Doesn’t mean that important processes aren’t running their course or that there’s much to depend on. Indeed, as one informed observer of the stock and commodities markets put it, the underlying message is that risk is back (while confusion reigns). Yet it feels as though the great political and cultural wave has receded, and that the tide has crested – for now.  Whether something like it again arises, and soon, and can reach an even higher mark, is an open question.

For now – maybe not much longer than it takes to finish this post, for all I know – we’re in the pools of the Obamian backwash.

What I’m referring to is reflected in the conclusion to Charles Krauthammer’s Friday column.  He observes the post-Massaschusetts state of things under the title “The great peasant revolt of 2010,” but what he describes is a correction toward the center, nothing approaching a revolution:

For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.

The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back. It recenters. It renormalizes. Even in Massachusetts.

ObamaCare seems well and truly dead, dead enough to provoke laughter from Democratic Reps quizzed about its prospects, leaving its remaining backers looking to Al Franken to express how seriously they feel about it.  On domestic affairs, the President himself seems like a Corpse-Man walking, his post-SOTU bounce evaporating, each passing day making his “hard pivot” on jobs and the deficit, and his office, look ever more trivial.  Retrenchment (in both figurative senses, economizing and fortifying – not settting off on new lines of march) seems to sum up the current phase of foreign and security policy, too.

The right is gaining, or has gained, but if “re-centering” is enough, then how much farther does it need to go? It would be enough to blunt the Obama program, and otherwise muddle through, taking some losses here and there, resting on the resiliency of the American economy and “bedrock common sense.”

Re-centering and re-normalizing read to me as treading water, or maybe floating in place for a while, maybe a good long while… It makes me think of some lines by John Ashbery, whom I think of as a poet of fraught complacency:

We Were on the Terrace
Drinking Gin and Tonics

when the squall hit.

Barack has gone out on a limb on this one. He has doubled down on the war in Afghanistan- and to give the administration its due, they have blown up a couple of really bad guys- but it’s getting harder. Lotsa casualties.

This creates a circular problem: if many people are like me, we don’t believe that the president means what he says. We don’t believe that he can lead and inspire the troops to fight the “good war.” And we don’t really believe he understands war well enough to lead well. This becomes a huge morale problem, not only for the military, but for the country. My own belief is that the reason GWB invested so much in Iraq was that there were aspects of Iraqi society that we could identify with: a middle class, biblical references, a truly bad guy at the top. Afghanistan is different, worlds away, a literacy rate in the low double digits and an intractable “culture of poverty,” as the new catch phrase has it.

On Special Report tonight, Mort Kondracke said that Obama was completely sincere about “winning” the “good war.” In the biggest fight I’ve ever seen between him and Charles K., Charles said, “He can’t even utter the word ‘victory.’ How can he even understand what that will take if he can’t say the word?”

I came to love Texas sometime in the fall of ’93 when I spoke to a man who had dispatched the problem of a neighbor’s 6′ boa constrictor in his driveway with a pistol.  Since then, I have come to love it for other reasons, and not least of all for today’s kudos from Charles Krauthammer on Special Report.  Let me quote, as accurately as I can (I’ll fix as soon as the t-script is published):

Today the governor of Texas said that he will reject the healthcare reform legislation citing his interpretation of the 10th amendment.  I say, why stop there?  Why not secede? Secede from health care, secede from cap and trade.  Texas has a history of gaining its independence.  True, there were some losses the first time [laughter] but they won against Santa’ana, and Obama is more lightly armed.