Barack Obama: The Audacity of Hope
The first of three columns on books by presidential candidates.
If platitudes had weight, Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope would be impossible to lift off the table. Still, it’s a good book. By the standards of “writings by politicians” it’s in the top percentile. You read it and you like the man. You read it and feel that he has managed somehow to be both a skilled politician and a genuine human being. He writes, for instance, about what motivates politicians to run for office and to continue doing so:
Those lines are indicative of the book's overall tone. They are disarming in their honesty on one hand, but calculated in the end for being so. Will anyone think less of him for admitting the role of fear in a politician's life?Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts for the behavior of politicians, however. There is a companion emotion, perhaps more pervasive and certainly more destructive, an emotion that, after the giddiness of your official announcement as a candidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and doesn't release you until after Election Day. That emotion is fear. Not just fear of losing — although that is bad enough — but fear of total, complete humiliation.
- Barack Obama: The Audacity of Hope
- Hillary Clinton: Living History
- John McCain: Worth the Fighting For
There is one, and while it isn't anything new, it is something that I'm not sure has been unpacked in all its dimensions: Obama thinks of himself as Lincoln. Anyone who cares to know that fact has known it at least since Sunday, June 26, 2005, when he declared as much in an article for Time magazine called "What I See in Lincoln's Eyes."
Indeed, Obama earned himself some rough treatment from Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal for writing that essay and he discusses the incident in his book. He writes:
Under the title "Conceit of Government," [Noonan] wrote, "This week comes the previously careful Sen. Obama, flapping his wings in Time Magazine and explaining that he's a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better." She went on to say, "There is nothing wrong with Barack Obama's resume, but it is a log-cabin free zone. So far it is also a greatness-free zone. If he keeps talking about himself like this it always will be."
Ouch!
Undaunted, if suitably self-aware, Obama continues to beat the Lincoln drum throughout The Audacity of Hope. On the face of it, this is unsurprising. Obama has presented himself to America as a high-minded uniter and Lincoln was, of course, the savior of the Union itself. But that is trivial stuff.
There is, however, a more complicated and interesting side to Lincoln's uniting. Lincoln united not so much by bringing all sides together, though he had the populist touch and the knack for speaking the common tongue, but because he outflanked nearly everyone and thereby trumped the political impasse of the time. The crisis of Lincoln's time was slavery, of course, but the contemporary debate centered on whether slavery should or shouldn't be allowed to extend into the newer states and territories in the West. You may remember the ongoing imbroglio over the Missouri Compromise, which effectively sliced the expanding nation of the early 19th century into slave and non-slave halves. Lincoln recognized clearly and decisively, and as few of his contemporaries ever did, that the terms of the debate itself were untenable. He immortalized this insight in his famous biblical quote that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." We tend to think of that line now as a truism. But Lincoln was boldly redefining the issue at the time. He was saying that the political divide of his era was structurally stagnant and therefore that neither side would be able to face the central questions of the day.
I think that's the kind of uniter that Obama wants to be. He wants to be an outflanker, not a synthesizer or a moderate in the typical senses of those terms. As such, he's not exactly a liberal, either, although he comes out of and was nurtured in the liberal tradition. As a Lincolnian outflanker, he is staking out a political territory that simply doesn't fit comfortably into the traditional liberal/conservative axis that has characterized American politics for more than 60 years.
And that is the second place where Lincoln comes in. In a seven-page stretch of the book that begins with Lincoln and that ends with Lincoln, Obama lays out a rough sketch of the last 150 years or so. First, you have the period in which "Lincoln embarked on a series of policies that not only laid the groundwork for a fully integrated national economy but extended the ladders of opportunity to reach more and more people." A period of prosperity followed that came to an end with the Great Depression. That set the stage for the legacy of the New Deal. FDR and Keynes saved us but capitalism continued to grow and transform. Reagan and then Clinton effectively ended the post-WWII period by reducing government's role while retaining something of a social safety net. That brings us roughly to the present, which Obama sees as a period ready for another political rearrangement but trapped in the battles of the past. He writes: "Republicans are fighting the last war, the war they waged and won in the eighties, while Democrats are forced to fight a rearguard action, defending the New Deal programs of the thirties. Neither strategy will work anymore."
Structurally, it's another Lincoln moment in Obama's eyes. One in which the necessary but nevertheless bold move is to outflank the existing political options. And it's a Lincoln moment in terms of content as well. Because the currently available option, as Obama sees it, is the old mix of Hamiltonian and Whiggish early Republicanism that got brushed aside in the tumultuous 20th century. "We can be guided," Obama says, "by Lincoln's simple maxim: that we will do collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as well or at all individually and privately." That maxim can sound just fine to any traditional 20th century Republican or Democrat so long as they listen to it in the manner to which they're already inclined. And it is OK to Obama, right now, if they do. He's trying to ride that broad approval all the way to the White House. But I suspect that what he really means with that Lincolnian maxim is something that can't sit right for either side, because it seeks to shift the ground upon which both sides are situated. Obama may indeed win the Democratic Party's nomination for President, but he's running as a Whig. • 14 February 2008Morgan Meis is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for The Believer, Harper’s, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily. Idle Chatter appears here weekly. Morgan can be reached at morgan@fluxfactory.org.
