Ryan's Fancy

This one brightened my morning with smiles and chuckles--Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker fills us in on how "conciliatory" Barack Obama was early on in his term, and his search for "common ground" with inside the Beltway conservatives who fell for him:

On a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning journalists to meet the President-elect. Accepting such an invitation was a gesture on Obama’s part that signalled his desire to project an image of himself as a post-ideological politician, a Chicago Democrat eager to forge alliances with conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. That week, Obama was still working on an Inaugural Address that would call for “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. They were Reaganites all, yet some had paid tribute to Obama during the campaign. Lowry, who is the editor of the National Review, called Obama “the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement.” Krauthammer, an intellectual and ornery voice on Fox News and in the pages of the Washington Post, had written that Obama would be “a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin,” who would “bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.” And Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and a former aide to Dan Quayle, wrote, “I look forward to Obama’s inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer.”

Over dinner, Obama searched for points of common ground. He noted that he and Kudlow agreed on a business-investment tax cut. “He loves to deal with both sides of the issue,” Kudlow later wrote. “He revels in the back and forth. And he wants to keep the dialogue going with conservatives.” Obama’s view, shared with many people at the time, was that professional pundits were wrong about American politics. It was a myth, he said, that the two political parties were impossibly divided on the big issues confronting America. The gap was surmountable. Compared with some other Western countries, where Communists and far-right parties sit in the same parliament, the gulf between Democrats and Republicans was narrow.

Obama’s homily about conciliation reflected an essential component of his temperament and his view of politics...

That's the funniest thing I've read in a while, made all the more hilarious because the comedy is unintentional. While I love the way Ryan is tryin' to make BHO sound JFK-esque ("Obama sprang coatless..."), he is totally off the mark in his assessment of "the most essential component of his temperament/politics." It is not, as Lizza claims, a hands-across-the table-let's-cooperate-and-compromise deal. It's a Harvard faculty lounge worldview, a perspective that precludes cooperation because it sees leftists as having a lock on virtuousness and folks on the right as being inherently evil (and never the twain shall meet). Shame on the above-mentioned foolish fawners who, though conservative, allowed themselves to be swept up in the Barry hysteria. I wonder if they wonder what got into them at the time.