Postcards from Nixonland

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

For Obama’s first-year anniversary the New York Times rounded up some White House veterans to write about their respective presidents’ first years. This one, especially, surprised me:

It was in many other ways a very good year for President Nixon. He called to congratulate the Apollo 11 astronauts on their moon landing. He initiated a huge expansion of the National Endowment for the Arts and began the processes that led to the desegregation of public schools in the South and a historic reform of the government’s policy toward American Indians. He announced the “Nixon doctrine,” providing aid — but not military forces — to our anticommunist Asian allies. He signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Nixon was a pretty abominable guy. He brought this country to the biggest political and constitutional crisis it’s faced since the Civil War, and he did this riding on the back of racial politicking and fear-mongering, the effects of which still reverberate through our politics today. On the other hand, he did manage do so some good things to advance the causes of American liberalism. He expanded social security benefits, he created the EPA, and he poured a lot of money into our national park system. He also introduced a bill for universal health care, which, according to some historians, he might actually have had the political capital pass.

Now, I personally don’t buy the meme that Obama’s first year has been some sort of unmitigated calamity for American liberalism. But it definitely could have better. There are a lot of issues our country needs to tackle — primary among them is the need to save the middle class, to fix our banking industry, to fix our energy economy, and (yes) to fix our health care system — and the prospect that we’re going to be able to do these things does indeed seem much smaller than did a year ago. Yet that’s less Obama’s fault than it is the fault of the system, than it is a signal of the sclerosis of our governing apparatus. We’re entering into the fourth decade where our country has failed to take on a major domestic project and succeed at fixing it.

Looking back, it’s a scary thing when a conservative a-hole like Dick Nixon can deliver on change, while a guy like Obama, whose mandate is much larger and whose integrity is much, much deeper, has to struggle so hard. The lesson to draw from that, to my mind, is that our current problems — our current inability to solve problems — is less about Obama than it is about us, our country, how we conceives of our national community and how we legislates on our own behalf. Self government involves a great deal more than the nature of the man on top.