Campaign Season in Earnest

All the smart people in the room have declared this Saturday to be the official, no-kidding, honest-to-god Opening Day of the president's re-election campaign. He will speak in Virginia and in Ohio. (The new jobs report undoubtedly has at least partly harshed the mellow of the day.) Still, the president will tell us that things are looking up, that we should all stay the course, and that electing the Romneybot 2.0 will send us back to the policies that set the country to reeling in the first place. (He likely will not say that it's "Morning In America" again, if only because the president and I have a firm agreement that he will not go out of his way to make me throw up.) There will be some more talk of the killing of Osama bin Laden, surely, and probably no little vainglory about our strategic partnership with the Afghanistan that exists only in the minds of the president and his advisors. He will point out that he inherited a mess, and that's he's done god's own work cleaning it up. He will point out that the job would have been easier had the Republican party in Congress not given itself over to obstructionists and vandals, most of whom have the essential civic conscience of a 12-year old with a can of spray paint. The president will not necessarily be lying about any of this.

He also will be too late.

The time to talk honestly and ferociously about the abject failure of the Avignon Presidency was in 2009. The time to demonstrate that failure by investigating the incredible panoply of crimes and blunders that were committed by the previous administration on almost every possible issue was shortly after he took office, when he still had at least theoretically congressional majorities and, in any case, could have, by executive order, released documents detailing at least some of what went on. [...] The time to talk — nay, holler — about the disinclination of the opposition to do the business of the people was every damn time they refused to do it.

  Charlie Pierce

Instead, he engaged time and time again in “compromise”. The only thing he compromised was his integrity, if he actually had any going into the race, which I grow more and more doubtful of with each passing day.

Absent being granted all that they want, the opposition has no interest in being a partner in the governing of the country. Much of the country agrees with them. The president has made a complete dog's breakfast of the job of explaining to that part of the country that it's being played for a sucker by forces that would sell every one of them for spare parts to the Chinese for four more points on the Dow. He also made a complete dog's breakfast of educating them as to how those forces came to control the government in the first place. I still think the finest moment of his presidency came when he looked down at the justices of the Supreme Court and told them to their faces how they had screwed up democracy in the Citizens United case. That was a moment. That was more like it.

So, it begins this weekend, the president's last chance to educate the country as to what's happened to it over the past 30 years and who has primarily been responsible for it. Personally, at this moment, I think he's probably going to lose.

He earned it.