What If Obama's Out of His Mind?

Seriously. And don't act as if you haven't wondered. Because if we ask nothing else about our presidents, we should ask if they're madmen.

What if he's crazy? Do we trust him, even though he's not talking amiably to the empty air? Are we comfortable having him around, even though he's the only one not playing with his toes in the punch bowl? Do we just ignore him, over there in the corner of the room, talking about the fact that there's not enough food, and that the sink in the kitchen is backing up, and that the fire in the laundry room is getting out of control, and that there's a hole in the floorboards where the stove just fell through while all the rest of us are worrying about the giant carnivorous bat-creatures — the ones only we can see — that are waiting to come swooping in through the windows if we dare open them to let a little fresh air into the place? If the village is full of idiots, what do you call the guy who has to sit on the wall and get the dung flung in his direction?

Listen to him. He's talking in what seems to be a glossolalic deluge of issues. One plan a week, each thrown out there while we're still digesting the previous one. He's moving too fast for us to keep up with him. He's talking a private language, to himself, like crazy people do, because he certainly can't be talking to us, his strange, atrophied people, our capacity for large projects and great achievement, let alone for the participation in enlightened self-government that such projects and achievements require, something safely kept reserved for HBO historical miniseries. The muscles have gone slack, the nerve endings gone dead. He's talking about phantoms, about ghosts, about things that aren't really there. He's speaking in tongues is what he's doing.

It took a county commissioner from Ohio to convince me. It is important to note here that county commissioners are of a lower political phylum than most other politicians. They do not walk entirely upright across the savanna, and their political thumbs are not necessarily opposable. As witness Mike Kilburn, a commissioner in Warren County in Ohio. In April, the county was supposed to receive $373,000 in federal stimulus money from President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan. This money was meant to go to the laudable purpose of buying buses and vans for the rural communities. The Warren County Board of Commissioners turned down the money, and Kilburn announced, with a curious kind of pride, "I'll let Warren County go broke before taking any of Obama's filthy money."

Until that moment, I didn't fully realize how deeply what Obama's been trying to do had penetrated the entire country, and how deeply it had sunk into the lizard brain that had controlled American society for the previous eight years. On January 20, Barack Obama became president of a deranged nation. He did so apparently taking no notice of the fact that a good portion of the country, a country that otherwise repeatedly voiced its support for him in poll after poll after poll, continued to be completely out of its mind. He was calm and reasoned, and he spoke in measured tones about the challenges he and the nation were facing. And then he seemed to go manic on us.

Early this year, he put together an economic team full of Clintonian retreads and fashioned an economic plan that somehow joined John Maynard Keynes and Charles Schwab, arguing for economic stimulus spending while simultaneously hiring some overfed foxes — Larry Summers? Again? Is there a hiring hall somewhere for these people where they all sit around and wait for administrations to change? — to watch a chicken coop that their own economic philosophies helped burn to the ground. He went to Europe and wowed the crowds. He scored the biggest victory won by an American president over pirates since Thomas Jefferson. He got his kids a dog.

One week in early April, he got up before the country and said that it was time for comprehensive reform of the immigration laws, an issue guaranteed to inflame the passions of a goodly number of his fellow citizens to no good effect. A week later, he made a pitch for high-speed rail transportation. He went to Europe to mend fences, and he went to Latin America and told them that it's time to build bridges again, even to Cuba. He'll be on to health-care reform any day now. There isn't a single major public issue of the past twenty years that he hasn't at least addressed, and he's acted on most of them. At the same time, he shifted his promise to reinstate the ban on assault weapons to the back burner, and he was noticeably dilatory on the subject of the torture that had been carried out under the administration prior to his. If it's possible to move judiciously and precipitously at the same time, Obama managed to find a way to do it.

And what happened? Well, he got a lot of what he asked for, but he did so in the same deranged country out onto which he gazed in the third week in January, so nobody was entirely sure what had been accomplished. It all went by too fast. He was asking for feats of long-term memory in a country with a nasty case of ADD. By the time he was talking about immigration and supertrains, the political culture was still trying to figure out what he was up to with his economic plan. The putative opposition, the Republican party, had gone out of what was left of its mind. On April 15, all around the country, there was an inchoate outburst of public disapproval. There were caricatures of him dressed as Hitler and as Lenin, which is a considerable, if utterly ahistorical, parlay. There was the spectacle of thousands of lower-middle-class people making the noise of hundreds and expressing outrage that Obama intended to raise the marginal tax rate on people making more than $250,000 a year to somewhere around where it was during Ronald Reagan's second term. It was a pathetically thin if noisy spasm of ill-conceived outrage. And then, at last, there was Commissioner Kilburn, acting as though he were being asked to accept a briefcase full of unmarked hundreds from Pablo Escobar instead of being asked to take some of his state's own federal tax dollars back in order to make sure his elderly constituents had an easier time getting to the Wal-Mart.

That's when it became clear what Obama had done. By acting so quickly on so many things, he had forced upon his political opposition a kind of instant obsolescence. He had arranged things so that the country could look at the contortions of the lizard brain in comparison with the frenzy of political activity, and those contortions looked tepid and ineffectual, something out of a different and slower time. Say what you will about the policy implications of seeming to do everything at once. Politically, it came onto his opponents like Stonewall Jackson's soldiers pouring out of the forest at Chancellorsville. The basic, important subtext to what so bothered Commissioner Kilburn and so convinced me was that, Jesus, this guy's liable to do anything. In a radically different context, Richard Nixon once called this the "madman" strategy.

Sorry, didn’t realize there was a page 2 to this article . . .

Think about it. Jack Kennedy told us we were going to the moon, but he gave us a decade to do it, which might as well be a century, the way we look at politics today. Bill Clinton came into office wanting to do everything, but he chose to try to do everything one thing at a time. His opponents realized that if they could jam him on the early stuff — health care, certainly, but before that, gays in the military — they could gum up his whole agenda until he began to trip over his own dick, figuratively and otherwise. They forced a small-scale presidency on a man desperately in love with big ideas until he said “The era of big government is over” in front of Congress because it was more dignified than saying “uncle.” If nothing else can be said of Barack Obama’s first days in office, it can be said that what Clinton said about big government was at best considerably premature. The sudden reemergence of big government left all the people who’d built their careers on what they perceived was its grave — and there are nearly as many Democrats about which this can be said as there are Republicans — scrambling to dust off arguments that they never thought they’d have to use again. (”Socialism!” hasn’t gotten this kind of workout since the death of Robert Taft.) They may never catch up with the sheer velocity of what they’re trying to stop. The received wisdom was that big government was clumsy and moved too slow. Obama has turned that wisdom on its head. Big government is now too fast and agile for the people who want it to die. They can’t get a clear shot at it anymore.

It is an accelerated age. Everything moves faster. We have grown accustomed to speed and, though we may rail against all those things that have been lost because they couldn’t keep up, we have accepted the acceleration that our technologies have brought to every aspect of our lives, including our politics and what we expect from them. Political dilemmas arise in the wink of a pixel. Crises erupt instantly and all at once together. Obama may be the first politician to grasp fully the implications of this, and he has used that realization to his consummate advantage. He’s fashioning political leadership to this accelerated age, making energy and forward movement something very close to an ideology in and of itself, the way Kennedy used the burgeoning technological promise of the Space Age to energize his New Frontier.

Of course, Obama’s doing so in a political context of accumulated inherited crises — a financial catastrophe, two wars of dubious prospect, a vandalized constitution, and a fundamental unease with the American identity that had its roots in the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the country’s panicked reaction to them and the exploitation of that reaction by the greedy and the amoral — the way that Franklin Roosevelt addressed the myriad issues arising from the Great Depression. He is trying everything in order to see what works. He has lashed New Deal politics to New Frontier “vigah” and thrown the whole thing into overdrive to meet the challenges of an accelerated age. In doing so, he is attempting to solve the crisis in American identity by dealing all at once with the more concrete crises that he’s inherited. In doing so, he is reestablishing the American identity as a people who can solve the problems of their own making.

And so far, the country has followed him; an AP poll in late spring showed that, for the first time in a long while, more Americans believed the country was headed in the right direction than otherwise. This has had the effect of squeezing the opposition down to its craziest essentials until it now looks like a sharp, clear diamond of pure insanity. That’s where Commissioner Kilburn comes in, but he’s not alone. The Republican governor of Texas talked seriously about secession, which worked out so well for the country the last time. A Republican congresswoman from Minnesota proposed a constitutional amendment to keep the dollar as the official U. S. currency in perpetuity, because she thought an international cabal was trying to replace it with the euro, or the franc, or perhaps live chickens. Who could say? Other Republican politicians declined to comment without getting a “Mother, may I?” from Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News found a ratings bonanza in a raving lunatic named Glenn Beck, who is what the Peter Finch character in Network would have been had the movie been written by fourteen gibbering marmosets. Not only is there no serious opposition left to what Obama is doing, there isn’t even any effective opposition to it, a curious distinction that a number of Republicans made their careers on during the Clinton years. Obama has not only outpaced the serious ideological objections to what he has done; he’s also neutered the ridiculous ones, which often can do far more damage.

Obama has outpaced it all, and he has brought much of the country with him, albeit groaning as its atrophied muscles of self-government are thrown all at once into a kind of sprint. It may not last. The country had been adrift for so long that it may not have the stamina to keep up with the dizzying agenda that is being put before it. It may well have forgotten how to debate three things at once, or how to keep four thoughts about five things in its head at the same time. But that is what it is being asked to do again — to live up to what had become the hollowest of its boasts during a period in which a president cut our taxes during wartime and asked us to face down our enemies by heading to the mall. It was leadership by lassitude and misdirection. For such an allegedly epochal time, events seemed to slow down, largely because so much was done behind closed doors. There was no perceptible movement because few people were allowed to see what was really going on. This past six months has been different. The pace of what Barack Obama has done — and the number of things he has tried to do — has forced a renewed sense of civic involvement on all of us, if only to simply keep up, if only so that we don’t sound ignorant at cocktail parties, or on unemployment lines.

So is Obama crazy? Good question.

Some people — they call themselves “birthers” — who believe that the president is Kenyan-born and so not eligible to be president (and also in unicorns) have made it their cause to mandate that future presidents establish their Americanness beyond the shadow of a doubt before being allowed to offer themselves as national candidates. But after the last eight years, it is the sanity of the president that we ought to be more inclined to care about. If there were no other baseline qualification for the job, it should be that one. Of lesser concern during times when presidents aspire to do small things, certainly, but as we find ourselves at present in the maelstrom of the Obama Revolution, we can only hope that the president is as sober as he appears to be. For he may have campaigned on hope, but he’s governed with implacable audacity.

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