Michael Tomasky: "The Untransformational President" - his good intentions may destroy his presidency

Remember back when Barack Obama talked about being a transformational president? You know, how Reagan was one, Clinton wasn’t, and Obama himself would be? Whatever happens in the ongoing debt negotiations, whatever happens in the next election, we already know that this is a fantasy. The news that Obama is willing to place Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid on the poker table reveals yet again, and more starkly than ever before, what’s most important to him. It’s not to lead. It’s not to fight. It’s not even to win. It’s to be the most reasonable and unflappable person in the room. Obama will not be a transformational president unless the transformation starts in his own DNA.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze the president too much. I’m familiar with the theory that emanates from Janny Scott’s book about his mother—how the important thing in Indonesia, where Obama spent crucial socializing years of his childhood, is show that your small-minded foes haven’t rattled you. I’m deeply sympathetic with the mental and emotional armature that must be donned by a young black man growing up in a white household and mostly white world—the need to prove that one is superior, and the need to do so quietly, in a way others have no choice but to respect.

In many walks of life, these would be outstanding qualities. Obama would, like his brother-in-law, make a good college basketball coach. But in this White House at this point in history with this much at stake and facing this perfervid opposition, these qualities are serving him and the Americans who want to believe in him very poorly.

Well. This many years later, it’s pretty clear that Barack Obama isn’t going to transcend liberal America and conservative America. Why? One reason is historical. Civic republicanism has rarely worked well in practice. Maybe during World War II, when civic duty was crystal clear and citizens were reminded of the common good every time they heard a battle report or picked up their sugar coupons. But otherwise, self-interest usually wins the day. Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley notes that even Monroe’s pacific era quickly washed away under the weight of 1819’s economic panic and 1820’s Missouri Compromise. The civic comity of the time “merely allowed differences to fester until the party system collapsed,” he says.

But other reasons have to do with Obama himself. To begin with, says historian Eric Rauchway of the University of California, Davis, Obama misapprehends history. Obama admires the Abraham Lincoln of the second inaugural—the Lincoln who promised “malice toward none” and “charity for all” those involved in the Civil War, on both sides. But Rauchway points out that six weeks later, Lincoln was dead—and that had the rhetoric of the second inaugural been translated into policy, it would have been disastrous. “The Lincoln who was a great success, the one who gets the monument on the Mall, is the one who was willing to make war rather than accept a moral wrong,” says Rauchway.

Obama also has a highly inflated opinion of his own ability to unite people, which leads him to think that folks on the other side of the partisan divide will join him in compromise. What else could explain his maddening speeches late in the debt-talks process, after tax revenues were already off the table, still beseeching Republicans to accept his “balanced” approach? He really seemed to believe that his political opponents would tally up the tweets and see sweet reason. The verdict of William Galston, a political theorist and former Bill Clinton adviser, is apt: “Sometimes, civic-republican pragmatism can be a fancy label for a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics works.”

-snip-

But more fundamentally, he’s in jeopardy. In Brinkley’s words, Obama’s presidency “is failing, and in danger of collapsing.” Lacerating battles await him on the budget (surprise: the debt deal didn’t solve everything!). The economy is grounded. Obama needs to quit trying to transform politics and just focus on winning fights on behalf of a careworn middle class. Otherwise, politics is going to transform him into a nicely intentioned one-term president.