One of them is, in Jon Stewart’s words, the finest orator of his generation. The other one, in Jon Stewart’s words, is getting kicked in the rear over health care.
The first Obama is the one most of us think about when the president’s name is mentioned. He’s the man that delivered the speeches that have so far defined his rapid rise to power and will probably define this generation: the anti-war speech from Chicago in October 2002, the 2004 Democratic party keynote, the March 2008 speech on race, the election night victory speech, and this year’s June address to the Muslim world in Cairo. Each showed exceptional delicacy for a modern politician, a degree of dialectical reasoning, an ability to combine serious and honestly held ideas with politically advantageous messages. Without these speeches, Obama would not be president. Neither would he be worthy of the history books.
The second Obama has lived in the shadow of the first, only occasionally making himself known. It’s easy to ignore the midget in the corner, but like it or not he’s there, making life trickier for the first one. The second Obama is the individual who declared he would negotiate with Iran and North Korea without preconditions, who told attendees at a Democratic fundraiser that bitter working class people “cling to guns or religion or antipathy” because of their declining job prospects. He’s the person who told Leno that his bowling was suitable only for the Special Olympics, that the Boston police were “stupid” for arresting Henry Louis Gates, that problems experienced by the Post Office showed why a healthcare public option was a good thing.
Viewed with a sympathetic eye, none of these statements is necessarily all that bad, but all were politically naive. Each produced a backlash that a more experienced politician would have anticipated, and each forced Obama’s team into careful back-tracking after the fact, distracting attention from his core goals and central messages. Don’t forget the healthcare backlash really got going after Gates-gate. Whether right or wrong, none of these remarks were either necessary or useful.
Clearly, both of the Obamas are a product of the same personal characteristics. They are expressions of a man who prizes free thinking and subtlety, who has commendably refused to talk down to the public, and who believes that he should honestly state his views rather than couch his messages behind blandly inoffensive political boilerplate. But whilst the moments of soaring oratory have been based on tightly scripted and well thought out remarks in which the president’s impressive intellectual flexibility has been parsed and checked by political machinery that considers the many ways a statement can be read or misread, Obama’s faux-pas have generally been when the president has been, shall we say, a little too relaxed in his off-the-cuff remarks. They’ve occurred when he’s forgotten that he’s talking to an interviewer or an audience with digital recording equipment in every pocket: in short, when he’s taken his eye off the ball.
Of course, it doesn’t really matter if the president makes the occasional gaffe now and then. Bush managed to take the country to two wars without constructing a single functional sentence. With basically 100 percent coverage of presidential life, it’s more or less impossible not to offer up a snafu to the slavering maw of the news media every now and again.
But are these occasional slips a sign of broader political inexperience? Perhaps they’re indications that Obama works better on defence than offence? Arguably Obama’s two major pre-presidential speeches were the most important politically: the first a gutsy call against a dumb war, a kind of wilful self-immolation that turned out to be a political asset thanks to the terrible failure of post-war reconstruction; the second a tactical response to attacks over Jeremiah Wright. Both represented Obama the underdog. By contrast, his speeches in Europe and Egypt, designed to drive politics in a new direction, were well-received, even masterly, but have yet to produce concrete results. Obama returned from Europe with no additional commitments to send troops to Afghanistan, and Middle Eastern diplomacy remains as fragmented as it ever was.
Most importantly, when Obama attempted to set the agenda on health care during his pre-recess press conference, he faltered. He gave an impression of being adept at policy but weak on the core messages, which the White House team has only slowly managed to rectify at the town halls. Hence the confusion about what’s going on in the White House. Some on the left of the Democratic party are ready to burn their party membership cards, believing that the president has sold out the public option to the Blue Dogs. Others, like Howard Dean, think the public option will be slipped into the final bill during reconciliation.
It’s perfectly feasible that the attempt to keep the debate open is a way of forcing the Republicans to take an intransigent position. This would prepare the way for a Democrat-only bill in the autumn. It’s possible, in short, that this is a clever political game. But as yet no-one seems exactly sure what the president is trying to achieve. Is the White House leading this debate, or is the debate leading it? In Balz and Johnson’s book on the 2008 election, The Battle for America, Obama admits that his early speeches after he declared his candidacy had fallen flat. “I’m actually always sort of a slow starter,” Obama told them. Let’s hope it doesn’t take too much longer for the president to get up to speed on healthcare.
Think Of the Children
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