In Dallas, Obama returns to Gettysburg

Is suffering redemptive? Obama thinks it is.

Do violent upheavals lead Americans to recommit to and advance the nation's founding ideals? Obama professes faith that they do, and will.

The ideas, as Obama has absorbed them, come from Lincoln above all others. At moments of crisis, he reverts to Lincoln's rhetoric. And so, in Dallas this week, he closed his funeral oration for the five murdered police officers by reprising (not for the first time) the Gettysburg Address:

And that’s what I take away from the lives of these outstanding men.  The pain we feel may not soon pass, but my faith tells me that they did not die in vain.  I believe our sorrow can make us a better country.  I believe our righteous anger can be transformed into more justice and more peace.  Weeping may endure for a night, but I’m convinced joy comes in the morning.   We cannot match the sacrifices made by Officers Zamarripa and Ahrens, Krol, Smith, and Thompson, but surely we can try to match their sense of service.  We cannot match their courage, but we can strive to match their devotion.

Obama's seductive love for America

The irony in this "Obama doesn't love America" crap is that Obama got himself elected by holding up  to Americans a flattering mirror that was suited to the moment.

The national narrative that Obama put forward in 2007/8 had two salient points (okay, may it had three or four or five, but two come to mind here). It was, first, a bid to move the political center to the left -- to cast American history as a progression in which Americans at various crux points demanded and obtained new common investments in shared shared prosperity and new extensions of equal opportunity to an ever-widening and more inclusive circle -- African Americans, women, gays. In Obama's telling, the nation had veered off-course for eight or thirty years, but democratic self-correction was also part of the long historical pattern and would come with him.

That's a kind of "whig history" for America, and it resonated in the wake of a disastrous conservative presidency.  It was also a message essentially common to all Democrats and would have worked for almost any Democrat.

The real contest in 2008 was in the Democratic primary, and perhaps Obama beat Hillary by making this whig history sing, tapping a deep American mysticism previously tapped by Lincoln and -- somewhat more caustically -- by Martin Luther King. This second element was captured by Obama's "more perfect union" trope.  That is: America's founding documents expressed principles for the best ordering of human society, and while the nation has never lived up to these ideals, its democratic engine draws it ever closer -- ever more perfect, never perfected. Those ever-widening circles of inclusive opportunity are bending the arc of history toward justice. Martin Luther's famous "check" of equal opportunity, returned for insufficient funds, is being paid on a very long mortgage schedule.

Where Obama's placation ended

In honor of the ACA's end-of-open season rush, a repost. 

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Garry Wills, summing up David Remnick's portrayal of Obama in The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, is close to right, and yet so very wrong, as he segues to his own judgment:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

Obama on kinks in the arc of history

One passage in Peter Beinart's stirring ode to Obama's gun control efforts set me thinking again about how Obama views (and frames) U.S. history:

Republicans often describe America as a country that was once pure—at its founding, before the New Deal, or before the 1960s—was sullied and now must now be redeemed. Obama, by contrast, describes America as a protracted struggle to honor our best ideals by overcoming our evil past, a struggle in which heroes often die without ever seeing their labors bear fruit. It’s no coincidence that a month after Newtown, he swore his inaugural oath on the bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and spoke of “the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall.” It’s no coincidence that he so often quotes King (who was himself quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker) as saying, “Even though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.”

I would slightly edit this acute observation, altering "overcoming our evil past" to "overcoming the evils in our past" or "overcoming our more limited past."  Due in part perhaps to political necessity, Obama puts a relentlessly positive spin on the national historical saga, casting it as a tale of continual progress toward a more perfect union.  The circle of those included in the "all are created equal" widens in concentric historical ripples, "through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall." It's a presentation of American history modeled on Lincoln's concept of what Garry Wills tagged in Lincoln at Gettysburg as "continual approximation" of the ideals embedded in the Declaration of Independence.  Wills cites Lincoln setting forth that concept in the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

Ruth Marcus's false "false false choice" charge

Purporting merely to debunk an irritating and misleading rhetorical device, Ruth Marcus has struck at the heart of Obamaism. Her target is Obama's fondness for what she calls a "false false choice':

The false-choice dodge takes three overlapping forms. The first, a particular Obama specialty, is the false false choice. Set up two unacceptable extremes that no one is seriously advocating and position yourself as the champion of the reasonable middle ground between these unidentified straw men.

I will argue further down that most of the Obama false choice tropes Marcus takes on are valid.  But first I want to spotlight the seriousness of the charge.  The false choice trope is not merely a tool of rhetorical combat. Setting things up this way reflects a core tendency in Obama's personality and approach to problem-solving.

Obama learns message discipline

Obama's latest weekly address  reinforces my sense that he is more comfortable working with a GOP that has a measure of power than he was working with a large but filibuster-prone Democratic majority.  What "Omnidirectional placation"  -- Garry Wills' somewhat derogatory and somewhat accurate term for Obama's m.o. -- works better with those under pressure to deliver than it does with those whose incentive is to thwart action.

Obama in 2011 has been far more on message than he was in the first two years of his presidency. He is building on his track record of successful negotiation with Republicans late last year to lock in the expectation that there will be further substantive compromise. He refers constantly to compromise accomplished and bids to set the parameters for compromise to come.  He alternates the olive branch -- we all agree that there must be cuts, and here are mine -- with his line in the sand:  the austerity can't undercut the investments he's defined as essential.   I believe that the repetition will resonate as negotiation heats up.  Here's how he hit the key refrains this week:

Liberal Reagan -- not

Garry Wills was right. Obama's default mode is "endless placation." When it doesn't work, he keeps doing it.  He did it nonstop on 60 Minutes tonight.

A few days ago, I linked to a Times story relating some statements by Ronald Reagan in January 1983, when his approval rating hit its nadir of 35%.  The words sounded superficially like Obama's, since the situation was so similar -- an unemployment rate stuck in the 10% range, a large loss in the recent Congressional elections.  But the differences were more telling than the similarities.

Reagan was unequivocal: his policies were working and would continue to work.  To the extent that they hadn't worked fast enough, it was because of compromises forced by the Democrats.

In the 60 Minutes interview tonight as in his Nov. 3 press conference, Obama validated Republican lies about his policies and the legislation passed by the 111th Congress. The healthcare reform process somehow tainted the result.  The bank and auto bailouts and stimulus gave the appearance that he was a proponent of big government.  He took too harsh a tone or somehow damaged the interest of the business community.  He failed to change the tone in Washington.

He never called out Republican mendacity or asserted that the reason he wasn't able to work with Republicans was because they made a bad-faith decision early on to stonewall his entire agenda and malign policies that in any sane era would have been bipartisan -- stimulus, bank and auto bailout, a health insurance program that leaves the private insurance industry intact and flourishing.

Worse, he never defended his own record with any vigor.  It's easy to ventriloquize a "liberal Reagan" defending the accomplishments of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. We created or saved 3 million jobs and added 3 points to GDP.  We saved the U.S auto industry from destruction. We saved the U.S. banking industry from destruction. We've got the states literally racing to enact meaningful, measurable education reform.  We've made unprecedented investments in alternative energy.  We ensured that banks could not entice and defraud consumers as was their practice last decade. We ensured that there will be no more megabank bailouts.  We've ensured that every citizen will be able to afford health insurance within five years and at the same time instituted healthcare cost controls that the CBC conservatively estimated will save $1.34 trillion over twenty years.  We closed the donut hole while eliminating Republican giveaways to insurance companies that balloon Medicare costs. We ended the corporate welfare system of student loans and ensured cheaper, fairer loans for all college students. We enacted the most stringent emissions controls on cars and trucks ever. We wrung $20 billion in restitution from BP. We did and we did and we did -- we accomplished more on behalf of working Americans in 2 years than our predecessors have done in the last 50.