One Good Man

Recently I have despaired that there was such a creature as a wise Republican. But I took note this morning of a piece by Charles Fried in The Daily Beast. Fried was Ronald Reagan's Solicitor General;  and he has taught at Harvard Law School for fifty years.

Fried begins his piece by cataloguing Barack Obama's weaknesses. And, truth be told, his assessment is pretty accurate:

Barack Obama is not a skillful strategist like Bill Clinton. He is not a gifted rhetorician like Ronald Reagan. Nor is he a bold and inspiring leader like Abraham Lincoln. And he can’t seem to shake himself loose from the strings that attach him to the trial lawyers, to big labor, and, surprisingly, to the standard banker-economists who got us into the mess we are in now.

At first blush, Fried seems to repeat standard Republican boilerplate. But  then he goes on to give Obama his due:

He is an honest man. He is intelligent, analytical, and knowledgeable. And he tries hard to think through the dilemmas which confront us and to tell us clearly and straightforwardly what he wants to do and why he wants to do it.

Fried then contrasts Obama with the other politicians who were involved in the debt ceiling negotiations. He finds little to praise:

When John Boehner at the height of the debt ceiling crisis answered him on the national media he simply did not tell the truth. He said that the president would not compromise, would not take yes for an answer, and wanted it all his own way. But he cannot have forgotten that he had negotiated Obama into far more cuts than Obama and his caucus had wanted, thought wise or even palatable in return for a modest increase in revenue to be achieved by closing egregious and unfair loopholes in personal and corporate taxes. This is the same compromise recommended by the “Gang of Six,” which included the extremely conservative and admirably patriotic Senator Tom Coburn, by the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson group, and by Republican economists like Martin Feldstein. It was the Speaker who, Arafat-like, walked away from that deal because he concluded he lacked the skill or the muscle or the spine to sell it to his own caucus. Let it be said that this compromise included recalculating the cost of living formula for social security—a change every responsible economist recommends—but the equally rigid Nancy Pelosi rejected.

He then turns to the Republican  who leads the race to oust Obama. He sees nothing but a hollow man:

And Mitt Romney, supposedly a man experienced in business realities, in a parody of himself, has pronounced that he opposed the deal reached on the very eve of default—because it did not go far enough in the direction of what the Tea Party wanted.

The politicians Obama is up against remind Fried of the characters in Arisophanes' play, The Knights. They are obsessed with finding a politician who fits the times. And, as proof that some metaphors never die, they find the perfect candidate in a local sausage seller. When he protests that he is not an educated man, his sponsors respond:

Politics these days is no occupation for an educated man, a man of character. Ignorance and total lousiness are better. Don’t jettison such god-given advantages.

Fried concludes, "Obama is too good for us." What a sad commentary on the state of American politics. But there is hope for the Republican Party -- if it listens to Charles Fried. There is still one good man within Republican ranks.

The Injustice of Being President

In a recent essay, David Shribman, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, writes that President Obama's troubles stem from "a moment of great achievement and a moment of great failure." The irony, Sbribman says, is that the achievement belongs to Obama and the failure does not. The President's situation reminds us that -- if one seeks justice, or at least a modicum of fairness -- the presidency is not the place to find it.

Obama's essential problem, Shribman says,

is not that he gets the policy wrong, as Mr. Johnson did, perhaps with the big spending Great Society, almost certainly in Vietnam. It is that in his first 17 months in office, Mr. Obama repeatedly gets the politics wrong. For if he showed anything in a bruising primary fight with Hillary Rodham Clinton and then a tough general election battle with John McCain, it was that Barack Obama had a political instinct as fine tuned as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy.

A prime example of Obama's blurred political instincts, writes Shribman, is his health care legislation. It is definitely what the nation needs. Unfortunately, "the biggest benefits of the plan will not be evident when voters go to the polls in midterm elections this November or when the President runs for re-election in 2012."

And now -- when he planned to sell his health care legislation to the American public -- the Gulf Oil Disaster has completely riveted the nation's attention. Obama didn't create the problem. He may not have understood how totally the second Bush administration had destroyed the country's regulatory infrastructure. But, as Gettysburg College's Shirley Anne Warshaw says, he and his administration "are paying the price for that right now."

The ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has become a metaphor for all that was wrong with public policy for the last thirty years. Just as the Wall Street meltdown robbed millions of ordinary folks of their livelihoods and their futures, the oil which is killing wildlife and depositing black sludge on the pristine beaches of the South is destroying a culture and a way of life.

And -- because Obama is president -- he owns the problem. With each day that the hole is not plugged, citizens lose faith in their president. Some are even suggesting that historians will compare Obama to the well meaning but ineffective Jimmy Carter.

The Carter analogy is misplaced. There is a long way to go before citizens cast their votes. Like Abraham Lincoln, Obama is enduring dark days. And, like Lincoln, Obama finds himself beset by forces which would do the nation eternal harm. The challenges he faces are most certainly tests of his intelligence and his political instincts. But, more than that, they are a test of his character.

This blog entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

So Much for the Conventional Wisdom

Barak Obama is the Democratic nominee for president. His rise has been remarkable -- so remarkable that, in truth, I never expected to see what I saw last night. But the greatest gifts are the ones which seem impossible.

Almost forty years ago, I headed to the School of Education at the University of North Carolina. Early one Saturday morning, I was sitting at my desk (luckily, I had awakened early to study) when a key turned in my lock and in walked a black man -- mop in hand -- to clean my room. We were both surprised. I didn't expect janitorial service on Saturday; and he didn't expect a student in his room, since most students left their dorms to go home for the weekend. Because home for me was in Montreal, I spent my Saturday mornings -- before the library opened -- in my room.

It was on those Saturdays that I got to know Douglas McNeil. On that first Saturday, he called me "Mr. Gray" -- even though he was old enough to be my grandfather. And, what bothered me more, he couldn't look me in the eye. It had only been five years since the signs "Colored" and "White" had been removed from water fountains, restrooms and restaurants in the South. What I soon discovered was that the signs were still inside peoples' heads -- as they had been for generations.

Three months later -- as part of my training -- I began teaching at a high school in Greensboro. It had been fifteen years since the Supreme Court had ruled that school segregation was illegal. But the school I taught in had 2,200 students -- forty-eight of whom were black. Another high school, on the other side of town, had 1,600 students -- and there wasn't a white face among them. Still, when we needed a halfback for our football team, a transfer was easily arranged; and there was one less black face among the 1,600.

In fairness, efforts were being made to change things. The Greensboro schools were on the cusp of implementing a busing plan to achieve better racial balance; but opposition to the plan was building and becoming increasingly vocal. There was also an attempt to shift staff between schools -- at least for the purpose of professional development. I remember one lunch hour, when one of our teachers returned from the school on the other side of town, claiming that he had spent the morning "learning how to be a nigger."

There are times, even now, when I wonder if anything has changed. Watching newscasts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I had my doubts. And a month ago, on another BBC newscast, the correspondent interviewed a man from Georgia who was sporting a T-Shirt, the front of which displayed an image of a monkey eating a banana. He laughed and said, "I think his ears look just like Obama's." I keep hoping that people like him and my former faculty colleague are extinct. But, like some prehistoric fish from the ocean depths, they keep finding their way to the surface.

Be that as it may, what happened last night was not just historical. It gave one cause for optimism. Barack Obama has shattered the conventional wisdom -- and, whatever happens, the world will not be the same again.

Not that the rest will be easy. Some, like Gwynne Dyer, have concluded that "It is now a near certainty that Obama will be the next U.S. president." Maybe. But the really hard part is about to begin. As historical as last night was, history is not on Obama's side. And I fear that the architects of schlock are gearing up for a nasty and brutal campaign.

Time will tell the story of the upcoming presidential election. But this morning there is hope -- and I rejoice. And, somewhere, I know that Douglas McNeil is rejoicing, too.

Mr. Obama's Speech

Barack Obama was two years old when Martin Luther King -- standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial -- declared, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Mr. Obama's generation is the generation on which Dr. King's hopes were riding. It is not too much of a stretch to conclude that -- even after "the searing injustice" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- King, upon hearing Obama's speech in Philadelphia, would have nodded in agreement: "I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together -- unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we have common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all have to move in the same direction -- towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren."

But Obama did more than reaffirm King's core conviction. He was more than a spokesman for his race. He illustrated what I have returned to more than once in this space: he showed that he has the ability to get inside the skins of people on both sides of the racial divide and truly understand their grievances.

Speaking of his pastor's racial intolerance, he reminded his audience that Jeremiah Wright grew up in an era when "legalized discrimination -- where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force or the fire departments -- meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations." In that context, said Obama, Mr. Wright's anger and intemperance were understandable, if not condonable.

But then Obama turned his attention to white families whom affirmative action policies have disadvantaged. "Most working and middle class white Americans," he declared, "don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience -- as far as they 're concerned no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures and feel their dreams slipping away . . . ."

In that context, said Obama, "when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time."

No one, to my knowledge, has ever tackled the problem of race in America from the perspective of Mr. Obama. His opponents have tried to make his lack of experience his Achilles' heal. The question is, "Which experience, and how critical is it?" It would appear that Mr. Obama's experience has been particularly unique and -- I suggest -- absolutely critical.

Whatever he and his countrymen have been asked to face, they have always been citizens of a nation divided -- fundamentally divided by slavery and its legacy. If the United States is to survive the brave new world of global terrorism -- which, at root, is the result of the same kind of cultural schism which led to a Civil War and segregation -- it will have to heal itself. Martin Luther King knew that. That's what King saw from "the mountain top." He knew that, like Moses, he would not make it to the promised land. But he hoped that his children would. Mr. Obama's run for the presidency is a sign that Dr. King's children have arrived.

The Delusion of the Masses?

Last Wednesday, Robert Samuelson, who writes a column for The Washington Post, published a piece titled, "The Obama Delusion," in which he reached the following conclusion: "He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation's problems when, so far, he isn't." On the previous day, in The New York Times, David Brooks wrote that he had encountered something he labeled OCS, short for "Obama Comedown Syndrome." Those who suffered from this affliction, he wrote, "began to wonder if His stuff actually made sense. For example, his Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for, but if we are the change we have been waiting for, then why have we been waiting since we've been here all along?"

The tone of both pieces reminded me of what Walter Lippmann wrote of Franklin Roosevelt six months before Roosevelt was declared his party's standard bearer in 1932: "He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President."

And, if one is looking for reasons to explain Obama's rise, it seems to me that what happened in 1932 is instructive. George W. Bush likes to think of himself as another Harry Truman -- a common man of strong convictions who was reviled when he left office, but who history has vindicated. However, Mr. Bush may be more like Herbert Hoover than Harry Truman. Hoover was a dedicated public servant, whose solutions to the economic crisis of his time were classic economic orthodoxy. He never understood that what he faced required a new set of solutions -- what Roosevelt called "The New Deal."

In reaction to Hoover's inability to perceive how much the world had changed, the public rose in revolt and put a man in office who some people referred to as "a feather duster," and who spent a good deal of his time in a wheelchair.

But Roosevelt -- like Obama -- was a quick study, who attracted a brain trust of superb advisers and who thought outside the box. The results were remarkable: Roosevelt abandoned the textbooks and experimented: the benchmark for success was, "Does it work?" Not everything worked; and when that happened, Roosevelt did not make the mistake of confusing policy with dogma. He simply tried something else.

If anything, Mr. Bush has been the opposite of Roosevelt. His mantra has been, "stay the course." The members of the Bush administration are right when they proclaim that the world changed after September 11th. Unfortunately, they have not had Roosevelt's flexibility of mind. And those who Bush has chosen as his Brain Trust have suffered from what the American historian Barbara Tuchman called "woodenheadedness." (See my post of April 9, 2007) The cure for woodenheadness, wrote Tuchman, is moral courage. Unfortunately, history is replete with examples of moral courage being equated with steadfastness. Often, she declared, the true measure of moral courage was the courage to change course. The man in the wheelchair had learned something about moral courage long before he became president.

What Obama is advocating is a change of course. Like Roosevelt, he is saying that the change will only be effective if it comes from the bottom up. And, like Roosevelt, the forces of fear are aligned against him. But he understands that -- in these extraordinary times -- our most potent enemy is "fear itself."

Sometimes the people have an instinctive knowledge that the man who can meet the challenges of their time is in their midst. My guess is that Obama will be elected President. If I'm right, the Walter Lippmanns of our own day will either be proven right or history will force them -- like Lippmann -- to reassess the man.