Overcoming the Poverty of Ambition: Barack Obama and the Bully Pulpit

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By David Michael Green (about the author) Page 3 of 3 page(s)

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Similarly, so much of where we go wrong in America is rooted in our system of campaign finance. As that screaming radical of the looney left, John McCain, once said, “America gets the best Congress money can buy”. Lots of Americans get enraged about taxes and pork barrel spending, but in doing so they (conveniently) miss the big picture. The problem is way deeper and way more fundamental. If a president were ever to lead on this, we could perhaps break the stranglehold that special interests have, not just on spending, but on policy. Almost every issue domain in American politics would turn out radically different if special interest’s interests were divorced from policy-making.

There are countless examples of what Obama could do with his bully pulpit but, above all, he must use it to completely reorient thinking (or what has passed for it) in this country on the global warming issue. This one never ceases to amaze me. Even the deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic metaphor fails to do justice to the sheer stupidity of American policy on this issue. As climatologists are now discovering that even their gloomy projections of massively destructive warming were insufficiently dire, my jaw sometimes drops so hard it dents the pavement in the realization that this society continues to allow short-term profits for extremely narrow special interests to continue their campaign of disinformation on the issue. Or that such-and-such a person’s job – or even a million jobs – stand in our way (falsely, at that) of saving the planet from total destruction. Do the oil and coal barons have some other celestial body their children will be able to inhabit, of which I’m unaware? Have they colonized Mars in preparation for the offspring of Shell and Exxon/Mobil CEOs to migrate there? Are there really human beings so impossibly sociopathic that they would trade entire species for a couple of extra decades with a second or third yacht? Yes, of course, there are. And the crisis therefore screams out for presidential leadership on the matter. Would it be so much for the president to say that these “What, me worry?” lies are, in fact, lies?

Barack Obama remains something of an unknown quantity to the world, even after two years of campaigning and a hundred days of governing. Both progressives and regressives alike have reasons for satisfaction and disappointment with the guy. Some in the former category still hold out hope that Obama is a practitioner of three-dimensional chess, that he’s smarter and more patient than the rest of us, and that he will implement progressive policy solutions soon enough, but cleverly, strategically, and deliberately. This may not necessarily (or, alas, may) be an entirely fantastical exercise in wishful thinking. Sounding reasonable and centrist while Cheney and Limbaugh push the GOP further toward the edge of the cliff with their insane histrionics, for example, is not necessarily a bad way to eventually move even dumbed-down America in the direction of a thoughtful politics.

Whether Obama ultimately turns out to be the clever progressive in centrist’s clothing, or the plain old centrist (and sometimes out-and-out conservative) in centrist’s clothing is yet to be determined.

What is clear, however, is that among any president’s greatest powers is the force of words, and that few presidents have ever had the rhetorical magic this one possesses.

If he uses this power thoughtfully and courageously, he might in so doing produce more positive impact on the direction of this country than would any bill rammed through Congress, or any redeployment of troops.

Getting Americans to think differently about themselves and their politics is the key that unlocks every door.

Obama carries those keys in his pocket.

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David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), (more...)

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