Era of No Consensus

"It's a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead, and find no one there."
—Franklin Roosevelt

A year ago, with the prospect of a second Great Depression terrifyingly real, many were quick to cast Barack Obama as another FDR. The prospect of a 21st century New Deal formed part of a larger narrative about the 2008 election. Fueled by anger over two unpopular wars, an economy in meltdown and simple Bush fatigue, voters weren't merely repudiating the status quo. In choosing Obama, they had transformed a center-right country into a center-left one. (See TIME's special report on the legacy of F.D.R.)

Already a historic figure on account of his race, Obama would emulate FDR by raising first a nation's spirits and then its economic indexes. By restoring the tarnished luster of democratic capitalism, the new President would restore to government a credibility undermined by decades of official mendacity and incompetence. Long-term solutions would supplant the politics of avoidance.

Ironically, the fruits of victory can sometimes contain seeds of defeat. With health care reform currently hanging by a thread and panic spreading through the Democratic ranks, it feels less like 1933 than 1993 — when another charismatic, inexperienced President prematurely tested the ice of post-Reagan liberalism, only to find it wouldn't support his activist agenda. Like Bill Clinton before him, Obama has been criticized for misreading his mandate, spending his political capital on health care reform at a time when millions fear for their jobs. It was as if FDR had devoted his first Hundred Days to promoting Social Security instead of a smorgasbord of emergency relief and recovery measures. (See TIME's 2008 Person of the Year: Barack Obama.)

That is not the only difference between then and now. As President-elect, Obama extended to the outgoing Bush Administration a statesmanlike cooperation that was the exact opposite of Roosevelt's politically shrewd distancing of himself from his discredited predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Obama could have scored cheap political points by leaving such criminally mismanaged enterprises as AIG and GM to their fate. Of course, he might also have touched off an economic smashup. In pursuing what he believed to be the responsible course, Obama echoed George W. Bush's fourth-quarter abandonment of free-market gospel. For both men, survival trumped ideology. In the process, however, the candidate of change became the President of continuity, a politically perilous position he has since reinforced, along with U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan. (See pictures of Person of the Year 2009 runner-up General Stanley McChrystal.)

The most cerebral President since Woodrow Wilson, Obama has more in common with Atticus Finch than with Arianna Huffington. A persuader by instinct, he is trapped inside a political culture that has lost any instinct for persuasion. That he is the third consecutive President to polarize the electorate — the fourth in five if one looks beyond the posthumous regard accorded Ronald Reagan — reveals more about us than about him. It is no accident that the past three decades have seen the rise of sound-bite politics, of snarky bloggers and strident talk radio, not to mention cable "news" largely preoccupied with the trivial, the tactical and the tawdry. Factor in an ever more fragmented audience, and the bully pulpit of Teddy Roosevelt's imagination is in constant danger of being drowned out by a Twittering choir.

Gone is the watercooler nation that signed on to the Cold War consensus, sent men to the moon and embraced Ike's ambitious interstate highway system. "The occasion is piled high with difficulty," said Abraham Lincoln at a moment of supreme peril to American democracy, "and we must rise with the occasion." Notice: he said we must rise. But that requires, if nothing else, a sense of shared values. Few paid much attention last December as Southern Republicans in the Senate blocked a $14 billion federal rescue of GM and Chrysler. That lawmakers representing states with nonunion foreign-auto plants should blame organized labor for not slashing worker benefits to levels offered by Nissan hardly came as a shock.

The surprise was that no political price was exacted for such a stand: abandoning assembly-line workers whose requested lifeline was a fraction of what Congress forked over to the financial joyriders who touched off the crisis. Lost in the euphoria surrounding Obama's victory, here was a change of the seismic variety, though admittedly far removed from the new President's vision. Indeed, it suggested that a tipping point had been reached, foreshadowing the fierce resistance to health care reform in a nation where most people were already insured, and most of those seemed content with the status quo. Far from riding history's crest, Obama found himself shouting into the wind. A year into his presidency, two things stand out: the easy history has been made, and it's simpler to change our leaders than ourselves.

Smith, who has headed five presidential libraries, is a scholar-in-residence at George Mason University

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