We're About to Learn Something Important about Obama

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By Andrew Bard Schmookler (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)

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For OpEdNews: Andrew Bard Schmookler - Writer

In the course of the next month or so, we are going to learn something important about Barack Obama: How great is his capacity to learn and to adapt creatively?

During the campaign, at several junctures, Obama impressed me on just this point, which is one of the aspects of the man that made me very hopeful about his presidency. But in the past two months, he's seemed slow to catch on to the way his customary approach was failing to deal with the evolving situation.

The evolving situation concerned the battle over health care reform. His customary approach is to be conciliatory and to avoid confrontation.

Non-confrontation is a fundamental aspect of Obama's modus operandi. He was able to ride that approach all the way to the White House. The effectiveness of that approach surprised me, and I learned a lot from Obama.

My own tendency is far more confrontational. My own website --www.NoneSoBlind.org-- was launched with a piece entitled "What America Needs Now: A Prophetic Social Movement that Speaks Moral Truth to Amoral Power." I closed that piece with this declaration:

Let us then speak to America out of our faith in a venerable idea deeply embedded in the Western religious tradition: the idea that the material power of the bad ruler can be overcome by the power of moral truth boldly spoken. Let us launch, then, a prophetic” social movement to re-establish the power of real righteousness in America.

Obama spoke some moral truth, but he hardly took on the mantle of the prophet to denounce the evil ruler. He left evil pretty much alone. Yet, avoiding confrontation with evil, he succeeded.

Until now, with this health care reform battle. For the past two months, Obama has been losing the battle, and in large measure that is because he has continued employing his habitual mode after it has ceased to be effective. While his enemies became ferocious and hateful, he remained calm and gentlemanly. Obama occasionally addressed their lies, but he never counter-attacked his enemies by calling them on their lying.

As a result, it seems, the lies of Obama's enemies largely drowned out Obama's positive message, and at the end of this one-sided confrontation a substantial proportion of the American people believed the lies and Obama's numbers were falling.

Why didn't Obama succeed with the methods that have worked for him before?

Perhaps it is because in this instance he's trying to sell something complicated. (And it didn't help that not only was it complicated but, because Obama did not define the specifics of his program but left it substantially up to Congress, "Obama-care" remained vague.)

Compared with the kinds of lies Obama had to deal with during the campaign (such as the image of him as a Muslim terrorist), a complex program is vulnerable to the lie: What's not easily perceived and understood is more readily misrepresented so that people will see it as something different from what it is.

He could sell himself just by showing himself, but he could not sell a complex and amorphous program his enemies were determined to distort without joining the battle.

Regardless of the reason why the lie succeeded in this instance, regardless of the reason why it no longer worked for Obama to leave the crazies to be crazy while he modeled sanity, what Obama has to understand now is that no single way of dealing with things is adequate to all occasions.

Non-confrontation has its uses; so also does confrontation. And it is now time for Obama to wield a different set of tools to prevail.
The old tool is not adequate to the new situation.

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Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. (more...)

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