As a matter of principle, I try to pay as little attention as possible to polls and the ESPN-style analysis that invariably follows. Still, it’s hard not to notice that Barack Obama’s approval rating has been trending mostly downward. This is because a lot has gone wrong.

On the issues, Obama’s highest approval ratings are for education, but he’s accomplished little there. He gets decent marks for foreign policy, but due mainly to the inertia he’s accumulated by reversing his predecessor’s policies. His own efforts (as much as they can be considered his), especially in the Middle East, have been stymied by events. The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are at a standstill and don’t look to be going anywhere. Violence in Iraq is up and the only bright spot is looming withdrawal. Afghanistan gets worse every day.

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The domestic front is no better. The economy continues to sputter. It seems that for the next year, the best-case scenarios are a decline in the rate of decline or (fingers crossed) anemic growth. Obama’s biggest problem is his foundering Healthcare reform. The Republican Party has used the issue to exhume itself. That much of their opposition is based on demagoguery (the “socialist” label) and sophistry (the “death panel” spectre) is immaterial. They’ve mobilized their base, allied themselves with conservative Democrats and accomplished a lot. A government-run alternative, once considered mandatory by the Obama Administration, looks to be bargained away for the sake of passing a bill, any bill. If that happens, the President will take a lot of heat from the liberal wing of his party. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, in a much discussed quote, put it succinctly:

…ultimately, if the president decides that he’s going to go with a reform effort that doesn’t include a public option, what he will have done is spent a ton of political capital, riled up an incredibly angry right wing base who’s been told that this is a plot to kill grandma…and he will have achieved something that doesn’t change health care very much and that doesn’t save us very much money and won’t do very much for the American people. It’s not a very good thing to spend a lot of political capital on.

If we assume, as is increasingly likely, that a watered-down healthcare bill is passed, Obama will still be unpopular with the right (no surprise there) and possibly with the left as well. He’ll be boxed into the center and his bargaining power will diminish. Worse, midterm elections are barely a year away and Obama must be on his best political behavior, since his party will probably loose seats next November. The race for the White House will start right after and further circumscribe the new President. So Barack Obama might not accomplish much of anything in his first term, and we must face the possibility that a crucial period in our nation’s history will be one of dithering and stagnation, another way-station on the road to decline.

-Greg Waldmann

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Coming out of Bowery rain into downtown New York’s New Museum last Friday, I didn’t expect more than to spend an an hour or so with some installations and some video art, — I’d just come off a long bus ride and was hoping the video rooms might have pillows on the floor. I didn’t expect a change in the way I think about the world and I didn’t expect to be be emotionally moved, but if you can make it to the Bowery show in the next three weeks, or to any of the dozen spots across America Red Dragon movie download Welcome to the Jungle move Private Lessons full movie where It Is What It Is travels this year, you can safely expect to leave feeling fascinated, bent out of shape, and grateful.

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The physical space of It Is What It Is doesn’t carry the viewer away. Two maps take up one corner of the wall — one of the maps is an outline of Iraq with the names of American cities inside it, the other vice-versa. Across the room sits the husk of an exploded car, which a little card explains was destroyed in an explosion on Al-Mutanabbi, a street of bookshops. There are some before and after pictures of the street there too.

But these things are mostly on hand to begin conversations with the attendant Iraqi citizens, academics, and soldiers, name-tagged participants who have had real experience of the country and who will appear throughout the next few weeks on the gallery’s couches in shifts. They are the installation, and they are not only fascinating but welcoming and solicitous. Although I haven’t asked, I suspect that the artist and organizer, Jeremy Deller, coached some of the participants on how to begin conversations with potentially unadventurous gallery goers. I talked with artist and Lieutenant Colonel Peter Buotte

about my life and my family’s military history and it turned out that we had a surprising amount in common. I asked him what he’d done in Iraq (infrastructure repair) and what Iraq’s most pressing problems were (massive corruption, among others, and no one knows what’s up with the electricity).

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Shortly, a woman, also wearing a name tag, arrived and sat down next to us. Her name was Zainab Saleh

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and she and Peter were as anxious to talk to each other as I was to talk to both of them. He and I both listened to stories about her life growing up in Iraq (her family had been murdered there and she escaped shortly afterward by “knowing the right people to bribe”). She told us that sectarian violence has increased enormously in her lifetime, that much of the unemployment and despondency now chronic there began as a result of the embargo in the 90’s, that normal people had turned to radical religion when they felt hemmed in. She said she never wanted to go back.

I can report these facts and more, but we have all read plenty of articles about Iraq and most of this has been observed by others and is somewhere in print. But the genius of the exhibition is its humanity, how normal and strange it is at once. The effect isn’t at all that of going to a lecture, since you’re just sitting around talking. But it isn’t exactly like a dinner party conversation either: there was no pressure to be amusing or to entertain. Even though I paid ten dollars to have the conversation (gallery admission, student rate), I felt privileged to be a part of it. As new people walked into the gallery — one or two every few minutes — we waved them in.

Later that day, I told a number of friends how much It Is What It Is had moved me, and a few were more than suspicious: What corporation had funded it? Were antiwar activists represented? In what ways had they tried to change my mind? I was against the war from the start and I still am, and no one tried to change my mind. (I asked a soldier how he felt about the decision to go and recent decision to leave, but he responded in the way soldiers have to: “we were ordered in and so we went, now we’re being ordered out, so we’ll go”). No, you probably won’t have your mind changed about whether or not the invasion was a good idea, but you may find yourself feeling differently about other aspects of the last six years; you may even find yourself finally knowing why something you’ve always suspected to be true really is true. But the one thing I can promise you is that both the war and the history of Iraq and the Americans who are over there now or who have been there in recent years will feel more real to you.

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You owe it to yourself to go, and to ask questions, no matter how foolish they may seem (and plenty of mine were plenty foolish). Talk with everyone who’s there and shake their hands. A better world would have more art like this.

– John Cotter