Barack's Toro Moreno/Hamlet Moment

Watching Obama struggle with implacable resistance to his health-care initiative has been as exasperating as watching a full-length performance of Hamlet: although it has been obvious since Act I that Hamlet needs to avenge his father, he is hopelessly conflicted will not act! Is Obama willing to fight for the public plan (which should be medicare for all who want it) or not? Will he abandon his hopeless need for a bi-partisan bill or not?

Obama has been extraordinary all of his life, a once-in-a-century combination of brilliance, charisma, beauty, and reasonableness. He has the politician's essential gift: he remembers everyone's name. There is no dark, Nixonian underside to him. He has an astonishingly charming, wonderful family. Everyone, even his opponents, likes him.Obama understands the world he sees and has always lived in: a world full of interesting people who like him and wish him well. He has never experienced anything else.

Which is why I'm also reminded of Toro Moreno, the dull-witted prizefighter in Humphrey Bogart's last movie, The Harder They Fall. Moreno has been led by Bogart to believe he's a natural fighter, but, unbeknownst to Moreno, all of his fights have been fixed. When the unfixable title fight is finally arranged, Bogart unexpectedly takes pity on Moreno and tells him to take a dive rather than be hurt. Moreno, outraged, refuses: he doesn't believe Bogart when told he can't fight. To prove it, Bogart sets Moreno up in the ring with a burned-out sparring partner twice his age. I don't want to hurt you, Moreno says to the old man who then unsparingly, massively, and efficiently reduces Moreno to pulp.

I don't think Obama has ever had to confront the idea that there are people whom he can't charm simply by being more likable, reasonable, or respectful. He may have been an organizer in Chicago, but Chicago had never seen his like before and probably never will again. Don't imagine that he was treated like your ordinary Joe! He made some early mistakes but I doubt that Obama ever so much as broke a fingernail in Chicago, his or anyone else's, for all his organizing.

He is opposed by those who find him over-the-top charming, persuasive, and brilliant—and they are beating the hell out of him. I fear that nothing in his experience has prepared him for the revelation that the raw, bare-knuckled political world is not the same as the accommodating one in which he used to live. Last week, for the first time he acknowledged, in a painful-to-watch, near-Shakespearean soliloquy, that there are those who would defeat health care just to hurt him politically—Obama's Toro Moreno moment. Obama's innate wonderfulness has, like Bogart, fixed all his fights for him. Until now. Obama simply can't accept the idea that the "loyal opposition" is out to do him in personally.

Which brings me back to Hamlet, who simply could not believe that Claudius murdered his father in order to marry his mother despite convincing evidence of that crime and others. Substitute Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa for Claudius and, to tie the movie and the play together, you have the old sparring partner teaching Obama a lesson that seems to be shaking Obama to his foundations: I like you but I'm going to thrash you. Don't take it personal, kid.Claudius, having had enough of Hamlet's suspicions, dispatched him by sea with the intention of having Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, well, dispatch Hamlet permanently. Instead, discovering the plot, Hamlet is transformed from the hopelessly conflicted boy to a resolute man of action. I'd like to think that had Obama taken the ferry to Martha's Vineyard this week, he might have experienced a similar transformation. Unfortunately, Obama arrived by helicopter.

Don't Take It Personal