The Fallows Corollary To The Famous Pelosi Gaffe

Remember when Nancy Pelosi proclaimed that Congress “[has] to pass the [Obamacare] bill so you can find out what’s in it,” and you thought the Obamanuts  couldn’t possibly get any stupider and more offensive than that? Well, you were wrong. The Atlantic‘s James Fallows has come up with his own Fallacy that’s every bit as perverse as Pelosi’s.

Where Pelosi said only that you have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it, Fallows now proclaims that you have to re-elect Obama to find out whether or not he has been — yes, has been; not will be — a good president. In his delightful review of Fallows’ new e-book, The Obama Presidency, Explained, Andrew Ferguson writes:

It’s an election year, and unspeakable horrors await the world if Obama loses. So Fallows comes up with an ingenious premise for his book: History’s verdict on Obama’s presidency will be largely determined by whether he wins reelection in November. “Our judgment about ‘really good’ and ‘mediocre’ presidents is colored by how long they serve,” he writes. “A failure to win reelection places a ‘one-term loser’ asterisk on even genuine accomplishments.”

In his review, The Obama Delusion, Explained, Ferguson makes mincemeat of this argument.

This is the kind of insight you often find in highbrow journalism: sweepingly explanatory and grandly historical and, upon reflection, not really true….

Fallows needs to believe that presidential reputation is shaped in large part by reelection because it helps him get Obama off the hook. On the matter of Obama-care, for example, he quotes Lawrence Summers, who says that if Obama is reelected his health care scheme will stand as an achievement as grand and uncontroversial as Medicare seems today. If he loses and Obama-care is dismantled, Summers says, his efforts will be a sign of the president’s “hubris” and “overreach.”

But this is a chicken-hearted way to look at Obama’s record. Obama-care is either a good idea or a bad one, with merits or deficiencies that are easy enough to grasp and argue about right now; there’s plenty of evidence to decide whether it was an act of hubris. And the president’s economic stimulus, to cite another example, has been a failure even by the criteria he himself set (“If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition”). Pretending that the merits of the Obama presidency are somehow undefined forestalls the debate—how can you defend a record that’s inconclusive?

If Obama is defeated (don’t just hope; give money, ring doorbells, lick envelopes!), perhaps Fallows can turn his talents to refurbishing the reputation not only of Obama but other one term presidents denied the greatness they deserved by ungrateful voters who turned them out of office. No, I’m not thinking primarily of Fallows’ former boss, Jimmy Carter (for whom Fallows wrote speeches), but another one term president whose problems eerily resembled those of Obama’s first term, the under-appreciated James Buchanan (1857-1861).

This is how the current White House views Buchanan, taken from a short biography of the fifteenth president that appears on the White House website:

Presiding over a rapidly dividing Nation, Buchanan grasped inadequately the political realities of the time. Relying on constitutional doctrines to close the widening rift over slavery, he failed to understand that the North would not accept constitutional arguments which favored the South. Nor could he realize how sectionalism had realigned political parties: the Democrats split; the Whigs were destroyed, giving rise to the Republicans….

As President-elect, Buchanan thought the crisis would disappear if he … could persuade the people to accept constitutional law as the Supreme Court interpreted it. The Court was considering the legality of restricting slavery in the territories, and two justices hinted to Buchanan what the decision would be.

Thus, in his Inaugural the President referred to the territorial question as “happily, a matter of but little practical importance” since the Supreme Court was about to settle it “speedily and finally.”

Two days later Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the Dred Scott decision, asserting that Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights in slaves in the territories. Southerners were delighted, but the decision created a furor in the North….

When Republicans won a plurality in the House in 1858, every significant bill they passed fell before southern votes in the Senate or a Presidential veto. The Federal Government reached a stalemate.

Substitute Obamacare for slavery, and the above should sound quite familiar. I hope it is, at least to the extent of Obama becoming a one-termer, but I also hope our current partisan civil war doesn’t soon resemble the actual civil war that followed Buchanan’s demise.