I Used to Like Countdown--and Sometimes Still Do

Twenty years back, I watched Sports Center with Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. They were funny, ironic, and hilariously enjoyable despite Olbermann's being a New York Mets fan and my agony over the 1986 World Series in which my Boston Red Sox lost to the Blue and Orange of Shea Stadium. Olbermann eventually left ESPN, went to NBC and, as far as I knew, dropped from the news radar screens. In more or less 2005, however, he re-appeared on a news show called "Countdown" over the MSNBC network. Once again, he was funny, ironic and this time, scathing in his denunciations of the now former Bush 43 administration. I thought most of what Olbermann said needed to be said and I especially appreciated his "Worst Person in the World" segments plus his periodic "Special Comments" along with nightly reminders of how many days it has been since "Mission Accomplished" was pronounced in Iraq.
Since the election of President Obama, however, I have grown tired of Olbermann. He has continued to rant, rave and denounce every hint of a policy that does not mesh with his view of what should or should not be done. His program does not even pretend to interview opposing perspectives, as if somehow left of center social, economic and foreign policies are beyond the scope of review, examination and question. I usually agree with the basic push of Olbermann's viewpoints, but I am weary of any form of absolutism, be it political, theological, journalistic or--more broadly still--moral. Olbermann's is not an exception and, I think, can become potentially more harmful to the causes he advocates. To my knowledge, he has never indicated the possibility of being wrong or at least incomplete in his analysis. After eight years of George Bush's never admitting that he might have been substantively rather than procedurally wrong, we as a country and, more importantly, as a people, simply do not need anyone in the public view expressing the same inflexible, apparently divinely-ordained mentality. Olbermann, along with several people I know on a personal basis, can't seem to release their--sometimes our--bitterness over Bush's Presidency long enough to allow President Obama the opportunity to govern in the direction of national healing. As much as I thought his inaugural speech was rhetorically disappointing, President Obama's invitation to healing and national health, I think, stood at the core of the entire ceremony, be it from the speeches, prayers and the glorious--if taped to preserve the instrument's tuning--music.
If Olbermann and my fellow left wingers want what they say they do--national accountability and a restoration of our international standing--they need to turn down their own rhetorical heat long enough for it to take place. These same sort of calls for vengeance howled from their left wing political ancestors 35 years ago when President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. Even Ted Kennedy now admits that President Ford did the right thing for the long term interests of the country. President Ford's actions largely helped to cost him the 1976 election, but aside from some of my fellow left winger's assessments of his administration when he died, Ford's larger sense of the moral and correct have proven the most effacacious for the country.
I very much agree that we are not a banana republic. We believe in the rule of law and seek justice for all. We have survived as a country due to our insistence that those principles are more than just ideologically-driven words. They apply without exception. In these next few months and first two years of President Obama's administration, let's rise above our anger and frustration long enough to act like Americans again. We'll be more likely to survive Bush 43's legacy as we do.
Keith Olbermann needs to calm down: or at least become more ironic again.

I Hope Obama Governs Better than he Spoke

I assume like many Americans and people across the world, I eagerly anticipated President Obama's inaugural address. I have heard him on two memorably past occasions when his words, demeanor and themes--in short, his rhetoric--became transcendent with their possibilities of restoring what he more prosaically calls our "common purpose." With the stream of news reports that as President-elect, Mr. Obama had been studying the speeches from his predecessors, I was expecting at least an effort to attain his previously poetic efforts.
After listening to his speech today, however, I felt a keen sense of disappointment. President Obama referred to issues, but did so sounding like a policy analyst on C-SPAN rather than a President using a platform surrounded by a rapt audience to set a tone for those policies whose details will, of necessity, come later (given our predicaments, tomorrow seems the best time to start). In all his preparation, our new President paradoxically seemed to miss what the best Inaugural Addresses--and other memorable orations throughout history--have achieved.
Namely, how words can define and shape an era. President Lincoln, of course, combined a knowledge of biblical King James poetry, a belief in American destiny--itself arguable, but Mr. Lincoln believed we had it--and a Shakespearean sense of power to mold words that went beyond themselves at Gettysburg and on March 4, 1865. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan captured the tenor of their moments through well-crafted and delivered--in Ford's case, almost by accident--phrases, words and sentiments. Lyndon Johnson also did so as he addressed "the American promise" on March 15, 1865. As President Bill Clinton spoke in Oklahoma City near the first anniversary of the Murrah Federal Building bombing, ending his remarks with the words of a church hymn ("Farther Along"), it did not matter that the theology it suggests is, shall we say, less than intellectually adequate. President Clinton spoke to a theology of the human heart and reduced many of us to tears ( I listened to his words from a hospital lobby after visiting a parishioner).
Today at least, President Obama missed a chance to speak, as it were, to a theology of our common heart. We Americans--and the world itself--know and will look forward to a set of policy proposals that will be for our heads to decipher, discern and debate. No one need remind us that as a result of many reasons over many years, Americans and the world face byzantine problems that seem almost incomprehensible even to the most astute minds. We needed, in short, a poem that resembled a sermon today--or maybe the other way around. Instead, we got a laundry list.
As I listened to the President's speech, I was reminded of something I have understood as "becoming or being Presidential." It is evidently an awareness that the office goes beyond one person or one time and carries with it an inherent call to preserve its position to paraphrase historian Michael Beschloss, as "head of state and head of government." Lyndon Johnson, once he assumed the office, insisted that he deliver his speeches in a "presidential" manner and subsequently did not permit himself to appear relaxed, humorous and even anecdotal in his public addresses. It lessened his chances to effect the types of overall changes that he desired and, at least to a degree, contributed to his downfall in 1968. I am sure there are other instances in which the need to be "Presidential" has inhibited a given person from achieving all he wanted during a given term in the office.
Given, however, the extremely tenuous nature of the country at present, I think even the most disappointed of us will just shrug off President Obama's speech as reflective of his trying too hard, obvious nervousness (so was Chief Justice John Roberts, who was administering his first oath of office today) and awareness of the tasks that we have elected him to address. There will be other chances and, no doubt on some of them President Obama will render unto us the sermonic poetry of which he is capable. If what occurred today--and from what I hear on the radio, I seem to be in a small minority of disappointed listeners--becomes something of a metaphor for the development of his administration, however, President Obama may well be sitting where his predecessor did, but in four rather than eight years. I hope, as it were, that he governs better than I perceived him to have spoken.