“This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It's authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.”
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It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.
There is much to dislike about President Obama's approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.
Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen.
There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.
