With every piece of compromised-to-surrender policy, the latest the “OK, I’ll grab my ankles and be your bitch if you save us from default” deal he gave weepy John Boehner, President Obama becomes a greater object of speculation. When he walked out in that stage in Chicago’s Grant Park he was what the decades-deferred dreams of liberals and progressives wished him to be—the second coming of FDR. Roosevelt had shown the way and Lyndon Johnson and M.L. King had whacked down enough of the obstructions of Jim Crow to clear a path. There he was, a Black man—OK a half-Black man, and one with a real African-American provenance—about to move into a house built by slaves. It was a blend of Virgil Tibbs and Meet John Doe.*
These days a lot of us now realize that we have a more subtle “birther” issue with Barrack Obama—not where he comes from geographically, but where he comes from ideologically. On that account it now seems we might have bought a “pig in a poke.” Ironically, Obama was supposed to be the transparent one. But, of course, it was Bush’s simple-mindedness that was transparent, even when he was lying. It was Obama’s lofty rhetoric, well above the specifics, the devilish details, that we swallowed with the magic Kool-Aid that would bring transparency to political discourse.
Republicans subscribe to the end justifies the means logic. Anything goes once you are convinced the American destiny is threatened. It might be the Watergate break-in, the Iran-Contra deal, or cocking up phony WMD to justify pre-emptive war and torturing prisoners. But at least you know what you are getting. They do not intend to be transparent; but you can see right through them. When Bitch McConnell says his job is to make Obama a “one term president” that’s transparency. (However, it seems not clear enough for Obama to understand that there are whole bunch of racists who hanker for his annihilation, not his cooperation.)
It is now painfully evident that Mr. Obama is more opaque than he led us to believe. Not just duplicitous ,“back room” deals with Big Pharma, but in the egregious and familiar manner in which he talks tough “talk” on domestic policy issues and “walks” like a eunuch when the Republicans enter the room. We would not have expected from his campaign rhetoric that he would he would surround himself with the same people who participated in the economic disaster Bush bequeathed him, and which, along with the Bush-Cheney wars, he has acquired considerable “ownership.” We would no have expected that he would have returned far more immigrants than Bush did.
So we wonder; who the hell is that guy behind those teleprompters, behind those sooth (almost choreographed) rhetorical gestures, underneath that clipped cadence, the sound of magazine loading the next eloquent phrase? He lacks Clinton’s easy personal touch of “talking” to us; Obama “speaks” to us. It was said that Bush was the sort of guy someone could have a beer with; Obama is turning out to be the guy you would not want to have your back in a bar fight. But it has to be more complex than that.
This past Sunday Drew Westin wrote in the NY Times, under the title “Whatever Happened to Obama?” that a president in such times as ours needs a narrative, a story that can situate a people historically. “In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety.” But he concludes that Obama has no such story, just catch phrases like “hope” and “change” and “audacity.” We got none of them. These were what TR and FDR had, but Obama is not with that narrative.
Nobel Economics Laureate Paul Krugman has called Obama the “Pushover President,” a characterization increasing shared in Obama’s (erstwhile?) liberal-progressive base. (OK, he’s like a bobble head on the dashboard of a Goldman-Sachs exec’s Bentley–but he’s our pushover president.)
But David Sirota writes that Obama is FDR, but “ . . . a Bizarro FDR. He has mustered the legislative strength of his New Deal predecessor, but he has channeled that strength into propping up the very forces of ‘organized money’ that FDR once challenged.” For Sirota we just have not recognized that Obama is not weak, but strong, because his real agenda is counter-FDR. He never was a liberal-progressive, as some of those who claimed he had no legislative accomplishments and never held an executive position by which he could be judged.
Maybe, then, I have to modify my earlier take on the slippery Obama political personality [from DCJ 68.2, 10.11.2010]: I have harbored the suspicion that President Obama’s proclivity to do things by halves comes from a lifetime of successfully negotiating his way through the White world. He is in some sense not just a Black man, but a Black “immigrant” (despite, I must remind Mr. Dobbs, the fact that he was born an American citizen). Such a bright man learns, at the interpersonal and institutional level, how and when to lay low or come forward, how to read the prospects and pitfalls. One does not make it to Harvard and the U.S. Senate without considerable ability at political compromise and social skills. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes of him (9.19.2010): The first African-American president, who wrote in his memoir that he trained himself as a young man not to let his anger show in a suspicious white society, now faces anger on an unprecedented scale from a mostly white movement. What that observation might also suggest is that—at the presidential level—it is time, if not of necessity, and prudence, to adopt a more proactive, not reactive and, yes, angry mode. Having reached the pinnacle of political power, Mr. Obama seems not to have the personality to govern with his own determination. The skills to get there are not the same as needed once he has made it. This might well be the reason he seems to “lead from behind.”**
There are other “takes” on what is considered as Obama’s betrayal of his liberal-progressive base (cf., e.g. Olbermann and Michael Moore). Is he really the best thing to come along for the fractious and querulous Republican/Tea Party—the wimpy White House”boy” who gives them what they want and can blame him if they make things worse. And now their arch enemies those “socialist” liberals are turning on him and might sit on their hands next election day.
What to do, oh, what can be done? Not much really. A primary challenge from the real left of the Democrats would be nice, but ineffectual. Or, a challenge from Hillary? No, that would ensure a Republican victory with some bat-shit crazy, Jesus-freak, or funny Mormon underwear plastic rich boy leading us into Dark Ages. We’re trapped.
Maybe there is one more sliver of hope (dare I use the word?) in the re-election of Barrack Obama. Could it be that Obama is his own Trojan horse, playing an admittedly dangerous strategy in his first term (Mr. Pushover/Bush III/FDR Deconstructer/etc.), but, once he is in his lame duck term, out comes the—surprise, surprise—real liberal-progressive-FDR Obama, kicking the crap out of Melanoma-head Boehner and Turtle-head McConnell, countervailing all his half-assed compromises and ushering in a new New Deal, a new era of American greatness . . . and . . .
Quick, wake me up! I’m having a nightmare of audacious hope and change . . .
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© 2011, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 8.10.2011)
*Forgive the movie allusions. Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) was the detective in In the Heat of the Night who actually slaps a white plantation owner; Doe (Gary Cooper) in Capra’s classic was transparency incarnate.
**As I write this Obama has just finished being almost totally distracted and outmaneuvered (again) by the Republicans on the debt default issue and belatedly returning to the issue of jobs.