The vanguard. Government was going to lift it up and demand integrity and thereby uplift humanity. To announce that would have sounded the clarion.
But Obama didn’t sound it to Western’s regret. He didn’t toot the trumpet; didn’t step into the shoes which the arc of history had cobbled for him. And why? Because he underestimated the viciousness and savagery of the capitalist enemy which he had the chance to suppress in the same way that FDR did.
Those were the shoes — that was the historic role — that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.
Instead, Obama sort of, kind of slipped into them and tried them on for size. But that was a mistake, because the thing about historical shoes is that you have to fill them completely. You cannot share the space handed to you by Fate with rival tendencies in historically decisive moments. You have to get up there and pump your fist in the air, lay down the gauntlet, brook no opposition, leave no gray areas because the American people are apt to be too stupid to see what a man with shoes is getting at unless he makes it “stick” in their minds. ‘I am wearing these shoes and you had better get used to it.’
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FDR took on Hitler. Smashed Tojo. Crushed Mussolini. Faced off with Stalin. Humbled the British Empire. All Barack Obama could do, by contrast, was surrender to Michelle Bachmann.
