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Part I
FOUNDATIONS
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1
THE EARLY OBAMA PRESIDENCY: FROM CAMPAIGNING TO GOVERNING
Every new president steps into the Oval Office facing a large in-box of public expectations. These are the result of issues that were on the public’s mind during the presidential campaign and the campaign’s response to them, the issues that the candidates stressed and their promised solutions, and the public’s mood—an emotional barometer of their experience during the years of the president in office at the time of the campaign. Elections are generally prospective in that they are focused on the future, but that prospective stance contains a retrospective element. People are either satisfied with the past and want more of it, or they want a break with the past and vote for “change,” however the winning candidate defines that. Either way, it is the past that helps define the future.
The same is true of the president himself. The Obama narratives are by now an often-told story. As a result, there is now widespread acceptance of a great deal of conventional wisdom about this president. He is cool, charismatic, slightly detached, deliberative, highly intelligent, verbally fluent, and a pragmatist more interested in policies that work than in scoring ideological points. All true, but only to a point. Obama is emotionally cool and detached. He is more likely to know your position than feel your pain. But he is also a president who has proved to be quite at home with harsh personal and political characterizations of those who hold different policy views. The president may be cool, but he is often not temperate.
The president presents himself as deliberate and methodical in his decision-making and judgments. And he definitely can be, but there is much more there than conventional wisdom allows. The president can also be impatient and ambitious; two core characteristics that sometimes trump his deliberativeness. Moreover, the president is an enormous risk taker, a quality that few have mentioned or analyzed.
Yes, the president is very intelligent and fluent in policy nuance, but he has also adopted a personal and political Rorschach approach of strategic ambiguity. This has left allies and opponents alike wondering just who is the real Barack Obama? That question is not likely to be answered without understanding what really motivates this unusual and in many ways unique president.
Yes, the president did search for his racial identity. But where between an early history of racial grievance and post-racial identity did Obama finally wind up? And yes, Obama’s book Dreams from My Father is the story of his coming to grips with his absent father. But those factors don’t begin to do justice to the real motives underlying Obama’s quest to become a transformational president. Those motivations, in a word, revolve around the core motivating dynamic of redemption—Obama’s, his father’s, his mother’s, and ours.
Yet, there is more to Obama’s presidency than his organizing motivations. He is a president faced with real policy problems, and he has adopted a leadership style that carries with it many consequences that have yet to be discussed, much less analyzed. Is Obama just preternaturally self-confident or arrogant? And where, exactly, did that self-confidence come from and what does it mean for how he approaches his leadership and judgment responsibilities?
These, and others, are the questions that frame the analysis that follows.
A President in Office
The nature of the presidential campaigns and a president’s initial period in office are of interest for many reasons. They give a preview of a president’s approach and success in assembling winning collations that have implications for governance. They provide information about the president’s psychology and skills in a publicly visible set of high stakes circumstances. And once a president is in office, his choices provide a set of public responses to an enormous range of policy and leadership questions that serve to validate, refine, or negate initial impressions gathered during the course of the campaign.
The 2008 presidential campaign did provide a great deal of useful information about Mr. Obama. We learned about his intelligence, temperament, rhetorical fluency, organizational talents, and ability to inspire large numbers of his supporters. What the campaign did not reveal was how Mr. Obama understood his mission of change and what that might actually mean in concrete terms once he was elected. That understanding has become clearer as the president assumed the actual responsibilities of his office.
Presidential campaigns are also important because they reveal a great deal about the public—its hopes, fears and expectations. They are a substantial part of the governing context within which the new president will operate. Mr. Obama read the success of his campaign as providing vindication for the view that the public wanted a clean break with the Bush Administration and all that it represented and endorsed. That conclusion may have been the first substantial misjudgment of the Obama Presidency, but it wasn’t the most important one.
At the outset of his presidency, Obama faced daunting domestic problems. The country was descending into a substantial recession, unemployment was high and rising, revenue collection was down, resulting in large and growing state and federal deficits, the housing market was deteriorating and major financial institutions and manufacturing industries were hemorrhaging money and in danger of insolvency. President Obama, like President Bush before him, understood the stakes and acted forcefully. In the words of one news analysis he “largely hewed to the emergency policies of former President George W. Bush in trying to resuscitate the economy with stimulus measures, tax cuts and bailouts.”1
Each of these measures was controversial at the time that President Bush initiated them and became more so as President Obama invested his political capital in a second and third attempt to stimulate the economy by massive government spending. Critics argued that tax cuts were more stimulating than large-scale government spending. The public didn’t support Wall Street “bailouts” especially when they learned that high risk trading with complex and unregulated financial instruments had caused great economic damage. There were worries that in gaining a controlling interest in banks, financial institutions and automobile companies (GM and Chrysler), the Obama Administration was involving itself in a way and to a degree in the private sector that was unprecedented. The president’s plans to rescue homebuyers who couldn’t pay their mortgages also spurred fears that those who had taken on mortgages they couldn’t afford, or who had speculated on the basis of a government supported housing boom, threw into doubt the prudent assumption of risk that characterized the majority of Americans who did repay their debts. And on top of that the president insisted on passing a huge and complex reorganization of the American health care system that would touch, in ways both foreseen and unanticipated, the health care of every American.
Still the president pressed on. Advised to reign in his ambitious agenda after Congress passed his health care legislation the president said, “what I’m not going to be dissuaded from is going ahead and taking on these big challenges that are critical in terms of America’s long-term economic health.”2 The president then specifically mentioned energy and immigration policy as well as financial regulatory reform. Whether the public was ready for further large-scale presidential initiatives is the defining question to date of the president’s first term in office.
Why Obama Won
It was the central insight of the Obama campaign that the election would turn on “change” and that this term needed to be defined as a clean break with what were widely considered the controversial stances and emotionally draining arguments that characterized the Bush Administration.3 Not all of President Bush’s policies, especially in national security, were necessarily wrong, as evidenced by the fact that the Obama Administration adopted many of them. However, the shrill debates surrounding almost every one of them fueled the perception that the Bush Administration was unnecessarily confrontational, too willing to follow its own views without listening to allies, and engaged in policies like invading Iraq that had high and brutal costs associated with them, in part because of early missteps. Although Mr. Bush was not running for reelection, having served two terms, he was front and center as a campaign subtext for Mr. Obama from the start. In an interview, David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, said
So we had a very simple premise about the general election, which is that these Bush policies had failed, that McCain was essentially carrying the tattered banner of a failed Administration, and that we represented a change from all that. There have been zigs and zags in the road, but that’s essentially the strategy that we have executed from the start.4
A Gloomy Public Mood
President Obama gained office in November 2008 with a public mood that was deeply dour. As of May 2008 an astounding 82 percent of a national sample of respondents had said the country was going in the wrong direction.5 Why the doom and gloom? In truth, there are so many plausible reasons that one is hard pressed to winnow a long list that includes: unusually high gas prices, the threat of renewed inflation, a surge in unemployment to 5.5 percent, the housing market meltdown, continuing public regret about having invaded Iraq and continuing uncertainty about the sustainability of progress there, the abysmal standing of America in the world, and the continuing poisonous atmosphere of Washington national politics. To those “atmospherics,” one could easily add concerns in the policy areas of immigration, health care, and energy.
As befits a country that increasingly looks to the president to shape and beneficially order the political universe,6 Mr. Bush was held largely responsible for all these maladies. Indeed, on issue after issue—the situation in Iraq, the economy, energy policy, health care, and immigration—the president’s net approval ratings were negative.7 Mr. Bush’s popularity, having reached stratospheric levels after 9/11 (90 percent), descended slowly and steadily until it had reached almost subterranean levels (28 percent).8 Not surprisingly, 74 percent of respondents in one national survey said that the next president “should take a different approach than George Bush has.”9 Mr. Obama’s repeated claim to be the candidate of “hope” and “change” therefore took root in fertile ground and helped propel him to victory.
Catharsis and Change
Americans wanted “change” but it was not clear they all wanted the same kind of change. Nor was it clear that they all wanted the kind of change reflected in President Obama’s first two years in office. Americans were also conflicted about the qualities they wanted in the next president. In one national survey, the quality most picked by respondents was “strong leadership.”10 On the other hand, the same polling organization reported in a survey taken the preceding month that respondents chose “working well with leaders of other countries” as the most important characteristic (32 percent), while “bringing unity to the country” was a close third (25 percent) after “having strong moral and family values.”11 In that context Obama’s campaign narrative and reputation as a bridge-builder and pragmatist was a central element in his political attractiveness.
Given the public mood, it was not surprising that Obama’s election would be viewed through the prism of repudiation of his predecessor. Adam Nagourney wrote in the New York Times that
The election of Mr. Obama amounted to a national catharsis—a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country.12
This was true, to a point; but it missed certain limits and their implications.
Certainly, the economic downturn was not a result of Bush economic policies. And “tax cuts for the rich” was a partisan talking point, not a fair or accurate description of them. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were genuinely disturbing to Americans across the political spectrum but there were legitimate, if contested, rationales for them. As to the perception that American standing abroad had declined, that was true, but the reasons for it were complex and not all reducible to the decision to invade Iraq. And many Americans decried the decline of civility and bipartisanship of American political life, but this too was hardly the sole fault of the Bush Administration.
Still, complex or unfair as the case may be, the controversies took their political and emotional toll on the American public. Catharsis is both a feeling of relief and an expectation that the tensions that made catharsis necessary would not return because President Obama would behave differently. So, the “national catharsis,” to the extent t...
