Jennifer Senior - New York Magazine - October 31, 2010
“In bad times, we frequently suspend what we know about politics—most crucially, how difficult change is—and choose to believe that this time, by pulling a lever or touching a screen, the choice we make will have a magical effect.”
”’Yes, we can’ is seldom real. We need people to say it—we needed Martin Luther King Jr. to say it, and perhaps we needed Obama to say it, too; it is the plainspoken, uncorrupted calls to arms that power our idealism. But King wasn’t in elected office, and, at the time, neither was Obama. Once you’re on the inside, the prospect of continual change looks bleaker. This is what Mario Cuomo meant in his 1985 speech at Yale University, when he famously told his audience, ‘We campaign in poetry, but when we’re elected, we’re forced to govern in prose.’
This is Obama’s paradox. He actually did try to brace us for this eventuality in his inaugural address, when he quoted Corinthians, saying we had to set aside childish things. But we haven’t heard much about it since. He wishes that we would act like adults, yet he has not yet figured out a way to translate the giddy, starry-eyed enthusiasm that swept him into office into something that would sustain our interest in—for lack of a better phrase—the common good. It may be that that’s impossible.”
