In an attempt to dial down expectations for his administration, President-elect Barack Obama's supporters have dropped much of the "messiah" talk.No more talk of him being The One (Oprah), or a Jedi Knight (George Lucas), or a "Lightworker" (the San Francisco Chronicle), or a "quantum leap in American consciousness" (Deepak Chopra). Instead we have more humble and circumspect conversation about the man. Now he's merely Abraham Lincoln and FDR and Martin Luther King, combined.
It's a step down from divine redeemer, but you have to start somewhere. . . .
What I find fascinating, however, is not so much the Obama hagiography, but the burning desire for another FDR or Lincoln that underlies it. . . .
I think Lincoln was just about the greatest president in American history, but I sure don't want to need another Lincoln. Six hundred thousand Americans died at the hands of other Americans during Lincoln's presidency. Lincoln unified the country at gunpoint and curtailed civil liberties in a way that makes President Bush look like an ACLU zealot. The partisan success of the GOP in the aftermath of the war Obama thinks so highly of was forged in blood.
Likewise with FDR. Listening to liberals gush over a "new New Deal" and Obama's call for us to emulate the "Greatest Generation," you'd think they want another Great Depression and World War.
Indeed, liberals have long idolized the 1930s as a decade of great unity. It wasn't. The 1930s was a miserable decade of poverty, domestic unrest, labor strife, violations of civil liberties and widespread fear. If liberals really loved peace, prosperity and national cohesion, they'd remember the 1920s or 1950s more fondly. And yet they don't. Why? Because liberals didn't get to impose their schemes and dreams on the country in those decades. Behind all the talk of unity and bipartisanship and shared sacrifice lies an uglier ambition: power. The audacity of hope behind all this Lincoln-FDR-Obama blather is the dream of riding roughshod over the opposition, of having their way, of total victory.
The Chinese curse and cliche "may you live in interesting times" is on point. Liberals (and a few conservatives as well, alas) seem desperate to live in interesting times. Not me. You know what I hope? I hope Obama is another Coolidge or Eisenhower. But I'm not holding my breath.