this early in his first term, but once the Democrats suffer serious losses in the midterm elections, which I expect to happen this fall, he will face little choice.

The reason is that moderate Republicans, like John McCain, are coming under withering attacks by their party's radical fringe. These conservative extremists will gain many seats in Congress, if current trends continue, further polarizing the country's already toxic public discourse.

Obama may choose to maintain his centrist posture, as the only adult in the political fray, but if so his will be one of the loneliest Presidencies in history, and he will accomplish little when it comes to policy reforms.

As a matter of pragmatism, he will need to move left to avoid the reality noted by Reizei: "the middle road is a lonely road."

That simply is a road too few modern Americans are willing to share with him.

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