Obama Power

Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernadette N. Jaworsky

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745696621, 9780745681993
• eBook ISBN: 9780745684215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the source of Obama's power? How is it that, after suffering a humiliating defeat in the 2010 mid-term elections, Obama was able to turn the situation around, deftly outmaneuvering his opponent and achieving a decisive victory in the November 2012 presidential election? In this short and brilliant book, Jeffrey Alexander and Bernadette Jaworsky argue that neither money nor demography can explain this dramatic turnaround. What made it possible, they show, was cultural reconstruction. Realizing he had failed to provide a compelling narrative of his power, the President began forging a new salvation story. It portrayed the Republican austerity budget as a sop to the wealthy, and Obama as a courageous hero fighting for plain folks against the rich. The reinvigorated cultural performance pushed the Tea Party off the political stage in 2011, and Mitt Romney became fodder for the script in 2012. Democrats painted their Republican opponent as a backward-looking elitist, a "Bain-capitalist" whose election would threaten the civil solidarity upon which democracy depends. Real world events can spoil even the most effective script. Obama faced monthly unemployment numbers, the daunting Bin Laden raid, three live debates, and Hurricane Sandy. The clumsiness of his opponent and his own good fortune helped the President, but it was the poise and felicity of his improvisations that allowed him to succeed a second time. Converting events into plot points, the President demonstrated the flair for the dramatic that has made him one of the most effective politicians of modern times. While persuasively explaining Obama's success, this book also demonstrates a fundamental but rarely appreciated truth about political power in modern democratic societies namely, that winning power and holding on to it have as much to do with the ability to use symbols effectively and tell good stories as anything else.

1

The Performance of Politics

On November 2, 2010, when the Democratic Party suffered severe defeat at the hands of its Republican opponents, 63 seats turned over in the House of Representatives, the most in a midterm election since 1938. Democrats gave up control of this major legislative body to a new Republican majority. They also lost critical seats in the government’s other legislative body, the Senate, maintaining control only by a thin margin.

These bare-faced facts were interpreted by the mass media in dramatic terms, as “The Death of the Hero.” In the days leading up to the election, Maureen Dowd, an influential syndicated columnist for the New York Times, had prophesied about the president’s “coalition and governing majority shattering around him.”¹ A poll taken among 18–24-year-old students just two weeks prior declared that the “Obamamania that gripped college campuses two years ago is gone.”² Even Hollywood liberals were quiet during the last push, reflecting an “enthusiasm gap.”³

The day after the defeat, the New York Times posted an ominous, almost Shakespearean headline: “In Republican Victories, Tide Turns Starkly.”⁴ The Wall Street Journal spoke of the “balkanized state of American politics” after the “historic” election,⁵ and its conservative opinion editor rejoiced, “The Empire Strikes Back … Let the recriminations begin!”⁶ The conservative Washington Examiner’s Byron York predicted “irreconcilable conflict.”⁷ The New Yorker’s senior editor, former Jimmy Carter speech writer Hendrik Hertzberg, augured: “For him and for the country, the next two years look awfully bleak. Capitol Hill will be like Hamburger Hill, a noisy wasteland of sanguinary stalemate.”⁸

There was blood in the water, a smell of murder in the air. Right-wing activists from the “Tea Party” had risen to power and challenged the status quo among the GOP.“Not since Barry Goldwater thumbed his nose at country-club Republicans in 1964 has a rebel movement created such a crisis of legitimacy among the GOP establishment,” proclaimed TIME.⁹ After the elections, the Republicans welcomed its new right-wing members into the legislative ranks. As then House speaker-inwaiting John Boehner put it: “What unites us as Republicans will be the agenda of the American people.”¹⁰ Obama’s rise had not heralded the rebirth of liberalism, but merely a temporary zig-zag on the long and steady horizon of conservative ascendancy. With the defeat of Obama’s party in 2010, the line had now been straightened back out. “Today the American people admitted the mistakes they made two years ago,” one of the founders of the group, the Tea Party Patriots, declared.¹¹ “Personally, I think he’s already lost his re-election,” Dick Armey trumpeted triumphantly about the president.¹² The neo-conservative activist and former Bush cabinet secretary had been the leading establishment figure behind the Tea Party’s confrontation with Barack Obama’s healthcare plan in the summer of 2009.

America’s conservative pundits interpreted the massive Republican shift as the rebuking response of the US electorate to a leftist president, one whose government-directed programs of redistribution stretched from Wall Street regulation to the auto industry bailout and healthcare reform. Republican master strategist Karl Rove described voters as “sick of the administration’s direction and tone” and accused the president of embracing a blame-game attitude “creating a vast army of people who feel personally assaulted by him.”¹³ John Boehner declared: “The American people have sent an unmistakable message to him [the president] tonight and that message is ‘change course’!”¹⁴ On Fox News, former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin offered some advice to the president going forward: “He is the one who is going to have start coming more to the center of America, toward some middle ground, instead of staying on that extreme far left that has driven us to where we are today.”¹⁵ In its end-of-year editorial for 2010, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal could scarcely conceal its satisfaction. The election result, it opined, was a clear-eyed, up and down judgment by rational citizens about liberal social policies: “The real story of 2010 is that the voters were finally able to see and judge this liberal agenda in its unvarnished form.”¹⁶

These statements about the meaning of the 2010 election, however, were less reflections of social reality than efforts to shape it. Forcefully crystallizing hopes and fears, they were interpretations of the voting result, not objective descriptions of it. Rather than denoting a condition that already exists, they constituted efforts to bring that condition into being by the very action of speaking about it. They were, in other words, political performances.

Is the electorate really rational in the way that reactions to the Democrats’ 2010 defeat suggested? Are the opinions of voters really so clear? How do we know what a vote indicates, exactly? Can we even speak of an “electorate” per se? Is it empirically correct that the results of the 2010 congressional voting actually indicated something about an entity called “the American people”?

From a cultural perspective, voting is viewed as symbolic communication, a political performance that demands interpretation. No doubt, those who participated in the election, and those who didn’t, were reacting to something about President Obama’s first two years in office, but was it, in fact, the leftist nature of his policies? Was the Republican shift in voting perhaps less a clear-eyed citizenry responding to liberal policies than a response to a symbolic failure – the weakness of his performance of liberal politics? Perhaps it reflected this liberal administration’s inability to reach out to centrist audiences and the clumsy inadequacy of its efforts to get even potentially sympathetic audiences emotionally engaged.

Leaders do not offer policy to clear-eyed citizens who rationally evaluate its effectiveness and register their deliberative judgment through their votes. Political leaders project complex and multilayered performances to audiences who engage these symbolic actions with more and less enthusiasm, with more and less criticism, and may not actually engage with them at all. Strictly speaking, such responses are not even interpretations of political actions. What citizens have available to them is only “news” about these actions – only journalistic reconstructions. What voters interpret are mass-mediated performances.

In the 2010 exit polls, only 37 percent of those casting votes – for their local congressional representatives – viewed the national election as a referendum on the Obama administration. Another 24 per cent did not. The remaining 39 percent of the electorate were not sure how to interpret the vote.¹⁷

And what about those who had not voted? Significant segments of the aroused electorate that had thrust Obama into power during the presidential voting in 2008 sat out the midterm congressional election two years later.¹⁸ Polls indicated that the audience of young voters aged 18–29, the so-called youth vote, continued to favor Obama by an historically unprecedented majority.¹⁹ In 2010, however, relatively few of these young voters cast their votes – just 11 percent, compared to 18 percent in 2008.²⁰ Despite the even deeper and wider commitment of African Americans to Obama, their participation in November 2010 declined as well. Just 25 percent had given “quite a lot of” or “some” thought to the midterm elections, compared to 44 percent in 2006 and 85 percent in the 2008 presidential elections.²¹ One black commentator observed a few days before the election: “[T]he sense of hope and history that drove turnout in 2008 are in short supply.”²²

The exercise of political power is not only pragmatic and practical, but cultural – not just about getting things done, but about making legislative accomplishments and organizational changes seem meaningful and legitimate. The electorate responds to the manner and style of power. President Obama had been a powerful executive in purely pragmatic terms, initiating far-reaching repairs that would deeply alter the social organization of American society. In the process of accomplishing these organizational reforms, however, he had been unable to make meaning in his old way. He lost his symbolic footing. His actions, while effective legislatively, were no longer affecting. As the president’s performances lost symbolic power, the Tea Party rose up and unceremoniously kicked the once and future American hero off the public stage. “The buzz and intensity for some months now has been on the right, led by the Tea Party,” the New York Times observed in March, 2010.²³ After the midterm elections, seven out of ten Americans felt that it was very or somewhat important that “Republican leaders in Congress take the Tea Party movement’s positions and objectives into account as they address the nation’s problems.”²⁴

The venerable political journalist Elizabeth Drew observed in the leftist New York Review of Books: “President Obama seems to be shrinking and becoming more ineffectual before our eyes.”²⁵ The Democratic defeat in 2010 was a reflection of this cultural deficit. In the wake of the deflation of their party’s political symbol, Democratic political campaigners had tried to “reignite”²⁶ the audiences of citizens who had supported them in 2008, but they could not generate the spark. The Democrats had been looking for a way to “energize” the electorate,²⁷ but they could not find it.

This book describes the symbolic deflation of Obama’s early years in office and explains how the Democratic president eventually found a way to get his mojo working again. We show how it was the cultural re-inflation of “Obama power” – not only shifting demographic and economic indicators – that allowed the Democratic Party to gain traction and the liberal president to be elected again.²⁸

2

Symbolic Deflation

In his campaign for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama had delivered a striking performance that powerfully connected with the left and the center sections of the citizenry, even as it deeply antagonized the right. He deftly deployed the moral language that undergirds US democracy and, demanding “change we can believe in,” presented himself as a transformative figure, a singular political hero who would solve the crisis of our times and take the nation along a new path.

Performing as a successful president, however, is even more difficult – exponentially more so – than winning the campaign. In one sense, the challenge is the same – to become a collective representation of democratic ideals. But the social circumstances surrounding this cultural effort have starkly changed. Political campaigns can be conducted in the future tense; presidents, by contrast, must tell their stories in real time. It is much more difficult to tell your story when you need to account for a real situation, especially when your position as head of state makes contemporary social conditions seem your responsibility.

The first two years of Obama’s presidency, 2009 and 2010, unfolded as a sequence of political duels that amounted to vicious, if symbolic, knife fights. Each side invoked the dichotomies of democratic morality to do maximum cultural injury to the other: Who is secretive, who open? Who is truthful and reasonable, who deceptive and domineering? Who is trying to be cooperative and who aggressive and bullying? Whose policies constitute a threat to the autonomy of individuals on the other side?

Healthcare as Primal Scene

The primal scene was the battle over healthcare reform. Republicans accused the administration and its liberal representatives of dishing out phony numbers and making secret deals. They highlighted the Obama administration’s insistence on the so-called “mandate.” Every American would be required to purchase health insurance, or else to pay a substantial fine. Since Teddy Roosevelt had first proposed governm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Performance of Politics
• 2 Symbolic Deflation
• 3 Re-Inflation
• 4 Setting the Stage
• 5 Unfolding the Drama
• 6 Pulling Ahead
• 7 Harrowing Home Stretch
• 8 Demography, Money, and Social Media
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index