As the economy sputters, the political class ignores it, and sage commentators despair, there has been a minor boom in the production of news-ish articles debating the finer points of nettlesome inconsequentialities. This genre has always been with us, but seems particularly prevalent of late, with the major example being whether or not Barack Obama would’ve done better with more “passion”, and the minor example being whether or not the Blues would’ve been better off with Hillary Clinton. The former is as unknowable as it is irrelevant, and the latter is the kind of impossible counterfactual that should never be discussed until the bottle is at least half consumed.
The impulse behind these discussions is understandable. None dare call it malaise, but happy times are very far from here and there’s a fundamental need for an explanation of how we got to this sorry state. But trying to peer into the mind of Obama or, worse, setting him up as some kind of tragic figure whose virtues doomed him from the start, neglects the mundane realities that so often rule our lives for good and ill.
The simple story is that Obama and company faced an enormous task in cleaning up the messes of Bush the Younger. In tackling them, they got some things right and some things wrong, and now we’re here. That explanation is less than fulfilling, for narrative or psychological purposes, but it’s a hell of a lot more realistic than trying to divine the present state of things as a natural outgrowth of the man’s psyche or as the final revelation of some centrist plot. Even the power of the White House shrinks to insignificance against the swirling mass of unknowable actors and events known as reality.
Sure, the Obama Administration could’ve made fewer mistakes and done much better. But it could also have made more mistakes and done much worse. That isn’t much of a conclusion, but it’s better than imagining how things might be different if something that was always unlikely (President Hillary Clinton) had happened. And it’s a great deal better than trying to unearth the one true misstep from which all others issue.
