There was fairy dust on him once. He campaigned almost in a mist, and pictures of him on the stump had a gauzy feeling to them. He spoke in meter more than in sentences, and his words had a mesmerizing effect.
Then Barack Obama became president and crashed to earth.
Mr. Obama won a second term, to be sure, but in the five years he has occupied the White House he has hardly caught a breath – or a break. Lingering economic distress. Lingering wars in central Asia. Lingering concerns about terrorism. Lingering doubts about his adaptability in the White House and his suitability as president. Could you blame the president if he lingered on the Shakespeare precept that "It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves?"
Mr. Obama is not alone in wondering why his presidency has been so difficult. Here are some possible answers:
1. The stars, or at least the era. This is a period of contention – you can sense it in Canada, in Europe, surely in the Middle East – and no leader, with the possible exception of Angela Merkel in Germany, has enjoyed even a remotely easy passage in office. Periods of economic instability are almost always that way (and sometimes worse, leading in Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933 to dictatorships), though the example of Franklin Roosevelt serves as a reminder that government during a period of crisis doesn't necessarily mean the government has to be in crisis.
2. The nature of his opposition. Much has been made of the remark – perhaps too much has been made of the remark – by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky that his goal was to make Mr. Obama a one-term president. Indeed, the ferocity of the Republican opposition to the president has been notable. But it may not be exceptional. Many congressional parties set out to stymie or to defeat presidents of the rival party; the Democrats were no different in the Nixon years, though Nixon had the good fortune, or the good vision, to embrace many of the priorities of the Democrats, especially the environment.
3. The modern political party structure. In the Nixon and Lyndon Johnson years there were conservatives in the Democratic Party and liberals in the Republican Party, and if you were to draw a Venn diagram of the parties – now we're surely dating ourselves! – there would be a large shaded area where the two circles intersected.
No longer. The most conservative Democrat in today's Congress is more liberal than the most liberal Republican—that is, if you can find one of either stripe. The old notion of bipartisanship was a mirage; Washington worked with coalitions of the parties but they were mostly ideological coalitions. That's what produced the great Civil Rights victories of the 1960s. That can't happen today.
This new architecture of the parties also militates against compromise. There are no consequences if Republican lawmakers move to the right rather than to the center, and no consequences if Democrats do the same. Their districts – American equivalents of Canadian legislative ridings – are drawn with an eye to ideological cohesion. The result is that conservative lawmakers are rewarded and not punished by moving rightward and liberal lawmakers are rewarded for moving leftward.
4. The personality factor. The ultimate criticism of lawmakers is that they just don't like the president. He's not clubbable. He doesn't reach out to us. He's not engaging. The presidency is an office made for extroverts, or at least political figures who have an extrovert chromosome along with their more thoughtful elements: Both Roosevelts, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton.
Barack Obama is no "happy warrior" (Democratic leadership candidate Al Smith, 1928), and he does not practice the "politics of joy" (Democratic presidential candidate Humbert Humphrey, 1968). But remember this: Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Humphrey won a presidential election and Obama has won two. He's down. But don't count him out. That's what the Democrats hope – and it's what the Republicans fear.
David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.
David Shribman