Obama is a bit confusing at this level. He often appears to be considerably more progressive than he is, or even than are his words. This perceptual trick has much to do with him being young, black and fresh (Biden was right about that part), but much more to do with him not being Bush. The last president not only made time stand still while history marched on, he actually bent the national arrow backwards. Obama, by simply barely catching up with history, is therefore taking a great leap forward from where he found the country he inherited – but it’s not really much of a real jump, from the longer historical perspective.
At the same time, though, the guy says that Iraq was a war of choice. He says that America has made mistakes in its past. He says we need national healthcare. He told graduating students at ASU that the pursuit of wealth – heretofore the very essence of our horrid little national ethos – represented an impoverished ambition. He went to the Islamic world and talked with them as equals, rather than lecturing to them as a superior.
This stuff really matters, because it does literally persuade people. In general, it seems a fundamental part of human nature that many people just want to be led. Probably this is an intellectual laziness more than anything else, or maybe they’re working too hard trying to hold together their middle class perch with duct tape and fraying string, but whatever the cause, the psychology is pretty clear. On any given issue, presidential rhetoric at its most basic level of persuasion can really matter, especially to the many people who prefer to let someone else do their thinking for them.
A third level of significance here is the strategic. I don’t know to what degree careful analysis of these repercussions underlie the rhetorical choices Obama makes. But what I do see, over and over again, is that the combination of his thoughtful, centrist, arguments, coupled with his calm delivery and unflappable demeanor, have been devastating to regressives at home and abroad. This is why you see these unbelievably childish attacks on the president that have nothing to do with substance, by the likes of Beck, Limbaugh and Gingrich. The president is staking out eminently reasonable positions (far too ‘reasonable’, actually), and making entirely moderate appeals to the public to support him. On the right, at least, this leaves hysterical ad hominem critiques and fabricated stories of failure as the only recourse. Of course, that garbage comes from habit, as well. For decades now, it’s worked rather effectively. But the public has moved on, even if regressive losers cannot seem to help themselves from smearing again. I hope they do a lot more of it, actually. I think every tirade of this sort effectively stokes their scary base of frightened old white men, while at the same time shrinking that base by alienating the middle. Like Bush said to those bad, bad men who were evildoing in Iraq, when it comes to the right acting stupid in public, I say, “Bring it on!”.
The effect is similar abroad as well. How much less plausible to ordinary Muslims do the right-wing religious rants of bin Laden and the Taliban seem in the wake of Obama’s initiative in the Islamic world? Bush was the radicals’ great gift. But even they couldn’t believe their astonishing fortune when the moron went completely off the deep end and invaded Iraq. Obama, on the other hand, is just the opposite, even apart from his middle name and personal history. Watching him go to Cairo, admit America’s past mistakes (well, sorta - they were more like crimes, actually, but hey), and acknowledge the legitimacy of Arab aspirations in an honor-obsessed and simultaneously self-regressing part of the world – this had to have been bin Laden’s worst nightmare. Indeed, some are arguing that Obama’s speech was already a factor in the significant turn represented by this week’s elections in Lebanon, a big defeat for Hezbollah.
Fourthly, and finally, there is the nature of how we engage politically – or what might be called the character of the meta-discourse – to consider. To choose just a single but very apropos dimension, we can have a mature national dialogue, or we can have an adolescent politics, complete with embarrassing bursts of explosive hormonal irrationality. In some ways, I think this will be Obama’s greatest gift to America, and likely – because of its subtlety – the most unnoticed and therefore unsung. Barring major scary events or crises, it’s hard for me to imagine the country, having finally tasted something akin to adult discourse, returning to the darkly comical days of Bushism. I doubt I’m the only one who finds viewing video clips of the Boy King in action from the last eight years incredibly cringe-inducing, regardless of whether or not one agrees with the content of his speech. Here was a cheap politician, of transparently severe emotional retardation, haranguing the country about the two-dimensional cardboard world he wanted us to believe we inhabit, as if he were Britney Spears lecturing a class of college students about the wonders of Santa, like they were kindergartners. “Santa!” “Presents!” “Reindeer!” After four or eight years of Obama, will Americans outside of the country’s few remaining erroneous zones ever again find that horrid and condescending tripe tolerable, let alone compelling?
All of this suggests that an Obama presidency might in many ways be well worth the price of admission – however disappointing at the same time – based on the rhetoric alone. If all he ever did, for example, was to reorient what we expect from ourselves and our politicians with respect to the how of politics, rather than the specific whats, that would represent an enormous contribution, even while we’d still need to recognize as well the missed opportunities to live up to his full potential. Think about the Founders and the Constitution. Their brilliance wasn’t in stuffing the document with answers to all the political questions that could ever arise. Indeed, their brilliance in part was in not trying to do just that. What they did instead was to create a structure for each generation to use in answering its own questions. Similarly, what if Barack Obama marked the historical dividing line between an old America with a political maturity level of four, and a new one at eight? That alone would be a huge contribution.
There are serious risks to the rhetorical presidency, however, as alluded to above.
First, at some point – especially during a crisis, and most especially during multiple crises – people want results. In Obama’s case, for example, his presidency will probably live or die on the basis of the economy – or at least, on the basis of the public’s perception of their economic vulnerability. But, more generally, a steady diet of words unmatched by achievements is thin soup indeed, even given the relief it provides in contrast to eight years of slurping thick and polluted sewage in a cup. Just ask Tony Blair. After eighteen unremitting years of Thatcher and Major, he got away with doing very little of the things of real consequence to British voters for a long time. But it would have been a lot less of a long time, had the prospect of more years of Conservative rule not been voters’ only viable alternative to Labour. Before long (and before he über-foolishly mortgaged his entire political legacy on George Bush’s sick adventure in Mesopotamia), Blair began to be perceived as a too-slick-by-half used car salesman. That could also be Obama’s fate.
An even darker scenario for the president would entail the public concluding that, not only do his actions not match his words, but they in fact contradict them. There’s already good reason to come to this conclusion. Particularly if one looks at his economic and civil liberties policies – this is a guy who even as a candidate voted for the telecom immunities bill that he had previously promised not only to oppose, but to filibuster. Obama too often talks like Bobby Kennedy but governs like George W. Bush. That’s a big disconnect, and one that could have a nasty bite to it should a surly public catch on at some point. This would entail more than disappointment with empty rhetoric. This would be anger at being lied to, perhaps all the more impassioned for the very reason of previously raised expectations emanating from the president’s laudable elevation of the political discourse.
In short, Barack Obama may be an impressive president, even if he does little. But he also puts at risk his greatest asset – the power of his rhetoric – if he doesn’t deliver more than just words. The two are independent of each other in many ways, but only for so long a time.
No president since FDR has come to office with so much crisis on his plate and so much potential for greatness associated with his leadership in response. Few have come to the office as intellectually, emotionally and politically well-equipped to do some real damage, either, despite Obama’s general lack of experience (which both history and common sense teach us is overrated, anyhow).
If I had to guess right now, I’d bet that he is going to be a very mixed success as president. If I had to guess, I would expect that he will in most every case favor half-measures, even when a crisis fairly well screams out for bold action, and even when the public could readily be persuaded or – worse – already is.
But I also think he will make some highly significant contributions as the rhetorical president of our time. Assuming the disconnect between his words and his actions doesn’t undermine him completely, this is nothing to be sneezed at, for sure.
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