“Just seemed like yesterday,” he reminisced.
This was a sentiment the rest of us did not entirely share. I felt as if Bush had been running things since the Mesozoic Age.
But now it also feels as if Barack Obama has been president forever. I’m beginning to wonder if in the 21st century, White House years are going to be like dog years in reverse. Every one is equivalent to seven or eight in the normal human calendar.
I personally think Obama has been doing a good job, all things considered. The economy is still depressing, but that’s an improvement over mind-bendingly terrifying. The rest of the world likes us better, and whenever the president goes overseas he seems to be able to nudge the other countries toward a little progress on some issue on which they had been hopelessly stuck.
And health care reform. Extremely big deal. Really could pass. Eventually.
No matter how difficult the issue, Obama has been sensible, deliberative. Just look at Dick Cheney swooping around like a dementor from Harry Potter, and you have to appreciate how much things have improved.
But Lord, is it good to bid farewell to 2009.
And imagine how Obama must feel. Every problem is a long, grueling slog. Even in the last minutes of the year, he was stuck trying to get out of the hole that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had dug when she used the fatal phrase “the system worked” after the failed plane bombing in Detroit.
Napolitano’s statements were more nuanced than we’re currently giving her credit for, but that doesn’t matter. What she said was ill advised on so very many levels, only one of which was the matter of the system not working.
In a time of crisis, you cannot make any sweeping statements defending the performance of the Department of Homeland Security. In a bureaucracy that big, somebody is screwing up somewhere.
Napolitano should have said something like: “Well, we were so happy that the Swiss guy tackled the underwear bomber. Let’s give him a shout-out! Now excuse me, but we have a lot of work to do.”
Maybe the problem is that the Department of Homeland Security is just too big to function. We know that creating it was a bad move since it was Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s idea. (This will undoubtedly be a chapter in my upcoming book, “How Joe Lieberman Ruined Everything.”)
Remember how hopeful everybody was last winter? Remember when Obama had the bipartisan Super Bowl party? I wonder who he’ll invite this time. Captain Sully Sullenberger appears to be the only person left in the country who everybody likes.
For Obama, one of the plusses of the first few months of 2009 was that the opposition was so inept. This gave the president momentum while also providing the troubled nation with much-needed entertainment.
Remember Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress? The one that the Republicans followed with a speech by Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who attacked “wasteful spending” on monitoring volcano eruptions in Alaska?
And when Arizona State University refused to give Obama an honorary degree because “his body of work is yet to come?” That was in April. And in October, he got the Nobel Peace Prize. Take that, Sun Devils!
But things really slowed down when we got to health care. Remember the Blue Dog Democrats holding the bill hostage in the House? The bipartisan panel of six senators who spent the summer sending back reports on what a great conference call they had had last Tuesday?
Remember Olympia Snowe? Whatever happened to her?
Remember the Ben Nelson crisis, and the Joe Lieberman crisis, and the plan from the freshman Democrats, and the plan from the moderates, and the revolt of the conservative Democrats and the revolt of the progressive Democrats? Boy, those were fun times. I bet Majority Leader Harry Reid is reliving them right now, on the floor of his bedroom in a fetal position.
The job of governing jumped from difficult to impossible after those right-wing tea parties last summer, which eliminated any Republican notion that if a president won a big election victory and large majorities in the House and Senate, that that might be a sign that the American people wanted him to succeed.
No more. This might allow one to theorize that Glenn Beck wrecked our year if we did not already know it was Joe Lieberman.
Gail Collins writes for The New York Times.
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