Politics & Power Quote by Kathleen Parker

Parker’s line lands like a polite reprimand dressed up as pragmatism: the problem isn’t that the house was on fire, it’s that the homeowner used too much water. Calling Obama’s ideas “too big for America’s appetite” turns policy into digestion, a metaphor that quietly shifts blame from leaders and institutions to the public’s supposed squeamishness. It’s a neat rhetorical move. If the country can’t “stomach” transformation, then ambition becomes a kind of bad manners - overeager, indiscreet, vaguely irresponsible.

The subtext is less about Obama’s agenda than about timing and permission. Parker grants that “transformative events” might be desirable, even “nice,” but only under calmer conditions, as if structural reform is a luxury good you purchase after the recession clears. That frames governance as maintenance, not reimagination: patch the roof, don’t redesign the building. The implied standard for a Democratic president becomes managerial minimalism - fix the immediate crisis, avoid ideological fingerprints, don’t force a national argument about who government is for.

Context matters: this is post-2008, when the economy was collapsing and political polarization was metastasizing. Parker channels a broader centrist anxiety that Obama overreached, but she also captures a recurring American contradiction: we romanticize bold change in retrospect, then punish it in real time. Her critique isn’t just about policy outcomes; it’s about emotional bandwidth - a claim that democracy has a stress threshold, and that leaders exceed it at their peril.