The More Things Change; The More They Are The Same

I urge you to read the following:

No, it is not about President Obama, but it easily could be.

"His nomination, his campaign, his election had meant many things to many people; now they waited, and many would find themselves disappointed in that first year. He was the first of a new kind of media candidate flashed daily into our consciousness by television during the campaign, and as such he had managed to stir the aspirations and excited millions of people. It had all been deliberately done; he had understood television and used it well, knowing that it was his medium, but it was done at a price. Millions of people watching this driving, handsome young man believed that he could change things, move. things, that their personal problems would somehow be different, lighter, easier with his election. As the President was faced with that great gap of any modern politician, but perhaps greatest in contemporary America: the gap between the new unbelievable velocity of modern life which can send information and images hurtling through the air onto the television screen, exciting desires and appetites, changing mores almost overnight, and the slowness of traditional governmental institutions produced by ideas and laws of another era, bound in normal bureaucratic red tape and traditional seniority. After all, although he had said in his campaign that he wanted to get America moving again, he had not mentioned that the people must allow for the conservatism of the Senate; he had implied that he could do it, it would move. In many ways he was as modern and contemporary as an American politician can be, more practiced at the new means of campaigning than any other major figure (he was frankly bored by the traditional power struggles of the Senate; it was not where the action was, or at least the action he sought). So, elected, he was charged with action against a bureaucracy and a Congress which regarded him and his programs with suspicion, the suspicion varying in direct proportion to the freshness and progressiveness of his ideas. In his first major struggle, a classic conflict of the two forces, the President finally won. But his victory was more Pyrrhic than anything else; it exposed the essential weakness of his legislative position, the divisions in his party, and as such, enemies on the Hill would feel encouraged in their opposition. The lesson, not immediately discernible in the early part of the decade but increasingly important as Americans came to terms with the complexity of their society, was that it was easier to stir the new America by media than it was to tackle institutions which reflected vested interests and existing compromises of the old order. In a new, modern, industrial, demographically young society, this was symbolized by nothing so much as congressional control by very old men from small Southern towns, many of them already deeply committed, personally and financially, to existing interests; to a large degree they were the enemies of the very people who had elected him. He was caught in that particular bind.

…that the most' surprising thing about coming to office was that everything was just as bad as they had said in the campaign."

The above quotation, and I have taken the liberty of making some very few deletions, and even fewer revisions, to keep it from being obviously about John Kennedy, is excerpted from Chapter V of "The Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstam written in 1969 and it refers to the first year of the Kennedy Administration, or the year 1961 half a century ago.

For those who would like to read the unchanged version, though with some verbiage deleted, can find it here.

Those who want to read it unexpurgated will find the quote here.