Salon's Joan Walsh published a sound rebuttal of Brooks' suggestion that successful American politicians are those who are unambiguously rooted in a clearly defined geographical, cultural, or temperamental mileiu. She cites John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and most of all, the synthetic cowboy George W. Bush, as presidents with complex and often self-contradictory backgrounds that rival anything "rootless" or confounding about Barack Obama.
Walsh could have gone further, insofar as complicated people have been the rule more than the exception among residents of the White House. There was Richard Nixon, whose entire career (as best documented by Rick Perlstein's brilliant book Nixonland ) involved an endless ambivalence towards the elite circles he despised and longed to join. There was LBJ, who aside from the ambiguities involving his views on race and economics, was a pathologically domineering personality whose political ascent was based on playing the submissive son to a series of powerful father figures (FDR, Rayburn and Russell most notably). Even an ostensibly "simple" figure like Eisenhower was actually a master Machiavellian who deliberately cultivated the false image of a genial and apolitical national father-figure. . .
We do not know these people who run our country in any way and we should stop pretending that we do. We know what they say and do in their public lives and that is what we can judge and comment on. And do what we can to make them do what we want them to do. The rest of the psychobabble and hero worship is all rubbish.
By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only
