All That’s Left Is the T-Shirt

The editor-in-chief tells his assistant that the story is too long. She disagrees, saying it has a wonderful narrative arc with a high point and you can’t separate them. “Yes, you can,” Ben Bradlee responds, and promptly tears the article in half.

Bradlee, gruff, handsome and self-confident, made a political institution out of a drowsy Washington Post and toppled President Richard Nixon in the process. Thus, a charismatic editor morphed into an influential one and eventually into a cultural icon as well. Now, Ben Bradlee is dead and the obituaries are full of anecdotes from a different age.

Ben Bradlee’s America has long since disappeared and a new one hasn’t yet emerged. The perennial demands that Philip Roth be given the Nobel Literature prize reflect America’s longing for the nation of Gore Vidal and John Updike, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Bradlee and the late fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who died the day previously, were bridges to a past already replete with pictures and memories. Bradlee went sailing with JFK and de la Renta clothed his Kennedy’s wife. Vanity Fair thrives on telling and retelling these stories from a bygone era, an era when Truman Capote was being spoiled along with everyone else in New York City, and the nation’s white, East Coast elites were still relevant.

Even Joschka Fischer Shopped at Brooks Brothers

A longing also appears in the success of James Salter’s late novels where he has a melancholy look back at all the martinis in Manhattan, a view which now only finds expression through modern authors like Jonathan Franzen and Donna Tartt. Even Joschka Fischer became an epigone of these times as he ostentatiously shopped at Brooks Brothers, unmindful of the fact that Brooks Brothers had long since been acquired by the British department store chain Marks and Spencer. And why should that matter when even the Washington Post itself has been bought by Amazon boss Jeff Bazos?

Ben Bradlee was a part of Washington’s “Old Georgetown,” that area where the important and powerful members of society lived and where they could read about themselves in Bradlee’s newly-invented style section of the Washington Post. Editor-in-Chief Bradlee was successful because he was at home with both the difficult and the comfortable. He knew both Nixon and Jackie. As with both his predecessors, Obama didn’t have much in common with that Washington despite his ties to Harvard. He was elected president despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that he wasn’t part of that East Coast milieu. Obama cried “Yes, we can,” but unlike Bradlee, he didn’t accomplish anything. His administration had two parts but no narrative arc and no high point. The congressional elections take place shortly and Obama’s approval numbers are in the cellar. They’re so bad that the Democratic candidate for Senate in Kentucky is running a television spot emphasizing “I’m not Obama.”

Would Hillary Have Been the Better Choice?

The U.S. president is so unpopular that historians like Timothy Garton Ash are already asking whether perhaps Hillary Clinton would have been the better choice. In defense of Obama, Garton Ash reminds us, “It’s important to recall that no president since 1945 has been dealt such a difficult hand. He came into office facing the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, the legacy of George W Bush’s disastrous, unnecessary war in Iraq, a dysfunctional political system that snarls around a gerrymandered, polarized and money-dominated Congress, and a millennial shift in the global balance of power.” Garton Ash concludes that hope alone was not enough to clear all the hurdles. At the same time, he also admits Obama has done a poor job of tending those foreign fields he inherited. The debate over Obama’s difficult inheritance will soon resume when Act Two of his administration begins in the wake of the congressional elections.

But it’s already shockingly clear how weak Obama’s mushy inheritance is. When he appeared like a star, a symbol whose likeness was emblazoned on T-shirts, he promised social change. But Obama’s impressive soft power, his oratory powers and his aura all have become more and more ineffective over time; he was unable to create a new Georgetown. Barack Obama could have become a cultural icon, but he has been unable to give America’s disintegrating cultural identity the necessary impetus.