The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Dream a Little Dream With Me

Somewhat lost in the presidential horse race this week, the Senate again takes up the question of retroactive immunity for the phone companies that helped the Bush administration in its illegal eavesdropping program. The rationale for granting telecom immunity is that they were innocently misled by the Bush administration’s doomsday rationale for breaking the laws and need to be free to be misled by the same rationale again in the future.

I point this out to make the simple observation that the folks inclined to sneer about Barack Obama’s hands-across-America yes-we-can fairy tales would do well to remember that we haven’t exactly been residing in gritty, cold reality these past eight years.

As Fred Kaplan points out in his new book, Daydream Believers, excerpted today in Slate, the politics of the Bush era has largely rested on near-daily screenings of a horror movie cobbled together up by a handful of fantasists unmoored from history, science, technology, or fact. And it was a movie they were screening privately long before 9/11.

After eight years of enduring the “daydreams” of “dangerous men [who] act their dream with open eyes," Obama’s daydreams about change and hope sound almost hardheaded and pragmatic to me.