Rick Hertzberg's Victory Dance

The opening pages of ¡Obámanos!, which is a real-time chronicle of Obama’s ascension, begin with agony: Bush winning re-election in 2004. “We’ve got the blues, and we’ve got ‘em bad,” Hertzberg writes. From there, the plot takes a slow but unmistakably upward trajectory. Hertzberg chronicles the death spasms of the Bush-Cheney White House—the flop of Social Security privatization, the botched execution of Saddam Hussein, the 2006 midterm (for which he pronounced the nation should be “grateful”), Rummy’s ouster—before diving into the 2008 Democratic primaries, where he referees disputes between Obama and Hillary Clinton (even though he says he was rooting hard for the former). Then the happy ending: Obama’s general election victory, which has Hertzberg galloping down 125th Street with his wife and young son, shedding tears.

Hertzberg, of course, has voted for every Democratic nominee for president since Lyndon Johnson. Most of those ballots were cast with little reservation. But Obama offered particular enticements. For one thing, there was his muscularly liberal convention address in 2004, which appealed to the old speechwriter. There was Dreams from My Father. “When I read the book,” Hertzberg says, “I knew this was not just speechwriting. This was writing. I knew that this was a book that could properly be called literature.” Then—more to the point—there was the age thing. Hertzberg is 66, and, he thought, If not a great, liberal president now, when? “I’m at the stage of my career where one is spending one’s capital rather than accumulating new capital,” he says.

With Obama in office, Hertzberg says he will turn his attention to another of his long-time obsessions: the byzantine structures of American government. Triumphant Democrats have discovered that big victories in 2008 haven’t instantly led to policy outcomes like, say, health care reform. In the British system, the public option would have been a fait accompli; in what Hertzberg calls our “ridiculously undemocratic” Senate, health care can be single-handedly dynamited by a Max Baucus or a Joe Lieberman.

“Right now, we have a situation where the human occupants are about as good as we’re going to get,” Hertzberg says. “So my attention goes back to the structure they’re trapped in. That’s what Obama and the Democrats are in the grip of now. And that remains to be fixed.”

He is also worried about the Republican Party that has shaped itself in the lurid image of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. “People are going to get fed up with the Democrats at some point,” Hertzberg says, “and they will replace the Democrats with the Republicans. And if these are the Republicans, we are really up shit’s creek.”

During these happy days, Hertzberg has another book out, a pure enthusiasm. One Million is an update of a volume Hertzberg first published in 1970. It seeks to answer a simple question: How big is a million, really? The book has 200 pages with 5,000 dots on each, and Hertzberg has plucked out a few dots to illustrate the bigness of the numbers—i.e., there are 601,405 projected centenarians in the United States by 2050. I asked him if this wasn’t a boyish enthusiasm. “It is,” he says. “And it’s also a kind of remnant of quasi-hippie days.” Add those old feelings to the new liberal ascendancy and you’ve got a columnist who’s never felt better.

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Bryan Curtis is a senior editor at The Daily Beast. His story about his grandfather’s softball career is in The Best American Sports Writing of 2009.

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