Not the Beatles Afterall

My mother-in-law has always thought I believed Obama was a savior of some sort. That's not true. We use language in flexible ways sometimes. You know how you might say to someone, "Oh! You're my savior!", when all they've done is stop to help you fix a flat tire and get your car out of a ditch, when your kids are in the back seat miserable and hungry, and it's getting dark? Obama's that kind of savior, helping us pull the nation out of the ditch the Bush administration steered us into.

The recent reissue of the Beatles albums, vividly remastered for the digital age, has opened up a window to help me describe what I believed about Obama, and what, as his Presidency unfolds over the first year, seems to be a more accurate picture.

What it boils down to is this: Obama is not the Beatles. He's the Kinks. But, although I have friends and nieces and acquaintances who will shout and throw things at me: the Kinks just missed being as great as the Beatles. I just heard a voice in Morningside Heights yell: "What!?" I know others out there are asking: "Are you gosh-darn-it CRAZY!"

Don't come at me with your outraged sensibilities until you walk away, take a deep breath, and listen to the string of albums the Kinks put out between 1966 and 1969: Face to Face, Something Else, The Village Green Preservation Society, and Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Genius. And most of the weight of composing these albums rested on Ray Davies. His brother Dave wrote a few great songs along the way (Death of a Clown, for example), but the best way to understand the situation is this: it would be like John Lennon carrying the songwriting duties of the Beatles without Paul McCartney. George Harrison contributed his share, much like Dave did. I Want to Tell You and Taxman help make Revolver a great album. But strip McCartney's Eleanor Rigby, Good Day Sunshine, and Got to Get You Into My Life from Revolver and the distance between it and Something Else by the Kinks is a matter of taste, not a difference in talent. Quit your belly-aching. It's true. Here's what I am talking about:



Aside from Paul McCartney, and the resources they could command because they were a cultural and commercial phenomenon, the difference between the Beatles and the Kinks was George Martin. Obama's problem is that he hasn't found his George Martin. Who could that be? My candidate: Donna Brazile. I know she has been cast off into the Democratic wilderness, forced to spend time with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday mornings, because she presided over the embarrassment that was the Al Gore campaign. But she is smart, strategically attuned, and commanding. Make her Chief of Staff, and suddenly Shangri-La starts to sound like A Day in the Life.

1967 is commonly understood to be the year the Beatles left their British Invasion rivals in the dust, and in the process redefined what rock and roll musicians were capable of achieving. That was the year they recorded and released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But I would claim, the next year was as important for my argument. Out of all their albums, Sgt. Pepper's was most clearly a product of the Beatles' artistic collaboration with George Martin. The strings, the depth of the recording, with layers upon layers of instrumentation and vocals, the quirky effects that were new to the recording studio: all of these were George Martin's contribution. Sgt. Pepper's, and later Abbey Road, are the albums that give my argument plausibility. Without George Martin, those albums would have never been the albums we cherish. Surely, they would have been remarkable albums, full of thoughtful and thought-provoking songs, but they wouldn't be Sgt. Pepper's and Abbey Road.

In 1968 the Beatles released the White Album, and the Kinks released The Village Green Preservation Society. The White Album was a double album which, famously, was a sprawling, all-over-the-map grab-bag. Noisy here and there, melancholy in places, outright weird in others. Ray Davies wanted Village Green to be a double album too, but his record company refused. Which tells us something else about why the Beatles were the Beatles: their prominence and commercial clout gave them the chance to do what they wanted.

Obama is more like the Kinks in this way too. He might have been a rock star on the campaign trail, but it has become clear that he is not universally loved, and the opposition party has carefully employed devices to call forth our uncertainties, our fears and our prejudices. Even more certain, he doesn't have the financial or operational resources to do the things he wants. The Bush years left our economy in shambles, the government deeply in debt, and our armed forces bogged down in two unwinnable wars. I made the argument once that Obama offered the promise of a new type of politics, setting aside incremental step-by-step gains for transformational, paradigm-shifting change. That may have been enthusiastic hyperbole on my part. Or I may have been right, but it is now impossible for Obama to move that quickly, since his administration must wade through Bush's wreckage in everything it does. Obama might want to produce the equivalent of a transformative double album, but circumstances will only allow him to slowly grind out more modest policy achievements that, while more limited in their scope, are indispensable and if passed into law will change the lives of those the policies touch.