The Daily Beast

There’s nothing Americans love more than demanding “honest talk” about race and then kicking the teeth out of anyone who engages in it. Thus the tale of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is now in political purgatory because he told authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann that white people were more open to voting for Barack Obama because he’s “light-skinned” and has “no Negro dialect.” Reid’s use of the word “Negro” was, to be sure, unpleasantly retro. But everything else about his statement is undeniably correct. Political scientists have proved it.

Remember when conservatives believed in color blindness? Before 9/11, when affirmative action was a hot topic; they were positively weepy on the subject. Discrimination based on skin color is just plain wrong, they used to declare, no matter whom it benefits. Martin Luther King was invoked. It was a matter of high principle. Conservatives had a dream.

Ronald Reagan once compared the flow of a presidency to the flow of a movie: Grab their attention at the beginning, coast for a while; then a big finale at the end. When he signs health-care reform in January, Barack Obama will have successfully completed Act One. Health care and the massive stimulus bill passed back in February represent the two most important pieces of progressive legislation in four decades. Domestically, Obama has had the most successful opening act of any president since Reagan himself.

Though Congress hasn't passed health-care reform legislation just yet, Senate Democrats have cleared what many believe to be the highest hurdle by getting all 60 members of the caucus to unite behind the Reid bill. So while congressional Republicans will continue to maneuver, we can safely say that President Obama has all but achieved his most vitally important legislative goal. If the final legislation looks anything like the Reid bill, it will most likely prove a very grave and very expensive mistake, one that depends on a number of rosy scenarios coming to pass.

Of all the kooky conspiracies you've heard about President Obama, from the fanciful notion that he was born in Kenya to Glenn Beck's deeply-held belief that he is a closet Marxist, I can guarantee that you've never heard my own pet theory, which is that Barack Obama is a sleeper agent dedicated to destroying the American left. This isn't literally true, of course. But the president's extraordinary ability to get liberals to abandon their convictions in exchange for symbolic gestures puts Bill Clinton to shame.

Harry Truman, who George W. Bush often praised but never understood, once said that “We all have to recognize—no matter how great our strength—that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.” To Bush and Cheney and Palin, the sentiment is offensive. Why should America not do as it pleases? After all, since our power stems from our virtue, the more unrestrained we are, the more good we will do.

Since everyone else is doing it, let me propose a person of the decade: Ulysses S. Grant. Yes, I know he’s been dead for more than a century. But the “aughts” have been his decade—because between 2000 and 2009, the North vanquished the South yet again. Today, when the folks who run Congress come to talk to the folks who run the White House, Barack Obama (Illinois) and Joe Biden (Delaware) sit down with Nancy Pelosi (California), Harry Reid (Nevada), and Richard Durbin (Illinois). There’s nary a Southerner in sight. And not coincidentally, northern values are in ascendancy.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s relationship with the Obama White House is badly broken, and it's hard to see how it can be fixed. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry's explosive call to rethink a troop increase in Afghanistan has renewed doubts within the Obama administration and the larger Democratic foreign-policy community about whether Karzai's government, in its current incarnation, is worth fighting and dying for. And though the president seems to be inching towards a substantial troop increase, these nagging doubts have led to a call for a narrower, more defined commitment to Afghanistan.

As the Republican Governors Association gathers in Austin this week, there is a real sense among conservatives that the Obama Bubble is about to burst. And all eyes are on the assembled governors to see who might do the bursting in 2012. Ever since his 2002 election, I've kept close tabs on Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota. As governor, Pawlenty coined the phrase “Sam’s Club Republican,” which Ross Douthat and I later used to refer to a strain of Republicanism that aims to meet the needs of working and middle class voters.

Thus far, President Obama has primarily been worried about his left flank as he sends more troops to Afghanistan. He should be just as worried about his friends on the right. I fully expect that over the next year Republicans will begin to abandon the president en masse over Afghanistan.