Meacham Tells Maher Obama's Not a Messiah, Just a 'Very, Very Hardball, Hardcore Practical Politician'

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham appeared on Friday night’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, and acted like a great moderator in the debate over Barack Obama, that he was neither the "Indonesian sleeper agent" the right imagined, or the "Messiah" the left imagined, but just a "very, very hardball, hardcore practical politician" willing to commit "great sins" in war time.

Meacham also assailed what he called the "fundamental illogic" of Dick Cheney’s remarks, saying he isn’t fighting Obama so much as his old Bush colleagues.

Bill Maher was very upset the Democrats were such "pussies" on closing Guantanamo, and assailed that "dusty old dumbass" Harry Reid for enabling a 90-6 vote against funding a Gitmo closing until the White House has a plan for it. Meacham agreed that it was "insane." But then he added:

You have political reality that goes back to something you mentioned. Obama during the campaign was a screen on which a lot of people projected their hopes, their anxieties, their dreams for the country. A lot people saw in him what they wanted to see. The right saw an Indonesian sleeper agent who, you know, was going to turn us into a socialist country. President Bush did that in September.

But then the left, broadly put, you may know some of these people, occasionally saw the Messiah, a mixed metaphor in your terms [speaking to Maher]. And so the question is – You don’t get to be the president of the United States without being a very, very hardball, hardcore practical politician.

And he has made a decision, I think, that on these "worst of the worst" [terrorist suspect] things, it’s not worth fighting. And this, I think, preventive detention, as they call it, may go down like one of the things like the Japanese internment, like Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, as one of our great sins. But wartime presidents commit great sins, and I think he’s willing to do that.

Meacham didn’t sound disappointed by it. He wanted to play the realist, the "very hardball, hardcore" politico in the media. But it looks a little disjointed to paint George W. Bush as a "dictator" (as Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter did) and then turn around and suggest Obama’s merely a pragmatist. Newsweek projected the Obama campaign as an ongoing dream sequence, with gauzy cover stories and syrupy prose and visuals.

On Cheney, Meacham presented Cheney as an extremist who lost battles with more moderate elements on Team Bush, and he’s illogical to claim harsh interrogations that stopped kept on protecting the country:

Cheney is arguing in a way not with Obama, but with his former president. Because a lot of the issues he’s arguing about are in fact second-term Bush initiatives. He’s trying to, as the president said the other day, relitigate the second term of the Bush administration, when people like Stephen Hadley and Condi Rice and others were pulling him back from the more extreme elements that he now speaks of as if they were going on until the 19th of January, keeping us safe.

But you really can’t have it both ways. Many of these things stopped, oh-four/oh-five, and he’s now – which is one argument, and the other argument Cheney’s making is this kept us safe all the way through.So there’s a fundamental illogic, and it’s Cheney arguing with his former administration.

But isn’t Meacham bright enough to consider that if, from the Cheney perspective, waterboarding a Khalid Sheikh Muhammad kept thousands from dying in Los Angeles, that these saved Americans kept on "not being dead" long after the waterboarding stopped? Many of these "worst of the worst" measures – like Guantanamo – actually did stay in effect through January 20 and are still in effect.