Horizons: Dreaming of things that never were

I'll give Michael Tomasky credit. At least he recognizes what President Obama is trying to do.

Obama believes in civic virtue, and in the idea that in a democracy it’s the duty of responsible leaders to reason together on behalf of something they all agree to call the common good. The fancy name for this theory of government in political-philosophy circles is civic republicanism: the “civic” part refers to action taken in the public sphere, while “republican” (a small-r republican and a big-R Republican are very different animals) signals a concern with tyrannical majorities and a faith that reasoned debate will produce a balanced result...

A return to that kind of civic culture is what Obama hoped to bring about—all that talk about transforming politics. And that vision was key to his appeal during, and before, the campaign. The most famous sentence in Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention speech—“there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America”—is a textbook civic-republican sentiment. After the thuggish, with-us-or-against-us posture of the Bush administration, it was something millions of Americans wanted to hear, and believe in.

But then he rushes to judgement with this.

Well. This many years later, it’s pretty clear that Barack Obama isn’t going to transcend liberal America and conservative America.

"This many years later?" Lets call it what it is, shall we? Its been 2 1/2 years. Does Tomasky really believe that we can transform our political gamesmanship in 2 1/2 years? And of course, that doesn't take into consideration that during those 2 1/2 years what was handed to this President from the previous administration was 2 wars and the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

No Mr. Tomasky, what we're talking here is vision - and that's a long-term struggle. It won't get settled in a few battles over things like health care reform or a debt ceiling hostage crisis.

As Michele Obama said a few years ago...

Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He's a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.

Our President doesn't take his cues about what's possible from politicians and pundits. He finds his inspiration elsewhere.

And so democracy is messy and it's tough, and our system is broken to a large degree. And that makes this election more important than 2008. 2008 put us in a position to do some extraordinary things and I can't be prouder of what we did. But in 2008, I also think everybody figured, we get through this one election and then it's all done. And then, after two and a half years, and it's been tough and there have been setbacks, there are a lot of folks who suddenly feel deflated, this is hard, I'm not sure I believe in change. They've still got the Obama poster but it's all kind of frayed. And Obama is grayer -- he doesn’t seem as cool.

But in some ways, that's a healthy thing, because what that means is in 2012, ... we realize this is about us. This is not about my election; it's not about one person. It's about competing visions about where we're going to take the country...

And those competing visions are going to be determined in this next election as much as they ever have before. And so I hope you guys aren’t tired because we've got a lot more work to do. And this is an ongoing project.

I'm going, on the 28th, I'm going to be at the dedication of the new King memorial, which I've flown over and it looks spectacular. And now that King has his own memorial on the Mall I think that we forget when he was alive there was nobody who was more vilified, nobody who was more controversial, nobody who was more despairing at times. There was a decade that followed the great successes of Birmingham and Selma in which he was just struggling, fighting the good fight, and scorned, and many folks angry. But what he understood, what kept him going, was that the arc of moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. But it doesn’t bend on its own. It bends because all of us are putting our hand on the arc and we are bending it in that direction. And it takes time. And it's hard work. And there are frustrations.

To be honest, I'm amazed that anyone would even consider the idea that transformational change would happen in 2 1/2 years. Its more likely that folks like Tomasky simply don't believe its possible and are willing to give up because this vision has never been realized before. To that, I say that we simply have to listen to another visionary leader from our past.