The Character of Barack Obama
David Bromwich
Professor of Literature at Yale
There are times when President Obama seems to imagine himself as the moderator of a national discussion encompassing all the major issues. A similar fantasy must have been harbored by many gifted speakers, at one time or another. The odd thing about finding it in a president is that the fantasy is so completely non-political.
One of the strangest facts we know about Obama is that his colleagues and students at the University of Chicago Law School came away from discussions very impressed with his abilities, but not knowing what he thought about many issues. This was not torts or contracts. Obama's subject was Constitutional Law.
He has always had a reputation for being fair-minded -- a strength only attainable by someone who is (to begin with) minded. But the cautiousness of his first six months as president shows a pattern of accommodation that often lands him on the far side of actual prudence.
His instinct is to have all the establishments on his side: Wall Street, the military, the mainstream media; the most profitable corporations in all but the most signally failing industries; and that movable establishment (which disappears and reconstitutes itself), the quick-take pulse of popular opinion on any given issue. A president, ideally, wants all the establishments to support him, of course. You can't do without two or more at a time on your side; it is hopeless to set yourself at permanent enmity with even one. Yet to oppose the bankers on the question of bailouts, to oppose the military on drone assassinations, to exhibit non-pliability against the insurance companies and press for a public option in health care, to defy a bare majority of popular opinion on the importance of keeping Guantanamo open -- to have fought at least some of these battles need not have been hazardous for a president who came into office on a wave of revulsion against his opposite.
In dealing with some of these issues, Obama has stepped forward and then back. On some, he has not yet taken a first step away from his predecessor.
Pragmatic justifications have been offered to explain his aversion to any contest that implies a clash of opposing interests. Thus Rahm Emanuel said of the disastrously time-wasting courtship of Republican support for the stimulus package: "The public wants bipartisanship. We just have to try. We don't have to succeed." But try every time and you will waste your life. And when did the public say it wanted bipartisanship? The last fair measure was the election of 2008; and the public then gave a convincing majority to one party.
Alongside Obama's reticence sits a curiously incompatible trait, a certain grandiosity. This showed recently in his second statement about the Cambridge police. Offered a chance to concede that matters of local law were ultimately outside his province, he replied that in his view such things were "part of my portfolio." Psychologically, this may be so. But Obama is mistaken if he thinks many Americans want to see that portfolio carried into many other towns and cities. People like to think a president is too important for that. He stands at the very head of the dignified part of government (as Walter Bagehot called it). He can't at the same time enter into the efficient part of government at the level of the city police.
Doubtless a certain grandiosity is an aspect of the man. But if it is bad, all things being equal, to appear grandiose and worse to appear timid, it is the worst of all to be grandiose and then timid.
Occasionally Obama seems even better in ad lib discussions than one had expected -- with voters and reporters, and with other politicians. But he has turned out to be far less canny than he needs to be in making the sort of major speech that explains an issue from the ground up. The absence of such a speech on the economy in his first few weeks in office, and the public unease generated by that default, prompted the first of his "recovery" trips on the road, to the West Coast for several town-hall meetings and an appearance on The Tonight Show. Now, far into the discussion of health care, he has re-engaged the strategy with appearances at town hall meetings in the Midwest. These represent the second stage of closing an understanding with the public that lacked a first stage.
On July 30 the New York Times ran a story about a woman who owns a small business and has followed the president from place to place to ask him a question. Is there, she wanted to know, a single government program that has ever done anything right? (She got that knock-down challenge from talk radio.) Obama replied with two examples, Medicare and Veterans Hospitals. The business owner who had chased him down with supreme confidence in her mockery was surprised to hear those two sober examples. Nobody had told her. Then there is the citizen at another town-hall meeting who said: "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."
Several months into the president's call for health care reform, their level of ignorance is his responsibility.
More...interesting read at........
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/character-of-barack-obama_b_251186.html
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