When Does No Drama Make For A Better Show and a Better Government?

Deep inside our first reality TV presidency, one designed, whether you like the policy or not, to squeeze maximum drama from every encounter, it’s almost hard to remember that the Obama presidency was 180 degrees away. It was built on the idea of “no drama.”

In the current context, it may look almost dull. It was professional, competent and the apogee of the work of hundreds, who’s life's work was to serve their country, and leave it better than they found it.

That’s why perhaps now, more than ever, we need the bracing reminder of what competence, rational decision making, and hard work were really like in the exercise of government.

Brian Abrams does this in his comprehensive oral history of the Obama administration, Obama: An Oral History.

My conversation with Brian Abrams:

Is Hope or Change Ever Possible After Trump?

Once upon a time, hope and change formed the basis of our political discourse. That now seems so long ago. Remember a time when the Koch brothers were the enemy, when we thought John McCain was the far right, when those of us on the left thought the FBI and the justice department needed watching?

In just ten years, we’ve gone through the looking glass. Now up really down, down is up, black is white and our enemies are embraced.

Our divisions over culture, politics, race and class have been weaponized. And demographics, geography, social media and technology make it so we seldom have to interact with anyone that disagree with us.

In this atmosphere of tribalism on steroid, is any kind of positive national politics still possible? Clearly on a local or community level, there is some reason to be optimistic. However on a national level, have we digressed to a point where even the instruments of our founding father, may not bring us back.

Dan Pfeiffer is a bit more optimistic in his new book Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump

My conversation with Dan Pfeiffer:

Obama and the Black Community - Seven Years Later

Last week Elizabeth Warren gave a scathing speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, about the seven year efforts, on the part of Republicans, to delegitimize the Obama Presidency. From the birther efforts to Mitch McConnell, saying that his goal, from day one, was to defeat Obama.

It’s not possible to carry on this discussion without accepting and understanding race as a part of it.The burden of being America's first black President, can’t even be imagined.

We know from the way this current campaign is playing out, how a large swath of white America has responded. But how has the black community viewed Obama? Long time journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan takes a look in I Heart Obama

My conversation with Erin Kaplan:

The responsibility of command

In the entire history of the US, only forty-four men have known exactly what it feels like to have the full weight of the nations security on their shoulders. Even fewer have assumed that mantel in a time of war.  As Barack Obama took office, the terrorist threat swirled around him. A year later, the failed Christmas day attack refocused Obama and the country on the threat of domestic terrorism.  Suddenly it wasn't just policy papers or briefings, but lives hung in the balance. N.Y. Times White House correspondent Peter Baker writes about this as the cover story in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

My conversation with Peter Baker:

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One year and counting......

One year ago this week we concluded one of the most transformative Presidential campaigns of all times.  A campaign and an election that will forever change the paradigm of American politics. One of the most astute chroniclers of that campaign was The New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg.  In his new book Obamanos!: The Rise of a New Political Era,he gives us his insights into the birth of a this new political epoch.  

My conversation with Rick Hertzberg:
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Jonathan Alter on 100 Days: FDR vs. Obama

Last week we marked President Obama’s first 100 days. Now that the dust and the hype have settled, we can really take a look at what we’ve learned about this young President. No one is better able to help us do that, then Jonathan Alter. His book about FDR’s first hundred days, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope is a national best seller that even the President has read. Alter is a Senior Editor of Newsweek and a contributor to MSNBC.

My conversation with Jonathan Alter:

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What Obama sees

It's impossible to emphasize enough how different our current President is from the last one. Regardless of policy, simply the ability to see the nation and the world through the lens of big ideas, and understand that we are "not in Kansas anymore."  That modernity, technology and the economic and social crises we face have put us at some kind of inflection point in the nation's history.  Obama touches on all of this, in a wide ranging, fifty-minute interview  with New York Times economics correspondent David Leonhardt.  That interview appears as the cover story in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.  

My conversation with David Leonhardt about his impressions from that Obama interview:

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Obamaism

For those that still don't understand how good Obama is, how he got elected and how is long view is far more conservative than radical, check out today's must reads: Mark Ambinder in the Atlantic and George Packer writing in the New Yorker.   Money quote from Packer:

Well short of Obama’s first hundred days, the dominant characteristic of his Presidency is clear: activist government, on every front. It’s harder to make out the contours of the philosophy at the core of this dazzling blur of action. Given the early and ample track record, there’s surprisingly little agreement over the nature of Obamaism. Obama’s signature projects defy grouping under a single heading, and, as a result, he has been criticized for inconsistency. To take one example, he forced the chief executive of General Motors, Rick Wagoner, into early retirement, and yet he has not called for the removal of any of the failed leaders of America’s financial institutions, like Bank of America’s Kenneth Lewis. He promised a federal guarantee of warranties for owners of G.M. and Chrysler cars, but he won’t put the government in temporary control of the banks, which are at the heart of the economic crisis. He is willing to spend $275 billion for homeowners’ relief, but he won’t let the government enter into the business of making direct loans. He has made health-care reform the ultimate test of his first year, but seems prepared to compromise on significant aspects of the legislation.

What underlies so many of Obama’s decisions is an attachment to the institutions that hold up American society, a desire to make them function better rather than remake them altogether. Allowing the auto industry to die would create social havoc in communities around the country, and anything less than de-facto government control seems inadequate. So the President has risked a good deal of his political capital on the largest federal intervention in a sector of the economy since at least 1952, when President Truman seized the steel industry to avert a strike during wartime. Obama, announcing his plan last week, said, “We cannot, and we must not, and we will not let our auto industry simply vanish. This industry is like no other—it’s an emblem of the American spirit. . . . It’s what helped build the middle class and sustained it throughout the twentieth century.” Obama may not see a similar need to put the government in charge of the big banks, but he has also shown that he has no taste for such a disruption of the system—even if it were politically possible, and perhaps even if it were the most direct route back to financial health.