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THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter
"Let us now praise Rahm Emanuel.
"No, seriously."
With those eight catnipping words, the Post's Dana Milbank ignited a classic Washington firestorm last month, which has yet to die out. Within the commentariat, the shortest route to Beltway notoriety is to gather intelligence on what most everyone else is writing, and then just write the opposite. In Milbank's curmudgeonly case of the 21st of February, however, a certain truth also inhered, which is what made the flames of outrage burn so hot and hurtful.
"Sacking Emanuel is the last thing the president should do," wrote Milbank, implicitly urging that the next thing the president should do is to sack Valerie Jarrett, Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod -- all "part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn't dirty his hands in politics," which of course for a politician can be hygienically fatal.
"Now in trouble," concluded Milbank, "Obama needs fewer acolytes and more action" -- and on that note the Post's columnist swung back onto the Beltway ramp of critical conventional wisdom; he simply took the contrarian route to get there.
Which is why Providence created columns and columnists in the first place. They've always been with us, whether in the form of "anti-administration" graffiti scratched on clay tablets or inked on papyrus scrolls or smuggled as samizdat. Yet political columnists mostly follow the lead of the 16th century's Michel de Montaigne, perhaps the world's true ur-columnist, who once confessed, as I recall in paraphrase, that in male beauty or athletic ability or even learnedness he may place second, but in political opinion he takes a backseat to no man. You gotta love it.
As I did Milbank's contrariness, but also because of its essential truth (in my superior political opinion). Emanuel may not be lovable, but he does provide presidential contrast: his earthy calculations, as Milbank noted, nicely and more importantly and even more necessarily balance the president's airy idealism.
And in that Milbankian phrase -- "the president's airy idealism" -- is where things get really interesting, since Obama is generally assaulted by the inexhaustibly noble commentariat at large for favoring a compromised pragmatism over unshakable lofty intent.
"Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan -- of following, as he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a 'pragmatic agenda,' " accurately wrote last Sunday the NY Times' Frank Rich, with whom I have always found myself in virtual uniform agreement. Virtual. Because here, Mr. Rich erred in his restatement of flawed conventional wisdom: "But pragmatism is about process, not principle."
I appreciate that my simply saying that isn't so doesn't make it so, so I'll quote instead from one of the philosophical co-founders of American Pragmatism, William James: This approach, and here I'll relate it to national governance, is "fully armed and militant" (my emphasis) he wrote in 1907, in the thick of the Progressive Era, because "It appears less as a solution ... than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed" (his emphasis).
Changed, it is almost needless to add, for the better. "If there be any life that it is really better we should lead," James reflected, "and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea...." And that's what lies at the practical though transcendently principled and progressive core of Pragmatism, America's only authentically original philosophy.
Rich also ventured that "Pragmatism is ... not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington as dysfunctional as the one Americans watch in real time on cable" -- and here, I'm somewhat resistingly back in agreement.
Pragmatism may indeed be the only cure for our dysfunctional government, as President Obama philosophically, and perhaps instinctively, understands -- But is the government's dysfunctionality in fact too far gone? And the answer to that question is what historians will be writing about 50 years hence; not, as I think Dana Milbank quite subtly understood and expressed, whether Rahm Emanuel stayed or left.
"No, seriously."
With those eight catnipping words, the Post's Dana Milbank ignited a classic Washington firestorm last month, which has yet to die out. Within the commentariat, the shortest route to Beltway notoriety is to gather intelligence on what most everyone else is writing, and then just write the opposite. In Milbank's curmudgeonly case of the 21st of February, however, a certain truth also inhered, which is what made the flames of outrage burn so hot and hurtful.
"Sacking Emanuel is the last thing the president should do," wrote Milbank, implicitly urging that the next thing the president should do is to sack Valerie Jarrett, Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod -- all "part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn't dirty his hands in politics," which of course for a politician can be hygienically fatal.
"Now in trouble," concluded Milbank, "Obama needs fewer acolytes and more action" -- and on that note the Post's columnist swung back onto the Beltway ramp of critical conventional wisdom; he simply took the contrarian route to get there.
Which is why Providence created columns and columnists in the first place. They've always been with us, whether in the form of "anti-administration" graffiti scratched on clay tablets or inked on papyrus scrolls or smuggled as samizdat. Yet political columnists mostly follow the lead of the 16th century's Michel de Montaigne, perhaps the world's true ur-columnist, who once confessed, as I recall in paraphrase, that in male beauty or athletic ability or even learnedness he may place second, but in political opinion he takes a backseat to no man. You gotta love it.
As I did Milbank's contrariness, but also because of its essential truth (in my superior political opinion). Emanuel may not be lovable, but he does provide presidential contrast: his earthy calculations, as Milbank noted, nicely and more importantly and even more necessarily balance the president's airy idealism.
And in that Milbankian phrase -- "the president's airy idealism" -- is where things get really interesting, since Obama is generally assaulted by the inexhaustibly noble commentariat at large for favoring a compromised pragmatism over unshakable lofty intent.
"Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan -- of following, as he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a 'pragmatic agenda,' " accurately wrote last Sunday the NY Times' Frank Rich, with whom I have always found myself in virtual uniform agreement. Virtual. Because here, Mr. Rich erred in his restatement of flawed conventional wisdom: "But pragmatism is about process, not principle."
I appreciate that my simply saying that isn't so doesn't make it so, so I'll quote instead from one of the philosophical co-founders of American Pragmatism, William James: This approach, and here I'll relate it to national governance, is "fully armed and militant" (my emphasis) he wrote in 1907, in the thick of the Progressive Era, because "It appears less as a solution ... than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed" (his emphasis).
Changed, it is almost needless to add, for the better. "If there be any life that it is really better we should lead," James reflected, "and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea...." And that's what lies at the practical though transcendently principled and progressive core of Pragmatism, America's only authentically original philosophy.
Rich also ventured that "Pragmatism is ... not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington as dysfunctional as the one Americans watch in real time on cable" -- and here, I'm somewhat resistingly back in agreement.
Pragmatism may indeed be the only cure for our dysfunctional government, as President Obama philosophically, and perhaps instinctively, understands -- But is the government's dysfunctionality in fact too far gone? And the answer to that question is what historians will be writing about 50 years hence; not, as I think Dana Milbank quite subtly understood and expressed, whether Rahm Emanuel stayed or left.
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter
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