Since my computer is less than cooperative tonight I’m going to dispense with providing links and trust your techno-competence to track them down, if you like. We’ve had enough snow here in Rochester that I’ve been reduced to watching some of the Health Care Summit and I thought I might share a few observations. First, many have noticed the excruciating boredom of the entire slow motion affair including a slew of European commentators who were apparently expecting a drama ridden political Olympics. Of course, this is a ridiculous expectation but the stultifying character of the summit really does seem like a particular disadvantage to the Democrats, particulary since the central motivation was to generate some momentum for very unpopular legislation.
Maybe more importantly, Obama’s own performance has been both lackluster and revealing, so much so that even some generally favorable pundits have taken to noticing (Dana Milbank, for example). Somewhere over at NRO’s The Corner, our friend Yuval Levin has pointed out that Obama has come across as a “cranky professor”, childishly oversensitive to criticism, condescending and knowing, and just downright testy. During the campaign and for a while after, he was able to effect a certain detached, even classy magnanimity largely by hovering above the political fray, directing and chastising it at the same time. But now that he’s in the thick of it, he seems comparatively small, sort of deflated, and conspicuously ordinary. Also, for the first time in quite a while, the Republicans look organized, well prepared, and occassionally even saavy.
Somewhere over at NRO Goldberg charges Obama with “rhetorical Keynesianism”, or the view that if he just keeps talking at the problem (throwing words versus money at it) that he will eventually win the people over. However, there’s a grating quality to Obama’s persistence, and his faux-pragmatic insistence on foregoing cheap political rhetoric is consistently and obviously nestled within his own partisan and dishonest gimmickry.
To be fair to the Democrats, the real ideological distance between the two parties makes any substantive compromise all but impossible. Obama keeps touting the bipartisanship of his bill due to the fact that a few provisions here and there are Republican suggestions, and that he may or may not be open to more, but these are still minor concessions within a piece of legislation otherwise inimical to Republican sensibilities. There doesn’t seem to be any hope for real bipartisan collaboration partly because it’s no longer in the Republican party’s interest to concede any ground now and partly because Obama is so ideologically inelastic that he seems incapable of genuine compromise. And I probably should point out that for all Obama’s posturing as the post-partisan president, he’s considerably more divisive than Bush was, who was far more moderate and accomodating than he’s usually given credit for.
February 27th, 2010 | 3:24 pm
Thanks to The K and Yuval Levin for bringing the “professor problem” to our readers’ attention. I would like to expand on their comments.
There is no reason, a priori, why a professor cannot be as skilled a president as, say, a Hollywood actor. Yet America’s two professor presidents–Woodrow Wilson and now Barack Obama–have displayed a set of traits, connected to their previous vocation, that have detracted from their performance as president.
No one, except another professor, begrudges a professor the status of being the smartest person in the room. That’s presumably why they became professors in the first place. And in the two cases under discussion–Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama–they probably have been the smartest person in the room, at least most of the time. (Only Larry Summers, from what I have heard, thinks otherwise.) Certainly at the Health Care summit, Barack Obama showed every evidence of being smarter than everyone in the Democratic contingent, though one must allow that this did not prove very much: the rhetorical performances of the top leadership–Nancy and Harry–must surely rank, for persons of that station, as one of the most sobering spectacles in the history of the republic. (Even Dennis Hastert, admittedly no Cicero, sounded loquent by comparison). So within that group, Barack truly stood out as Gulliver among the Lilliputians–or perhaps, as the sycophant in chief at the New Republic put it, as LeBron James amidst a group of NBA player. (Still, this might be slightly unfair LeBron, who is ranks as a king, not a president, and who earned his MVP award.)
It is not being the smartest person in the room that was damaging to Wilson and is now damaging to Obama. Rather, it is their tendency, by word or gesture (or both), to make it known that they are the smartest person in the room. This is the quality that many came to find insufferable in Wilson, and one worries that the same thing may be happening to Barack, at among many of his political adversaries. Many who were disposed earlier to regard him as charming have now begin to find him grating.
One other matter. The category of “know it alls” subdivides into two groups: those who are always right on the facts (which is infuriating), and those who are sometimes in error (which brings s a slight measure of satisfaction). Professor Wilson was in the first group, Professor Obama in the second. He is perfectly articulate and appears knowledgeable, but then we learn of the slip ups. Think of the Officer Crowley affair (and no more press conferences please!) and President’s open challenge at the summit to Senator Alexander on a factual matter, when Obama not only insisted he right, but also that he knew he was right. That was not a very magnanimous way to treat a senator, and in the event (as the British say) Obama had his facts slightly mixed up. No slam dunk there!
February 27th, 2010 | 5:11 pm
The thrust of Ivan’s post alerts us to certain questions re: the president’s intellectual abilities.
Barack Obama has been described by certain pundits as “brilliant, intellectual, and smart” in their effort to describe his acumen. By comparison Bush the Minor, on the other hand, was described by these same pundits as mentally challenged.
Now, I don’t care to participate, at this time in any partisan mudslinging, but I would like to ask the question, What is it about Barrack Obama that folks see as “intellectual” or smart?
I can’t find any serious ‘paper’ written by him, but maybe I’ve simply not looked hard enough, maybe there’s some indication in the public domain that I’ve overlooked that clearly defines the president as a “smart” gentleman.
So let me ask the question, with absolutely no snark intended, what is it about the president that makes you believe that he is an intellectual?
February 27th, 2010 | 8:28 pm
Bob, there is none. And that makes an employment-challenged prof like me, who probably knows more about con-law than Obama but never got to get credit for editing the Harvard Law Review, well, cranky. His intellectualism is sham, or to put it less starkly, Bill Clinton was/is as much of an intellectual as he is, and Reagan was more of one.
With Obama anymore, it’s You Lie and You Bore. The only interesting thing about You (as opposed to U.S. politics) is whether You’ve successfully Lied to Yourself as well, and if or when the revelation of your self-deception will break through.
There are fruitful parallels, I think, b/t Obama, Wilson, and I would add, Jefferson. I bring in the giant Jefferson, whom no matter how much we dislike we all owe a great deal to, into a parallel with these lesser beings mainly because I agree with the K’s assesment of how truly partisan Obama and his appeal have been, and like Jefferson’s administration did, Obama’s is experiencing the deserved shame of having to continue, or only slightly change, a number of Bush policies that Obama’s people said were utterly destroying America.
But really, Obama is of a lesser order than Wilson as well. It’s not just the accuracy gap (jwc, was Wilson really THAT accurate with the facts? I really do not know…), but it’s the gravitas gap. I.e., by now, we’ve all learned that it’s nearly pointless to try to examine Obama’s speeches, b/c all the big ideas and post-partisan moves turn out to be so much less than they initially seem. Yes, some analysts, like yourself and Charles Kesler in particular, have connected some of the dots that are there to be connected. The recent Mansfield piece was particularly good in this regard. But still, there is this now-insurmountable gap b/t the gravitas adverstised and that which is actually there. Clinton, you know, never did that–it was policy, policy, policy, and rhetoric. He didn’t present himself as laying down something heavy, at the most it was classic American liberalism, with some New Dem or 90s multiculturalism stuff added.
This means that while Wilson is insufferable in 101 ways, as I’m finding to my chagrin as I struggle to get through Pestritto’s book on him (Pestritto’s not the problem!), you find at the end of the process a basically coherent (while fundamentally wrong) progressive theory of democratic government. And you know it’s Important. You see how it extends over the last century. You know that at least some of your suffering through Wilson’s insufferableness has been worthwhile.
By contrast, with Obama, at least up to this point, its not just insufferable and wrong doctrine, but it’s constant spin and funny math and framing and errors on the basic facts, and even the rhetorical tropes turn out to amount to nearly nothing, or they contradict one another. And then there’s the constant digs, slyly presented but ever present–whereas a Wilson would attack with direct and high-toned rhetoric. So there’s essentially nothing to gain. I can still read magazines likeTNR and learn things, useful things, about the Democratic mind, the core Democrat positions…lately I don’t feel like granting Obama’s speech events even that (fairly low) expectation. I expect gobbledygook presented with absurd confidence, and I expect that none of the merited criticisms and pointed questions that such gobbledygook elicits from the right will ever be directly addressed. So there’s no point, except that he is my president and I am charged with teaching American Govt. to my students.
I of course would love to have prof jwc as our president…such a one would make me, and all Americans, much less cranky.
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