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Much of the focus on President Obama’s one-year anniversary in the White House, on Wednesday, centered on retrospective views timed to the day he took office on Jan. 20, 2009. It’s a ritual of the calendar and the media: the customary polls assessing his performance in office; the ritual scorecards of “promises kept” and “promises broken”; the pat “report cards”; the hierophants in the punditburo about Obama’s future prospects and those of the Democrats in this election year.
The real events that both mark his first year in office and offer a forecast to the three years remaining didn’t dovetail with the anniversary. One occurred the day before, the other one a few days later. Both of these Richter-scale events underscore the unpredictable nature of our politics. Both could be bellwethers for Democratic prospects in 2010, Obama’s presidential prospects in 2012, and other campaigns into the indefinite future.
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The first happened on Tuesday, when Scott Brown, a little-known Massachusetts Republican state senator, defeated his Democratic challenger, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, to deliver unto the Republicans the seat in the United States Senate occupied for 47 years by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, moral conscience of the Senate.
Besides being a response to Coakley as a candidate — one who by all assessments ran a feckless, half-hearted campaign — the Brown win was seen as a message to the White House that the GOP could penetrate an historically reliable Democratic stronghold.
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Brown tapped into public anger about the bank bailouts, proposed changes in U.S. health care, and a generalized fear about the size of the federal government and its role in everyday American lives. With a populist campaign that featured Brown sprinting from town to town driving a truck and wearing blue jeans and a barn coat instead of a suit and tie, Brown successfully adopted the grassroots outsider meme that Obama himself used to great effect in the 2008 presidential run (right down to a slight variation of the font Obama used in his campaign logos and branding all of 2008).
The result is a likely challenge to the Obama health-care agenda that’s hanging on by a thread in Congress, and a certain revival of Republican swagger and confidence in that party’s prospects for 2010 and beyond.
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The second and more serious pushback against the Obama agenda happened on Thursday. In a decision that threatens to permanently transform the ground game of American politics, the United States Supreme Court, 5-4, ruled that corporations, like individual American citizens, could make unlimited contributions to political campaigns in order to influence politicians.
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In its decision, the Court purported to hew to the free-speech principles enshrined in the First Amendment. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority: “The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.”
Justices Roberts and Alito wrote, in a concurrence: “The First Amendment protects more than just the individual on a soapbox and the lonely pamphleteer.”
The decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, effectively overturned 103 years of settled law, and was a direct indicator that the court meant to put citizens and corporations on equal existential footing.
It sent the signal that the battle between Wall Street and Main Street — between the interests of deep-pocketed corporation and those of everyday people — has been fully joined by the most toweringly dangerous, thunderously insensitive Supreme Court ruling since Dred Scott.
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Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissenters, framed the stakes of the decision: “In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. ...
“The Court’s blinkered and aphoristic approach to the First Amendment may well promote corporate power at the cost of the individual and collective self-expression the Amendment was meant to serve. It will undoubtedly cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress, and the States to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process. Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.“
The anglers’ saying for making a decision — “fish or cut bait” — has rarely attracted so much attention as it has since Sunday, when Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens used the phrase to set the terms for deciding on a time for retiring from the court. “There are still pros and cons to be considered,’ Justice John Paul Stevens told The New York Times. “[But] I do have to fish or cut bait, just for my own personal peace of mind and also in fairness to the process. The president and the Senate need plenty of time to fill a vacancy.” .jpg)
It’s a fact that whoever President Obama nominates to the court will be required to pass a test as fraught with politics as with a command of the law. Olive branches from ranking Senate Republicans notwithstanding, GOP senators can be expected, as a matter of reflex, to oppose whoever he chooses. 
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