If there was any lingering doubt, in the minds of his readers, that he had access to ‘a key’ White House official, Opinionator Emeritus (OE) has laid them to rest, with the opening sentences from his latest essay:
“So, what do you think?” The brief email from a key White House official greeted me Monday morning , along with Osama bin Laden’s death notices. “It’s the best I’ve felt about my country since 9/11,” I responded. He shot back: “It’s a whole new world.”
In these opening words OE makes concrete, in the minds of his readers, that he is a well connected person of the American Foreign Policy Establishment, with a demonstrable connection to power: He establishes that rhetorically, not by presenting any empirical proof but simply by means of an aggrandizing self-report; an opening that resonates with his audience. But let us move from the frame to the pedestrian character of his encomium to a new National Mood of optimism that has been the watershed of the execution of Mr. bin Laden. The new stronger, not to challenged President, will be harder to defeat in 2012 as he has now established a Democrat, in the public mind, with a ‘strong’ policy regarding terrorism and terrorists. Match murder for murder? Vengeance for 9/11 is an easy sell to a populous whose self-regard and deeply held notion of their invincibility, was damaged, possibly beyond repair, by heathen troglodytes and their benighted leader. Our national bogey man has been slain, in a brilliantly executed military operation , that no other nation could claim, except, perhaps for Israel, our foremost and unmanageable client state. OE’s mood is near euphoric as he swipes at the right and the left, as representative of an easily dismissed policy nihilism, compared to his proclaimed political rationalism, as the mean between these two untenable, unrealistic extremes. Here is a quote that is illustrative of the paternalism that is the psychological mainspring of OE’s political meditation:
‘The end of bin Laden has given Obama a rare chance for a new beginning. A majority of Americans are just confused, and are not so nearly as ridiculous in their thinking as right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats. They just need to hear a president tell them what they already sense the truth to be, the hard truth, with all the common sense that used to mark America, with all the can-do spirit and skill of Sunday’s commando operation. They are waiting for the man in the White House to tell them these things.’
What we need is a new National Daddy to lead us into the Radiant Future: a political reminiscence, a nostalgia like Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America.’
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