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.