Rick Hertzberg's Victory Dance

Jae C. Hong / AP Photo With ¡Obámanos!, his exuberant new collection chronicling the rise of the president, The New Yorker’s witty political sage celebrates the good guys finally winning.

The first time Hendrik Hertzberg, the New Yorker political writer, met Barack Obama, the young Illinois senator tried to pay him a compliment. As Hertzberg later described the exchange, Obama said “he didn’t think of my work as being knee-jerk liberal.” Yowsers. Anyone who has read Hertzberg in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section over the years knows that he is—unapologetically, indefatigably—a liberal. And Obama’s election has Hertzberg kicking with both feet. Hertzberg’s rollicking new collection of columns, ¡Obámanos!—The Birth of a New Political Era, is a liberal knee-jerker doing an end zone dance.

So yes, these are happy days for Hertzberg. “I don’t expect to see a better president in my lifetime,” he says, sitting in his New Yorker office filled with piles of books and a twin mattress.

“I didn’t hate Bush the way I voluptuously, enjoyably hated Nixon,” says Hertzberg.

“We—vaguely progressive-minded, liberal Democrat-types—have a substantial majority in both houses of Congress,” Hertzberg continues, “which is larger than it’s likely to be in the next four, eight years. So this is it. This is it.”

The feeling of joy is magnified by the closing of the Bush era, which Hertzberg considers the worst presidency of his lifetime. He pauses, before qualifying it. “Well, the only reason I hesitate is because of Nixon. … I think Nixon was the worst human being to be president in my lifetime, but Bush was probably the worst president. I think he might have been the worst president ever.”

But, he adds, “I didn’t hate him the way I voluptuously, enjoyably hated Nixon.”

Voluptuous and enjoyable are two words you might select to describe a Rick Hertzberg column. The column can be about Obama,Bush, Chris Matthews or Mitt Romney: his prose always has a snappy assurance that makes it seem like he’s having fun even when he’s not, politically-speaking. Frank Rich and Paul Krugman are New York’s liberal mafia dons; Hertzberg is the wiseguy who sidles up at the subway entrance and tells you a breezy joke while he lifts his eyebrows.

This puckishness may be due to the fact that until Obama’s victory, Hertzberg, as if a victim of some giant cosmic joke, seemed fated to only write about Republican presidents. In his thirties, he was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter when Carter was thumped by Ronald Reagan in 1980. (“I brought that on myself,” he admits.) As two-time editor of The New Republic, Hertzberg covered Reagan and Bush I. He was hired by Tina Brown at The New Yorker in 1992, as Bill Clinton led the Democratic re-awakening, but was primarily an editor. During the first term of Bush: The Sequel, Hertzberg returned to writing full-time, usually batting leadoff in “The Talk of the Town.”

It was during this period that he became a strong voice of loyal opposition. You are not likely to be surprised by how he comes down on the Iraq War in ¡Obámanos!, but you are likely to admire the cleverness of his lead paragraphs, the range of reference and effortless deployment of history (he’s happy to time-warp back to the Founders, or further back, as necessary), and, of course, the witticisms (“Bring us the head of Donald Rumsfeld”). “It’s manna for the base,” says Franklin Foer, the current editor of The New Republic, “but it’s three-Michelin-starred manna.”

Hertzberg is one of the favorite MSM citations of the liberal blogosphere. “You could argue that bloggers love him,” says Ezra Klein, a staff reporter and blogger at The Washington Post, “because his crystalline, elegant prose is what we all wish we could do, and like to imagine we could do, if we simply had more time.”