Obama’s passion gap

George Packer delivered a bitter assault on the competence of Barack Obama’s presidency in the influential “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker. He elevated the standard liberal frustration—the President’s “fire in the belly” problem—by saying worse things about others, invoking the pain of unemployed individuals that Obama can’t help, and quoting the famously scientific 19th Century European political thinker Max Weber. 

“On its own, the ethic of responsibility can become a devotion to technically correct procedure, while the ethic of ultimate ends can become fanaticism. Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their own dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad.”

Read more www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/07/25/110725taco_talk_packer#ixzz1SeU3bUUH

The serious target of this extravagant indictment is clearly the President. The Republican Party is not of one mind. Try to imagine Sarah Palin and Mitch McConnell finishing each other’s sentences. Republicans recklessly over play their hand. Obama apparently doesn’t even have his heart in the game.

Packer’s case against him is personal: Obama seems determined to do his best within the bounds of Washington’s divided-government and doesn’t try to escape that reality with sufficient rhetorical verve:

“More important, he no longer uses his office’s most powerful tool, rhetorical suasion, to keep the country focused on the continued need for government activism.”

This fundamentally understates what Packer actually wants him to do and overstates the use of rhetoric to do the job. Packer wants the center of opinion in the country to shift far enough to the left that Obama can get his way on policy with a hostile Congress.

The center of public opinion is deeply ambivalent about the virtue of debt- financed government intervention. It can shift in favour a little more government leadership and, for the sake of a faster recovery, it probably should.  However, trying to hasten that process now with florid presidential rhetoric would be self-defeating.

Any success would be entirely speculative. Republican activists will continue to drive the primary process—the process that disciplines the president’s recalcitrant Washington opponents. The undecided voters that Obama needs won’t have a ballot to confirm what they think for another fifteen months. That’s a long time to wait for crowd reaction and policy progress.  

Of course, it would be more exciting if Obama dropped his reputation for being “more reasonable” than his adversaries and deployed a winner-take-all inspirational style. However, that would only deepen paralysis in Washington and feed the suspicion that he’s more articulate than effective.

The crucial problem with Packer’s thesis, however, is the contention that inspirational White House rhetoric can change the way the people think and, in doing so, can change circumstances on the ground.

Teddy Roosevelt coined the phrase “bully-pulpit” but never enjoyed the right circumstances to make it work. His theatrical competitor Winston Churchill appeared to use words to vastly great effect while TR ended his public career as a rather windy crank.  Yet, it was only during an extraordinary period in history that Churchill truly inspired. In the late spring and summer of 1940, he and his listeners agreed, finally, on the nature of the problem and necessity to act.   

Reading the facts responsibly did not encumber Churchill’s rhetoric. Luftwaffe planes over the night skies of London established Churchill as Britain’s greatest realist and that allowed him to be heard by everyone. Theories about military deterrence didn’t work for Churchill and economic arguments will not create a national consensus for Obama.

For a generation, Churchill had been recognized as a great wordsmith, while his political influence faded. He inspired a nation in 1940 because no one questioned his definition of the task before them. It would have only been embarrassing if he’d given “his blood, sweat and tears speech” a year earlier.

Conviction, without good timing, makes people look away rather than leap to their feet.

A quiet race for a quieter presidency

Last week’s Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire was a quiet affair.

Emotions flickered only when they spoke about the pick-pocket presidency of Barack Obama. The moderates blamed him for America’s misfortune, for losing its way and drifting near the tricky shores of Greece. The radicals blamed the other presidents since Ronald Reagan as well.

The candidates displayed the civility of a boys choir; sweet sounds for privileged ears. Joe Klein captured well the problem this harmonious gather will be facing some months down the road.

“But if the debate lacked flash, it was instructive. It set the ideological parameters for the coming campaign. The candidates locked themselves in a philosophical space about the size of Rush Limbaugh's radio studio. It took nearly an hour before any of them spoke well of a government program, when Herman Cain grudgingly acknowledged that the Food and Drug Administration's meat and vegetable inspections were probably a good thing. At one point, Romney made this statement: "I think fundamentally there are some people — and most of them are Democrats, but not all — who really believe that the government knows how to do things better than the private sector. And they happen to be wrong." Which raised the possibility that Romney might want to privatize the military. Everything else certainly seems to be on the table — Cain wants to privatize Social Security; Gingrich wants to privatize NASA; most seem willing to voucherize Medicare along Congressman Paul Ryan's lines.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2077962,00.html#ixzz1PdLoViEp

Not one candidate came close to the vision of the presidency enunciated 100 years ago by the Theodore Roosevelt, the 20th century’s most influential Republican president. He created the modern presidency that every contemporary Republican presidential candidate seems determined to dismantle. Sean Wilentz review of “The Pride of Teddy Roosevelt” by Edmund Morris captures Roosevelt’s ambition:

“Roosevelt, on the contrary, looked back to the Civil War era, understood the federal government’s potential capacity for serving the common good, and insisted that ‘the sphere of the State’s action may be vastly increased without in any way diminishing the happiness of either the many or the few.’ He naturally viewed the presidency as the center of that action: ‘I believe in a strong executive; I believe in power,’ he said.”

Roosevelt, in 1912, believed in social insurance, workers’ compensation, women’s suffrage, an inheritance tax, and a national health service. Is it any wonder that today’s Republican presidential candidates can’t recall a great Republican president prior to Ronald Reagan?