Photo Credit: By United States Senate [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
March 9, 2014
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Like
many days, March 3rd saw the delivery of a stern opinion by President
Obama. To judge by recent developments in Ukraine, he said, Russia was
putting itself
“on the wrong side of history.” This might seem a surprising thing for
an American president to say. The fate of Soviet Communism taught many
people to be wary of invoking History as if it were one’s special friend
or teammate. But Obama doubtless felt comfortable because he was
quoting himself.
“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the
silencing of dissent,” he said in his 2009 inaugural address, “know that
you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if
you are willing to unclench your fist.” In January 2009 and again in
March 2014, Obama was speaking to the world as its uncrowned leader.
For some time now,
observers -- a surprisingly
wide range of them -- have been saying that Barack Obama seems
more like a king
than a president. Leave aside the fanatics who think he is a “tyrant”
of unparalleled powers and malignant purpose. Notions of that sort come
easily to those who look for them; they are predigested and can safely
be dismissed. But the germ of a similar conclusion may be found in a
perception shared by many others. Obama, it is said, takes himself to be
something like a benevolent monarch -- a king in a mixed constitutional
system, where the duties of the crown are largely ceremonial. He sees
himself, in short, as the holder of a dignified office to whom Americans
and others may feel naturally attuned.
A large portion of his
experience of the presidency should have discouraged that idea. Obama’s
approval ratings for several months have been hovering
just above 40%.
But whatever people may actually think of him, the evidence suggests
that this has indeed been his vision of the presidential office -- or
rather, his idea of
his function as a holder of that office. It
is a subtle and powerful fantasy, and it has evidently driven his
demeanor and actions, as far as reality permitted, for most of his five
years in office.
What could have given Obama such a strange
perspective on how the American political system was meant to work? Let
us not ignore one obvious and pertinent fact. He came to the race for
president in 2007 with less practice in governing than any previous
candidate. At Harvard Law School, Obama had been admired by his
professors and liked by his fellow students with one reservation: in an
institution notorious for displays of youthful pomposity, Obama stood
out for the self-importance of his “interventions” in class. His
singularity showed in a different light when he was
elected editor of the
Harvard Law Review
-- the first law student ever to hold that position without having
published an article in a law journal. He kept his editorial colleagues
happy by insisting that the stance of the
Review need not be
marked by bias or partisanship. It did not have to be liberal or
conservative, libertarian or statist. It could be “all of the above.”
This
pattern -- the ascent to become presider-in-chief over large projects
without any encumbering record of commitments -- followed Obama into a
short and uneventful legal career, from which no remarkable brief has
ever been cited. In an adjacent career as a professor of constitutional
law, he was well liked again, though his views on the most important
constitutional questions were never clear to his students. The same was
true of his service as a four-term Illinois state senator, during which
he
cast
a remarkable number of votes in the noncommittal category of “present”
rather than “yea” or “nay.” Finally, the same pattern held during his
service in the U.S. Senate, where, from his first days on the floor, he
was observed to be restless for a kind of distinction and power normally
denied to a junior senator.
Extreme caution marked all of Obama’s
early actions in public life. Rare departures from this
progress-without-a-trail -- such as his
pledge
to filibuster granting immunity to the giants of the telecommunications
industry in order to expose them to possible prosecution for
warrantless surveillance -- appear in retrospect wholly tactical. The
law journal editor without a published article, the lawyer without a
well-known case to his credit, the law professor whose learning was
agreeably presented without a distinctive sense of his position on the
large issues, the state senator with a minimal record of yes or no
votes, and the U.S. senator who between 2005 and 2008 refrained from
committing himself as the author of a single piece of significant
legislation: this was the candidate who became president in January
2009.
The Man Without a Record
Many of
these facts were rehearsed in the 2008 primaries by Hillary Clinton.
More was said by the Republicans in the general election. Yet the
accusations were thrown onto a combustible pile of so much rubbish -- so
much that was violent, racist, and untrue, and spoken by persons
manifestly compromised or unbalanced -- that the likely inference was
tempting to ignore. One could hope that, whatever the gaps in his
record, they would not matter greatly once Obama reached the presidency.
His
performance in the campaign indicated that he had a coherent mind, did
not appeal to the baser passions, and was a fluent synthesizer of other
people’s facts and opinions. He commanded a mellow baritone whose
effects he enjoyed watching only a little too much, and he addressed
Americans in just the way a dignified and yet passionate president might
address us. The contrast with George W. Bush could not have been
sharper. And the decisiveness of that contrast was the largest false
clue to the political character of Obama.
He was elected to govern
when little was known about his approach to the practical business of
leading people. The unexplored possibility was, of course, that little
was known because there was not much to know. Of the Chicago organizers
trained in
Saul Alinsky’s methods
of community agitation, he had been considered among the most averse to
conflict. Incongruously, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out in
Blessed Are the Organized, Obama shunned “polarization” as a valuable weapon of the weak. His tendency, instead, was to begin a protest by
depolarizing.
His goal was always to bring the most powerful interests to the table.
This should not be dismissed as a temperamental anomaly, for temperament
may matter far more in politics than the promulgation of sound
opinions. The significance of his theoretical expertise and practical
distaste for confrontation would emerge in the salient event of his
career as an organizer.
As Obama acknowledged in a revealing chapter of his memoir,
Dreams from My Father,
the event in question had begun as a protest with the warmest of hopes.
He was aiming to draw the attention of the Chicago housing authority to
the dangers of asbestos at Altgeld Gardens, the housing project where
he worked. After a false start and the usual set of evasions by a city
agency, a public meeting was finally arranged at a local gymnasium.
Obama gave instructions to two female tenants, charged with running the
meeting, not to let the big man from the city do too much of the
talking. He then retired to the back of the gym.
The women, as it
turned out, lacked the necessary skill. They taunted and teased the city
official. One of them dangled the microphone in front of him, snatched
it away, and then repeated the trick. He walked out insulted and the
meeting ended in chaos. And where was Obama? By his own account, he
remained at the back of the room, waving his arms -- too far away for
anyone to read his signals. In recounting the incident, he says
compassionately that the women blamed themselves even though the blame
was not all theirs. He does not say that another kind of organizer,
seeing things go so wrong, would have stepped forward and taken charge.
“I Can’t Hear You”
“Leading
from behind” was a motto coined by the Obama White House to describe
the president’s posture of cooperation with NATO, when, after a long and
characteristic hesitation, he took the advice of Hillary Clinton’s
State Department against Robert Gates’s Defense Department and ordered
the bombing of Libya. Something like that description had been
formulated earlier by reporters covering his distant and self-protective
negotiations with Congress in the progress of his health-care law. When
the phrase got picked up and used in unexpected ways, his handlers
tried to withdraw it. Leading from behind, they insisted, did not
reflect the president’s real attitude or the intensity of his
engagement.
In Libya, all the world knew that the planning for the
intervention was largely done by Americans, and that the missiles and
air cover were supplied by the United States. Obama was the leader of
the nation that was bringing down yet another government in the Greater
Middle East. After Afghanistan and Iraq, this marked the third such
American act of leadership since 2001. Obama, however, played down his
own importance at the time; his energies went into avoiding
congressional demands that he explain
what sort of enterprise he was leading.
By the
terms
of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, a president needs congressional
approval before he can legally commit American armed forces in
“hostilities” abroad. But according to the argument offered by Obama’s
lawyers, hostilities were only hostilities if an American was killed;
mere wars, on the other hand, the president can fight as he pleases --
without the approval of Congress. No American soldier having been killed
in Libya, it followed that Obama could lead the country from behind
without congressional approval. This delicate legal sophistry served its
temporary purpose and the bombing went forward. Yet the awkward
description, “leading from behind,” would not go away. These days, the
phrase is mostly used
as a taunt
by war-brokers whose idea of a true leader runs a remarkably narrow
gamut from former president George W. Bush to Senator John McCain. These
people would have no trouble with Obama if only he gave us more wars.
The
curious fact remains that, in Obama’s conception of the presidency,
leading from behind had a concrete meaning long before the Libyan
intervention. When approached before the 2008 election by labor leaders,
community organizers, foreign policy dissenters, and groups concerned
with minority rights and environmental protection, each of which sought
assurance that he intended to assist their cause, Obama would invariably
cup his ear and say, “I can’t hear you.”
The I-can't-hear-you anecdote has been
conveyed
both in print and informally; and it is plain that the gesture and the
phrase had been rehearsed. Obama was, in fact, alluding to a gesture
President Franklin Roosevelt is said to have made when the great civil
rights organizer A. Philip Randolph put a similar request to him around
1940. Roosevelt, in effect, was saying to Randolph:
You command a
movement with influence, and there are other movements you can call on.
Raise a cry so loud it can’t be mistaken. Make me do what you want me to
do; I’m sympathetic to your cause, but the initiative can’t come from
me.
It was clever of Obama to quote the gesture. At the same
time, it was oddly irresponsible. After all, in the post-New Deal years,
the union and civil rights movements had tremendous clout in America.
They could make real noise. No such combination of movements existed in
2008.
And yet, in 2008 there
had been a swell of popular
opinion and a convergence of smaller movements around a cause. That
cause was the candidacy of Barack Obama. The problem was that “Obama for
America” drank up and swept away the energy of all those other causes,
just as Obama’s chief strategist David Plouffe had
designed it
to do. Even in 2009, with the election long past, “Obama for America”
(renamed “Organizing for America”) was being kept alive under the
fantastical conceit that a sitting president could remain a movement
leader-from-behind, even while he governed as the ecumenical voice of
all Americans. If any cause could have pulled the various movements back
together and incited them to action after a year of electioneering
activity on Obama’s behalf, that cause would have been a massive
jobs-creation program and a set of policy moves to rouse the
environmental movement and address the catastrophe of climate change.
Civil Dissociation
By the middle of 2009, Barack Obama was no longer listening. He had already
picked an economic team
from among the Wall Street protégés of the Goldman Sachs executive and
former economic adviser to the Clinton administration, Robert Rubin. For
such a team, job creation and environmental regulation were scarcely
attractive ideas. When the new president chose health care as the first
“big thing” he looked to achieve, and announced that, for the sake of
bipartisan consensus, he was leaving the details of the legislation to
five committees of Congress, his “I can’t hear you” had become a
transparent absurdity.
The movements had never been consulted. Yet
Obama presumed an intimacy with their concerns and a reliance on their
loyalty -- as if a telepathic link with them persisted. There was a
ludicrous moment in the late summer of 2009 when the president, in a
message to followers of "Obama for America," told us to be ready to
knock on doors and light a fire under the campaign for health-care
reform. But what exactly were we to say when those doors opened? The law
-- still being hammered out in congressional committees in consultation
with insurance lobbyists -- had not yet reached his desk. In the end,
Obama did ask for help from the movements, but it was too late. He had
left them hanging while he himself waited for the single Republican vote
that would make his "signature law" bipartisan. That vote never came.
The
proposal, the handoff to Congress, and the final synthesis of the
Affordable Care Act took up an astounding proportion of Obama’s first
year in office. If one looks back at the rest of those early months,
they contained large promises -- the closing of Guantanamo being the
earliest and the soonest to be shelved. The most seductive promise went
by the generic name “transparency.” But Obama’s has turned out to be the
most secretive administration since that of Richard Nixon; and in its discouragement of press freedom by the prosecution of whistleblowers, it has
surpassed all of its predecessors combined.
In
the absence of a performance to match his promises, how did Obama seek
to define his presidency? The compensation for “I can’t hear you” turned
out to be that all Americans would now have plenty of chances to hear
him.
His first months in office were staged as a relaxed but careful
exercise in, as was said at the time, “letting the country get to know
him.” To what end? The hope seemed to be that if people could see how
truly earnest, temperate, patient, thoughtful, and bipartisan Obama was,
they would come to accept policies that sheer ideology or ignorance
might otherwise have led them to doubt or reject.
It was magical
thinking of course -- that Americans would follow if only we heard him
often enough; that people of the most divergent tempers and ideas would
gradually come to approve of him so visibly that he could afford to show
the country that he heard the call for reform. But one can see why his
presidency was infused with such magical thinking from the start. His
ascent to the Oval Office had itself been magical.
To be known as the voice of the country, Obama believed, meant that he should be
heard to speak
on all subjects. This misconception, evident early, has never lost its
hold on the Obama White House. The CBS reporter Mark Knoller
crunched
the first-term numbers, and some of them are staggering. Between
January 2009 and January 2013 Obama visited 44 states, led 58 town hall
meetings, granted 591 media interviews (including 104 on the major
networks), and delivered 1,852 separate speeches, comments, or scheduled
public remarks. From all those planned interactions with the American
public, remarkably few conversions ever materialized.
By following
the compulsion (which he mistook for a strategy) of coming to be
recognized as the tribune of all the people, Obama squandered indefinite
energies in pursuit of a finite opportunity. For there is an economy of
gesture in politics, just as there is in sports. Show all your moves
too early and there will be no surprise when the pressure is on. Talk
steadily on all subjects and a necessary intensity will desert you when
you need it.
In
Confidence Men,the
most valuable study so far of the character and performance of Obama as
president, the journalist Ron Suskind noticed the tenacity of the new
president’s belief that he enjoyed a special connection to the American
people. When his poll numbers were going down in late 2009, or when his
“pivot to jobs” had become a topic of humor because he repeated the
phrase so often without ever seeming to pivot, Obama would always ask
his handlers to send him out on the road. He was convinced: the people
would hear him and he would make them understand.
He sustained
this free-floating confidence even though he knew that his town halls,
from their arranged format to their pre-screened audiences, were as
thoroughly stage-managed as any other politician’s. But Obama told
Suskind in early 2011 that he had come to believe “symbols and
gestures... are at least as important as the policies we put forward.”
The road trips have proved never-ending. In 2014, a run of three or four days typically
included
stops at a supermarket outlet, a small factory, and a steel mill, as
the president comforted the unemployed with sayings such as “America
needs a raise” and repeated phrases from his State of the Union address
such as “Let’s make this a year of action” and “Opportunity is who we
are.”
In discussions about Obama, one occasionally hears it said
-- in a mood between bewilderment and forbearance -- that we have not
yet known the man. After all, he has been up against the enormous
obstacle of racism, an insensate Republican party, and a legacy of bad
wars. It is true that he has faced enormous obstacles. It is no less
true that by postponement and indecision, by silence and by speaking on
both sides, he has allowed the obstacles to grow larger. Consider his
“all of the above” energy policy,
which impartially embraces deep-sea drilling, wind farms, solar panels,
Arctic drilling, nuclear plants, fracking for natural gas, and “clean
coal.”
Obama’s practice of recessive management to the point of
neglect has also thrown up obstacles entirely of his devising. He chose
to entrust the execution and “rollout” of his health-care policy to the
Department of Health and Human Services. That was an elective plan which
he himself picked from all the alternatives. The extreme paucity of his
meetings with his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen
Sebelius, in the three years that elapsed between his signing of the law
and the rollout of the policy
makes a fair epitome
of negligence. Indeed, the revelation of his lack of contact with
Sebelius left an impression -- which the recent provocative actions of
the State Department in Ukraine have reinforced -- that the president is
not much interested in what the officials in his departments and
agencies are up to.
The Preferential President
Obama
entered the presidency at 47 -- an age at which people as a rule are
pretty much what they are going to be. It is a piece of mystification
to suppose that we have been denied a rescue that this man, under
happier circumstances, would have been well equipped to perform. There
have been a few genuine shocks: on domestic issues he has proven a more
complacent technocrat than anyone could have imagined -- a facet of his
character that has emerged in his support for the
foundation-driven testing regimen
“Race to the Top,” with its reliance on outsourcing education to
private firms and charter schools. But the truth is that Obama’s
convictions were never strong. He did not find this out until his
convictions were tested, and they were not tested until he became
president.
Perhaps the thin connection between Obama’s words and
his actions does not support the use of the word “conviction” at all.
Let us say instead that he mistook his preferences for convictions --
and he can still be trusted to tell us what he would prefer to do.
Review the record and it will show that his first statement on a given
issue generally lays out what he would prefer. Later on, he resigns
himself to supporting a lesser evil, which he tells us is temporary and
necessary. The creation of a category of
permanent prisoners
in “this war we’re in” (which he declines to call “the war on terror”)
was an early and characteristic instance. Such is Obama’s belief in the
power and significance of his own words that, as he judges his own case,
saying the right thing is a decent second-best to doing the right
thing.
More than most people, Obama has been a creature of his
successive environments. He talked like Hyde Park when in Hyde Park. He
talks like Citigroup when at the table with Citigroup. And in either
milieu, he likes the company well enough and enjoys blending in. He has a
horror of unsuccess. Hence, in part, his extraordinary aversion to the
name, presence, or precedent of former president Jimmy Carter: the one
politician of obvious distinction whom he has declined to consult on any
matter. At some level, Obama must realize that Carter actually earned
his Nobel Prize and was a hard-working leader of the country. Yet of all
the living presidents, Carter is the one whom the political
establishment wrote off long ago; and so it is Carter whom he must not
touch.
As an adapter to the thinking of men of power, Obama was a
quick study. It took him less than half a year as president to subscribe
to Dick Cheney’s view on the need for the constant surveillance of all
Americans. This had to be done for the sake of our own safety in a war
without a visible end. The leading consideration here is that Obama,
quite as much as George W. Bush, wants to be seen as having done
everything possible to avoid the “next 9/11.” He cares far less about
doing everything possible to uphold the Constitution (a word that seldom
occurs in his speeches or writings). Nevertheless, if you ask him, he
will be happy to declare his preference for a return to the state of
civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001 era. In the same way, he will
order drone killings in secret and then give a speech in which he
informs us that eventually this kind of killing must stop.
What,
then, of Obama’s commitment in 2008 to make the fight against global
warming a primary concern of his presidency? He has come to think
American global dominance -- helped by American capital investment in
foreign countries, “democracy promotion,” secret missions by Special
Operations forces, and the control of cyberspace and outer space -- as
the best state of things for the United States and for the world. We
are, as he has told us often, the exceptional country. And time that is
spent helping America to dominate the world is time that cannot be given
to a cooperative venture like the fight against global warming. The
Keystone XL pipeline, if it is built, will bring carbon-dense tar sands
from Canada to the Gulf Coast, and probably Obama would prefer not to
see the pipeline built. Yet it would be entirely in character for him to
approve and justify its construction, whether in the name of temporary
jobs, oil industry profits, trade relations with Canada, or all of the
above.
He has already softened the appearance of surrender by a device that is in equal parts real and rhetorical. It is
called
the Climate Resilience Fund: a euphemism with all the Obama markings,
since resilience is just another name for disaster relief. The hard
judgment of posterity may be that in addressing the greatest threat of
the age, Barack Obama taught America dimly, worked part time at
half-measures, was silent for years at a stretch, and never tried to
lead. His hope must be that his reiterated preference will count more
heavily than his positive acts.
Copyright 2014 David Bromwich
© 2014 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175816/
David Bromwich, the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke's speeches,
On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, has written on the Constitution and America's wars for The New York Review of Books and The Huffington Post.
