The One-Off

Busier than I'd been, and grateful of it, the times being what they are. But blogging has been bogging.

Still, I have been trawling the Tubes with scarcely-abated vigor (what it says about me that this is how I unwind is a topic worth revisiting!). Of particular fascination to me has been the precipitous decline of what Election 2008 was judged by some to have constituted a Progressive Moment in the USA. Obama's ascension, in conjunction with overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, were seized as an auspicious Mandate for a Leftward lurch of historic proportions. But, as some have noted, the narrowness of the election, coupled with the abiding Center-Right orientation of this society were lighthouses past which Obama's Ship of Statism has blithely steamed. And love on the rocks is hard on the back.

The above-linked Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics hit another one out of the park in his spot-on deconstruction of Obama's style of governance...or rather its lack. He most effectively challenges the emerging meme (mainly, and not un-ironically from the Left) that the US has become ungovernable. In short, it's not. It's just that Obama has done a positively dismal job of governing. It is a devastating piece, so abundantly well worth a read, I'll refrain from even a block-quote.

This evening, I also came across this characteristically eloquent and scathing piece from Fouad Ajami. Where Cost ably describes the political mechanics whereby the Obama Administration has failed the Nation, Ajami goes after the mythology of the thing. It is a tale of Icarus (that is, of waxing and waning).

OK, Jack Bauer then Morpheus for me now. I am terribly excited for the changes which stand to occur on the American political front, and at last daring to hope that this unnerving experiment in the Republic's ability to stave off hubristic juggernauts may not turn out so badly after all...