Breaking Barack

My president has a lot in common with my favorite meth maker.

Like the story of an upstart senator from Illinois, the saga of Walter White, the Mr. Chips-turned-Scarface at the center of “Breaking Bad,” started out simply enough. Saddled with a cancer diagnosis, a son with cerebral palsy, and an unexpected pregnancy, the brilliant chemistry teacher turned his talents to manufacturing meth—just to leave enough for his family before he died.

To a country that in 2008 was similarly saddled with a slumping economy and scarred from President Bush’s law of war and war on the law, the meteoric rise of Barack Obama glowed with a messianic aura.

But from their initial perches of moral rightness, Barack and Walt both gradually slipped. Walt, the one-time family man, poisons children and bombs nursing homes. The one-time constitutional law professor now ardently defends the unconstitutional surveillance of most and the unconstitutional assassinations of others.

But both didn’t break bad overnight. There’s an intermediate stage—a schizoid split among dueling impulses and personas. For Walt, shell-shocked after too many encounters with megalomaniacal dealers and cartel leaders, it’s the alter-ego of Heisenberg: the drug kingpin who is fearless where Walt is feckless. And for Obama, buffeted by unsubtly racist criticisms as weak or un-American, it’s his alter-ego of the hawkish commander-in-chief putting national security—or least what neoconservatives think that is—above all else.

Like Walt, he wants “to be the danger,” to be “the one who knocks.”

Just like spirits in horror movies, the darker personas fester in secrecy and insidiously subsume the real character—a metastasis metaphorized by Walt’s resurgent cancer.

By the time the persona is publicly revealed the transformation is complete, leaving a trail of betrayal and deception. For “Breaking Bad,” when Walt brutally manipulates his wife Skyler, brother-in-law Hank, and even cooking partner and pseudo-son Jesse, the effect is brilliant television—a drama that subverts the audience’s expectations of a likable protagonist.

President Obama’s undisclosed hawkishness also subverted expectations, but to much less brilliant effect. To the country’s disappointment, the anointed candidate was a dud president—misplaced faith in Anakin Skywalker that begat Darth Vader.

In “The Second Coming,” W. B. Yeats cautions us with a phrase that could be the central theme of politics: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

The passionate intensity driving both men is an obsession with their legacies. The president’s dithering, half-hearted administration springs from a spineless fear of criticism—a Neville Chamberlain-like policy of appeasement with the right wing in hope of a more charitable depiction in the history books. Walter needs to avenge the perceived wrong of selling out his third of a multibillion-dollar company for $5,000 because of a personal dispute.

“I’m in the empire business,” Walt says.

“Is a meth empire really something to be that proud of?” his cooking partner Jesse Pinkman retorts.

The American empire is certainly more prestigious than Walt’s. But is it still something to be proud of?

Is the ends-justifies-the-means mentality of the post-9/11 era really any different from Walt’s calculus? If constitutional protections and international laws are seen as mere hurdles to be circumvented through legal loopholes by executive fiat, how does that differ from Walt’s always impeccable self-rationalizations?

And while the “Breaking Bad” finale is in one month, Obama has more than three years left in his term. If the tantalizing flash forwards are to be trusted, things won’t end well for Mr. White. Yet the possibility for redemption, for a radical recalibration of the country’s priorities, still exists for the president.

But it seems unlikely that he would suddenly back away from staunchly defended power grabs like the National Security Agency’s disturbing domestic spying operations, unprecedented incrimination of investigative journalists and whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, or the right of a president to maintain kill lists with American citizens on the rolls.

Walt could well be speaking for the president when he threatens a family member he has ensnared in his web of lies:

“If you don’t know who I am, then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly.”

Idrees M. Kahloon '16 is a Crimson editorial writer in Dunster House. Follow him on Twitter @ikahloon.