Voices
14. APOCALYPSE AMERICA
Win-win is a cool idea — for social media and much of business
life. But America’s public and
entertainment culture wants a
narrative of total victory, crushing blows, winner-take-all contests and paranoid, apocalyptic
sagas. White House aides talk
about “breaking the will” of the
tea party, and they glory in each
new poll that shows the GOP’s
public approval is plummeting
toward single digits. (Yet how
can you celebrate a prostrate
GOP if the worldwide economy is
in shambles?) We live in a time
when ultimate fighting trumps
boxing; football trumps baseball;
talent contests trump variety
shows; The Walking Dead is the
new Friends. No wonder Washington is the way it is. The biters
are everywhere.
15. YOU’RE NOT MY PRESIDENT
It’s hard to know when in the
modern era Americans stopped
believing that whoever was president was president of all the
people. It may have started with
Lyndon Johnson, whose ascension after the assassination of
John F. Kennedy was bitterly
resented by the Kennedy crowd.
HOWARD
FINEMAN
HUFFINGTON
10.27.13
‘An amazing percentage
of people here are intellectually
lazy or distracted or ignorant
or all three,’ one senator told
me, anonymously.”
Many voters came to see Richard
Nixon as an illegal usurper. In
1992, many Republicans refused
to accept the legitimacy of Bill
Clinton’s election, an attitude
that led ultimately to his impeachment. But there is nothing
in recent decades to match the
visceral fear and hatred that a
minority of Americans express
for Barack Obama, whom they
see as an alien, dictatorial force.
There is no denying there is an
element of race and xenophobia
to it. To be sure, Obama’s most
passionate foes wouldn’t like any
big-city, liberal, Harvard-trained
constitutional lawyer. But the
fact that this one is black and
has an unusual-for-America
name just adds to the alienation.
Obama’s fans flocked to him because of his biography. But the
flip side of hagiography is demonization, and that is where
his enemies are now. To say the
least, that makes doing a
deal with him difficult.
Howard Fineman is the editorial
director of The Huffington Post.