After an illuminating and stimulating program last Sunday, Fareed Zakaria's GPS program this afternoon did a certain amount of regressing to the mean. As part of the "grade the president's first hundred days" frenzy, Zakaria had a panel of three "historians" on to produce a grade. The three were:
Jon Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek, editor of
a collection of essays on the civil rights movement, author of histories of both
the religious convictions of the founding fathers' religious views and the friendship between
FDR and Churchill, and recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson,
American Lion,
Walter Isaacson, former head of CNN and author of three biographies, of
Henry Kissinger,
Benjamin Franklin, and
Albert Einstein (as well as a fascinating history of the men who steered American foreign policy for much of the middle of the 20th century, called
The Wise Men), and
Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal columnist and speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, and author of
a memoir about being a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan,
an account of the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a
how-to book about making speeches as good as Ronald Reagan's,
a collection of her own newspaper columns,
a hagiography of Pope John Paul,
a hit job on Hillary Clinton, and
an appeal for a public discourse that is more "graceful", and less prone to hagiography or hit jobs.
Even for those not familiar with these three people, those lists of book subjects should give a broad hint at the relative qualifications of the panelists, and they lived up to expectations. Despite their skills as writers and legitimate claims to historical perspective, both Meacham and Isaacson gave measured, but somewhat uninspired evaluations of Obama's performance in several areas. Noonan punctuated those efforts with regular doses of fatuous disapproval that drew on completely bankrupt Republican tropes and made me wonder if Mike Pence wasn't available.
The process of arriving at these putative "grades" involved chewing on two particularly annoying media narratives we hear all the time lately, both of them derived entirely from the pages of an RNC talking point sheet.
The first is that the president is "doing too much", which is the concern troll version of Republican obstructionism, and asserts that the change Obama ran and won on and is now trying to produce is a tactical mistake, since "presidents can only do one big thing". It's certainly noteworthy that those who are the most "concerned" about the costs of this tactical mistake are those who disagree with those changes anyway, since that tends to make their concern a little hard to take seriously. The other thing that makes the concern hard to credit is that the president enjoys spectacularly high approval ratings and trust from the American public, which appears to be pretty happy to see him try to keep his campaign promises.
Finally, since the project these concern trolls are most interested in seeing President Obama focus all his attention on is fixing the financial system, the assertion amounts to a declaration by Republicans that they have made such a mess that it is the Democrats' only responsibility to clean up that mess, and that there is consequently no time and no mandate to fix the problems that created the mess in the first place. When asked what was the one big thing Obama shoud devote all his attention to, Noonan solemnly intoned, "the banks". None of the agenda items Obama ran on, and not even the economy at large, of course, since that would be socialism, and the only thing we are permitted to socialize is the cost that financial buccaneering imposes on the buccaneers!
There is an old saw that goes "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp." This is a case in which the alligators themselves are observing that since they are so difficult to deal with, there really isn't any energy left to drain that swamp, and it would be much better and much more politically astute for Obama to devote all his time to making sure they are all getting fed well enough to keep them from doing more damage.
The second talking point arose in discussion of how the Obama administration was dealing with the torture memos and the policies they attempted to legitimize. Noonan essentially repeated her by now notorious opinion that it's better not to know what has been done in our names, despite the fact that we and the rest of the world already did and do know. To his great credit, Meacham said this was ridiculous, and that the essence of democracy is for the public to know what is being done in its name, so it can decide if it approves of those actions.
Noonan then went on to repeat the substance of Karl Rove's claim that trying people for these crimes would make the US into a banana republic. Isaacson agreed, saying that it would condstitute "criminalizing policy differences". Nobody on the panel had the wit to recognize that these "policy differences" were to torture people, and torture has already been criminalized, in the same way that rape has been criminalized - we passed laws against them both. To prosecute people for breaking laws is what sets us apart from banana republics, not what makes us like them.
Meacham and Isaacson delivered unimpressive beltway conventional wisdom, and Noonan, once again, made a complete fool of herself. I truly don't have any idea why this woman still gets airtime, and I
wouldn't even if I were a conservative - she couldn't be a worse
representative of her own point of view.
After this disappointing foray into feverish 100 days analysis (which CNN is overplaying even more than the rest of the media), the program took a turn for the much better, with interviews of Niall Ferguson and Malcom Gladwell. Ferguson made an interesting, if rather gloomy, analysis of the current financial crisis (and perhaps the most damning grade for the new administration, even though that was not the focus of his interview), and Gladwell discussed the thesis of his new book, Outliers.
Ferguson is a thought-provoking historian and a skilled economic analyst (his tenth work of history is a finanvial histrory called The Ascent of Money), and Gladwell is an incisive student of social phenomena, and Outliers sounds as though it's as interesting as his first two books, Tipping Point and Blink, both of which were great reads.
So, even though it started by regressing to the mean, Zakaria's program departed from it again right away - I'm still a fan.
