Why America doesn’t do kings
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: October 29 2010 22:05 | Last updated: October 29 2010 22:05
On my mantelpiece is an election night invitation that has a picture of President Barack Obama on it. I have been asked to “join national conservative and Tea Party leaders for a history-changing election victory party as we throw out the ruling class”. There is nothing demeaning or wrathful about the way the president is portrayed. On the contrary, he looks handsome, youthful, thoughtful – every inch the man Americans elected in a wave of pride and optimism two years ago. It is just that someone has photoshopped a bejewelled crown on to his head. That, my hosts imply, is why the Democratic party will lose dozens – and maybe many dozens – of seats in Congress next Tuesday.
Perhaps they are right. Although voters have decided that Democratic policies, from last year’s stimulus to this year’s healthcare plan, threaten the country with ever-expanding deficits, Republicans have just as bad a track record and offer no credible budget alternatives as yet. Yet the president is at a disadvantage because of the spirit in which his policies were offered. He has governed in a spirit of condescension. He has snubbed the voters he seduced, cut them cold, given them the high hat. An alternative history of the president’s first two years in office would look not at the moments when he provoked voters’ disagreement but at the moments when he insulted their sensibilities.
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Four episodes stand out.
The first came in July 2009 when James Crowley, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, police sergeant, found Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard professor of Afro-American studies, trying to break into his own house. (He did not have his keys.) The officer asked Mr Gates to show identification. Mr Gates grew angry and wound up in handcuffs for disorderly conduct. Mr Gates claimed he had been “profiled”, singled out because he was black. Mr Obama took his side. He accused the officer of having acted “stupidly”. The charges against Mr Gates were dropped.
But Cambridge is a city with a hair-trigger sensitivity to racism or even the hint of it. Working in that environment, Sgt Crowley had compiled such a spotless record that he even taught the city’s course on racial profiling. If Mr Gates was wrong, then the president had a big problem, for he knew Mr Gates socially. Once all the bombast about race and the Ivy League and respect for the police was cleared away, as it eventually was, the story line looked exceedingly simple. A powerful politician appeared to have intervened in a local police matter to tip the scales of justice in favour of his friend.
Episode two came when Mr Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009. There was no shame in being awarded it, but it was a mistake to accept it. Mr Obama admitted he had not yet accomplished anything to further peace. The award looked like a stunt meant to damage the international reputation of the US, a Nordic sequel to the Palme d’Or awarded to Michael Moore’s anti-Iraq war movie Fahrenheit 9/11 at Cannes in 2004. While it did not violate the letter of the constitution about accepting emoluments “from any King, Prince, or foreign State”, it violated the spirit. The award made Mr Obama beholden to a foreign power, even if it was the “soft power” of elite opinion rather than the hard power of a state. Those who objected could not be accused of any kind of double standard. When Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, appeared to be the favourite for the Republican presidential nomination in 2007, nothing incensed rightwing primary voters more than his having (while a private citizen) accepted an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. Those voters backed Ron Paul in 2008. Today, in much bigger numbers, they back the Tea Party.
A third big hit for Obama’s reputation as a man of the people came with his wife Michelle’s visit to Spain last summer. Again, it is hard to pin down exactly why this bothered voters, but it is easy to see that it did. The most substantive cause for grievance was that the vast security entourage that needs to be laboriously and expensively rolled out for the president and his family when he travels on business was instead deployed so that Mrs Obama and her friends could enjoy the sun.
It made matters worse that there were sunny regions of Mrs Obama’s native country undergoing economic hardship – the oil-lapped shoreline of Louisiana sprang to the minds of many.
The president’s most recent slip came two weeks ago at a Massachusetts fundraiser, where he widened the distance between himself and the electorate in the very effort of trying to explain it. “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now,” he said, “and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.” Arguably Mr Obama is at his most blunt, honest and incisive when he is speaking to millionaires. It was at a San Francisco fundraiser in 2008 that he described Pennsylvania voters as “cling[ing] to guns and religion”.
For the purposes of this election, the crown fits. While Americans honour the office of the presidency, they expect the person who fills it to remember that he is, constitutionally speaking, their employee, not their king. They prefer a man who looks right in a dunce cap to a man who looks right in a crown, as they have had many occasions to show.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.
Time for the great orator to talk back
By Simon Schama
Published: October 26 2010 23:00 | Last updated: October 26 2010 23:00
History will be kinder to the first two years of Barack Obama’s administration than the electorate next Tuesday. (That’s because history mostly gets written by gutless liberals, you can hear conservatives snort.) But history loves lists and the record of the 44th president and the universally despised 111th Congress boasts an array of legislative accomplishments unrivalled since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society years of the 1960s and the momentous opening charge of the New Deal in 1933. Facing his own midterm debacle in 1994, Bill Clinton, (now by a long way the most popular politician in America), had nothing remotely comparable to run on. Between Mr Obama’s twin peaks of regulatory reform of the financial industry and healthcare, are unsung acts of excellence that speak to the gross inequities of American society: the delivery of medical insurance to 11m children hitherto deprived of it; legislation enabling women to bring legal action against employers who fail to offer equal pay for equal work; prohibitions against credit card companies jacking up interest rates without warning to extortionate levels.
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History loves this kind of meaty record. But politics yawns at it. And on one critical matter, history will not cut the beleaguered president a break: the inability to protect his own power. That fatal flaw has come about through the one defect no one watching his ascent to the White House, punctuated as it was with so many exercises in eloquence, could have predicted: a failure to connect with the American people. But then Mr Obama has always inclined to the magnificent oration over the truck-stop rap. To keep the sympathy of the people you need your high mind to get down and dirty, and there is something about simplification to which this most intellectually complex of presidents is constitutionally allergic.
Which is not to say that, over the long haul, he will be remembered as a loser. Though he himself has said he would prefer to be a one-term president who did the right things rather than re-elected on expedient compromise; it is too soon to be writing the obituaries for his administration. For one thing, the expectations for the Democrats on election day have been so apocalyptic that any results belying them will be treated on the left with hysterical elation. Lately there has been some movement in the polls and not towards the right, nothing to get in the way of Republicans recapturing the House of Representatives but perhaps enough to thwart their control of the Senate.
Sarah Palin-anointed stars of the Tea Party such as Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, whose professed devotion to the Constitution was not helped by her failure to recognise in its First Amendment the separation of church and state, are now more entertainment than threat. Liberal icons such as Barney Frank in Massachusetts, co-author of the momentous reform of financial regulation, pounced on by the gleeful rightwing media as in Deep and Deserved Trouble, and obliged to put a hefty chunk of his own change into the campaign, now looks to be in the clear. The Senate race in Colorado, in which another Tea Party darling Ken Buck should have been streets ahead, is a toss-up. In California, Barbara Boxer should scrape by against the ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard Carly Fiorina. Republican control of the Senate is then likely to come down to whether Joe Manchin in West Virginia, enough of a local to be endorsed by the National Rifle Association and a foe of cap and trade in a state where coal mining is the heart of the economy, can fend off his businessman opponent, John Raese.
Crumbs of comfort from the table of ruin? Perhaps, but not the annihilation of the Democratic party that Republicans are slavering for. There will be symbolic humiliations over which Republicans will crow till they can caw no more: the Senate Majority leader Harry Reid going down in Nevada; Mr Obama’s own Senate seat in Illinois likewise changing hands. But should the Republicans control both houses of Congress, they should not expect, in the ashy dawn of November 3, a chastened president to appear in the Rose Garden mantled in sackcloth and ashes. Ronald Reagan at precisely the same moment in his administration – the midterm of 1982 – his presidency similarly bogged down in recession and high unemployment, had identical poll numbers as Mr Obama, stuck around the mid-40s.
Mr Obama knows perfectly well that the Republicans may as easily be punished as rewarded by their own success. For what are their choices in the two years that lie ahead? Either they can be co-opted in the politics of economic difficulty, or more likely they can remain the Party of No, the Party of Adamant Repeal, a position that will be much less popular with the electorate two years hence than they now imagine. Will the Party of No again allow medical insurance companies to deny treatment to patients on grounds of pre-existing conditions? Will the Party of No return the financial industry back to the unhinged Klondike that brought the country to the verge of Depression? Most important, if Mr Obama has not entirely lost his nose for strategy he will force the Republicans to say exactly where, beyond the discretionary spending that accounts for a modest proportion of government outlay, they are prepared to make the deep cuts that will reduce the deficit as steeply as they say they want. Since they refuse to contemplate reining in military spending, they will have to run on reduced entitlements. Hello voters in Michigan and Nevada: our platform is to cut or postpone the Social Security you have already paid for, we think it’s a wizard idea to abolish drug prescription benefits for seniors! Now there’s a way to poop the Tea Party overnight.
It was never going to be easy. In his downbeat inauguration speech asking America to “put away childish things”, Mr Obama said as much. But he grossly underestimated the need of the American people to cling to childish versions of what has befallen them; recite puerile readings of the Constitution that bear no relation to the determination of Founders such as Hamilton to create a strong federal government, quite as much as to warn against its engrossing power. What do all the Tea Partiers waving their copies of the sacred document imagine was meant by “to promote the general welfare” in its Preamble?
But Mr Obama is not dealing with informed readings of history, he is dealing with the comical-sinister version narrated by Glenn Beck who fancies himself a professor. He has had to deal with a quasi-religious conviction that tax cuts are the engines of growth rather than the makers of mega-deficits as any inspection of recent history will incontestably demonstrate. (Thanks Dubya for the $1.3 trillion deficit.) He is confronting a public that by a large majority believes he, not George W. Bush, created Tarp; that he is a Muslim not a Christian; that he is bent on turning America Marxist; that the jury is out on evolution; that global warming science is a hoax; and that Woodrow Wilson (don’t even ask) was Beelzebub in a Princeton bow tie.
Against this contagion of paranoid craziness, an epidemic spread by colossal infusions of money and the howling of radio ranters, the virtues that brought Mr Obama to office – composure, a belief in classical rhetoric and the force of reason, the hope that people of clashing beliefs may be reconciled – are of little avail. Sometimes those belief systems are so utterly opposed that embracing the conflict is preferable to pretending it may be painlessly resolved. If Mr Obama and his good works – for they are good – are to survive he needs to discard his Plato and summon his inner Machiavelli. Then he needs that Machiavelli to man up and talk back. If Ms Palin invents “death panels” in his healthcare reform he should not make light of it but call her out for a liar and never ever let her forget it. To Republicans who even now assert the falsehood that bureaucrats will dictate a choice of physician he should stand tall like Ed Murrow against the McCarthyism this moment so resembles and say: “Have you no decency?” Above all, he needs to repatriate the idea and practice of American government from its demonisation as some kind of occupying alien force.
He needs to be unafraid to give offence; and to say the words that can make him – especially amid a hostile Congress – a fighter for all the millions of Joes and Janes whose lives have been ruined by the busted flush of casino finance. Then he can flip adversity; then he can become again the Obama we all thought we knew.
The writer is an FT contributing editor
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.
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