On trusting Obama, revisited

James Fallows, while expressing increasing consternation over the ground Obama has ceded in deficit reduction talks, airs the views of a couple of Obama faithful. Here's one:

And now he has taken the Republican stupid-assed, testosterone addled attempt to hold the debt ceiling hostage, and has judo-thrown them into forcing a discussion of the very problem that they've been purportedly complaining about.  He is using their own two-faced complaints about the deficit...and presenting them with a very sound, very practical, very compromised, totally solid proposal to deal with the long-term structural deficit, which any Republican four years ago would have leapt at, and which contains the very broad-based sacrifices that he promised in his inaugural address...

If he succeeds in his big picture deficit plan, he'll go into 2012 having tamed the long term deficit.  He'll be in a position to lambast the Republicans and hopefully, gain more control of Congress, and, when he's reelected, he'll have a powerful mandate to pursue his more adventuresome and long-term beneficial programs. It'll take a few more years, but he's  a long-term strategic thinker, and I think he'll get us there. The Republicans look like a lot of power-addled men who are really out of touch with the electorate.

Fallows' own response: "It is indeed pretty to think so [hmm...seen Midnight in Paris lately, JF?]. And perhaps this will turn out to be true."  As for my own somewhat shaken faith in Obama's moxie as a long-range strategist, here are the caveats and counter-caveats:

1) No one questions Obama's high intelligence and analytical approach to policymaking.  But smarts don't trump nature, they bend to it, and even the smartest are susceptible to confirmation bias.  Obama's greatest character strength is also his weakness: he has got where he is by deploying what Garry Wills called "omnidirectional placation, and which in a kinder interpretation (i.e., mine, a while back) might be recast as a bottomless confidence that he can always disarm, win over, find grounds for cooperation with the most seemingly implacable ideological foes.
 
That orientation has determined his strategy, for better or worse: he is hell-bent on appealing to Republicans' better angels. The face he put on reasonable Republicanism is John Boehner. That made sense as far as Boehner himself goes -- I have been impressed by him this year -- but we recently seem to have learned that Boehner does not speak for his party, particularly the frosh (for the measure of their extremism, read Stan Collender's account of the first Tea Party caucus meeting of the new House).   

One part of Obama's most recent argument, expressed in his last two press conferences, indicates to me that he may be invested to the point of personal mania in transforming GOP intransigence.  It's this:

Where Obama's "placation" ended

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.

To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope. 

It is true that Obama sets tremendous stock in his ability to win buy-in from potential adversaries, to disarm them by acknowledging what he regards (or presents) as the legitimate points in their argument, to find common ground and therefore assent. Remnick captures this.  Recounting Obama's reaction to Robert Caro's portrayal of the old hard-core segregationist bull of the Senate Richard Russell, Reminick writes:

Much of Obama's self-confidence resided in his belief that he could walk into any room, with any sort of people, and forge a relationship and even persuade those people of the rightness of his positions. Jim Cauley, Obama's Senate campaign manager, said he thought Obama believed that he could win over a room of skinheads. "All of us are a mixture of noble and ignoble impulses, and I guess that's part of what I mean when I say I don't go into meetings with people presuming bad faith," Obama has said. Now he seemed to think that he would have had a fighting chance with Russell: "Had I been around at all in the early sixties and had the opportunity to meet with Richard Russell, it would have been fascinating to talk to somebody like that.  Even if you understood that this enormous talent would prevent me from ever being sworn in to the Senate"(426).

But placation is only weakness if it has no end point. Obama did persist too long in trying to win Republican cooperation. But his faith in his ability to win assent was not weakness but hubris.  According to George Packer, the title of whose long chronicle Obama's Lost Year gave Wills his keynote above:

Obama's quest for bipartisanship, in the face of exceedingly discouraging facts, has been so relentless that it suggests less a strategy than a core conviction: reasonable people can be civil, exchange ideas, and eventually find points of agreement.