Inside Story

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THROUGH most of the years that George W. Bush was president of the United States, Aaron Sorkin’s TV series The West Wing offered liberals an alternative universe, one in which a worldly wise Nobel Prize–winning neo-Keynesian economist was the Democrat president. As the Bush era sputtered to a close, along came a real-life Democrat who both embodied and articulated all that liberals longed for. Barack Obama was a relatively unknown African-American Illinois state senator and first-time candidate for the US Senate when he gave the keynote address at the Democrats’ 2004 National Convention in Chicago. Finding in his own life and family background a metaphor for the American dream, Obama spoke movingly, not of neo-Keynesian economics, but of “the audacity of hope.” The effect was electrifying. Almost immediately, liberal pundits and political commentators were comparing him with Lincoln and tipping Obama to become America’s first black president.

Obama’s campaign for the presidency was built on his natural gifts as a speaker and as a writer. He was the author of two best-selling books: Dreams from My Father, commissioned after Obama became the first black student to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review, was his autobiography up to the year of his marriage, 1992; The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream appeared in 2006, on the eve of his successful campaign to become the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2008.

Obama won the presidency, but as the global financial crisis took its toll, the high hopes invested in him dwindled. In the mid-term congressional elections of November 2010, the Democrats were thrashed, or as Obama put it, “shellacked.” The president’s response was to seek rapprochement with the opposition. In December 2010, he struck a tax deal with the Republicans, whereby the Bush tax cuts for the rich stayed in place for two years. Next, in his January 2011 State of the Union Address to both Houses of Congress, he announced a three-year government spending freeze, promising that, “like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t.”

Real-life Nobel Prize–winning neo-Keynesian economist Paul Krugman was appalled. In his New York Times blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” he pointed out that this was exactly what Republican leader John Boehner had been saying in 2010 to attack Obama’s stimulus policy. To Krugman, it was “a spectacular demonstration of Obama’s failure to change the narrative. Not only is he accepting the Republican world view, he’s parroting their dumb attacks on his own policies.”

Other commentators had a word for Obama’s strategy: “triangulation” (roughly, “balancing act”), a term used by White House staff in 1995 to brazen out Clinton’s embrace of much of the Republicans’ tax-cutting agenda after they won control of both Houses in the 1994 mid-term elections.

On 7 February 2011, Obama went further. He made a personal appeal to the US Chamber of Commerce, the biggest lobbying organisation in the United States, which had spent over US$90 million in support of Republican candidates in the mid-term elections. Seeking the chamber’s support for his program of “investments in education, innovation, and infrastructure,” Obama promised in return “to freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years… lower the corporate tax rate… remove outdated and unnecessary regulations” and “make America the best place on earth to do business.” Characteristically, he appealed to his audience’s better nature: “Whatever differences we may have, I know that all of us share a deep, abiding belief in this country, a belief in our people, a belief in the principles that have made America’s economy the envy of the world.” Echoing John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech, he urged: “[A]s we work with you to make America a better place to do business, ask yourselves what you can do for America. Ask yourselves what you can do to hire more American workers, what you can do to support the American economy and invest in this nation.”

Obama’s appeal to the chamber’s patriotism fell on deaf ears: he was applauded only twice during the speech. Next day, Robert Reich, Labor secretary in the Clinton administration and also a neo-Keynesian economist, spelled out the chamber’s inflexible free-market agenda:

I’ve been watching (and occasionally trying to deal with) the Chamber for years, and all I know is it has a deep, abiding belief in cutting taxes on the wealthy, eroding regulations that constrain Wall Street, cutting back on rules that promote worker health and safety, getting rid of the minimum wage, repealing the new health-care law, fighting unions, cutting back Medicare and Social Security, reducing or eliminating corporate taxes, and, in general, taking the nation back to the days before the New Deal.

For much of the time since then, Obama has struggled to get the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to pass the budget before a temporary spending bill passed in February expired. Faced with a government shutdown, he offered more spending cuts. “We’ll only finish the job together – by sitting at the same table, working out our differences and finding common ground,” he said on his weekly radio and internet address on 5 March.

Some would call this an instance of Obama’s pragmatism, but that charge is turned on its head by the Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg in his intellectual biography of the president, Reading Obama. “It has become a cliché to characterize Obama as a pragmatist,” Kloppenberg writes, “by which most commentators mean only that he has a talent for compromise – or an unprincipled politician’s weakness for the path of least resistance.” Kloppenberg argues instead that the president is guided by “philosophical pragmatism,” a philosophy that views the world as pluralistic and changing, that is concerned with practical, open-ended outcomes, with debate and experimentation, with “what works,” rather than working from fixed principles.

Originating in the late nineteenth century with the American thinkers Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey (and applied to the law by US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes), pragmatism is “closely connected with the culture of democratic decision-making,” says Kloppenberg, and “has played an important part in shaping progressive politics [in the United States] since the early twentieth century.” In the 1980s and 1990s, pragmatism underwent a “resurgence” in the work of, among others, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls, and Harvard law professors Martha Minow, Frank Michelman and Laurence Tribe. During the years Obama was a student and president of the Harvard Law Review, pragmatism was becoming the springboard for progressive research and debate on the law, and, Kloppenberg argues, was thus central to his studies and his work as editor. In his first year at Harvard, for example, Obama worked as a research assistant to Tribe on a paper entitled “The Curvature of Constitutional Space,” which, Kloppenberg explains, used a metaphor from physics to make the pragmatists’ point: that “the law necessarily affects social relations… much as a star ‘curves’ gravity in the space that surrounds it.”

Kloppenberg acknowledges that “Obama rarely mentions the scholars whose work has shaped his ideas.” In fact, Obama makes no mention of pragmatism or the pragmatist thinkers of the past or present in his exposition of his political philosophy in The Audacity of Hope. Kloppenberg’s method of research was to interview Obama’s college and university teachers (though not the president himself), trawl the reading lists of the courses he took as a student and taught as a lecturer, read the papers he wrote and the issues of the Harvard Law Review he edited, and re-visit the cultural upheavals of Obama’s college and university years.

Obama’s Harvard Law School colleagues spoke glowingly of his “striking ability to resolve disputes,” his “knack for conflict resolution,” Kloppenberg reports. A progressive in his politics, Obama went out of his way, they said, to talk with and find common ground with conservative students. This ability “to empathise with others, and his persistent efforts inside and outside the classroom to find ways to resolve conflicts,” Kloppenberg was told, was what clinched his election to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review.

Kloppenberg acknowledges that his account of Obama’s evolution into what he calls the “philosopher president,” heir to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, is a partial portrait. I would argue that, by his own account in Dreams from My Father, Obama’s worldview, however much it accords with “philosophical pragmatism,” evolved in the distinct circumstances of his personal struggle to find where he belonged in America.

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WRITTEN with the skill of an accomplished writer of literary fiction, Dreams from My Father tells the story of a solitary boy raised by his white mother in Hawaii and Indonesia with little knowledge of his Kenyan father and no contact with his Indonesian stepfather after his mother sent him back to her parents in Honolulu to receive an American education at an elite private school. In high school, Obama was not the academic achiever he was to become, concentrating his ambitions on basketball. Struggling to resolve the identity bequeathed by his mixed heritage, he drank, tried drugs, and sought advice from a black poet, a mate of his grandfather. Moving to Occidental College in Los Angeles, he studied history and political theory (and read, Kloppenberg has discovered, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk). Finding his place among fellow black students, he joined the anti-apartheid movement and momentarily discovered his gift as an orator in a speech calling for disinvestment in South Africa. Transferring to Columbia University in New York, he studied international relations, tried his hand as a novelist, immersed himself in the history of the civil rights movement of the sixties, and in 1983, the year he graduated BA, found inspiration in the victory in Chicago of the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington. But it was when he worked briefly as a community organiser in Harlem that he found his vocation:

Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.

The civil rights movement was his inspiration:

In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned…That was my idea of organizing. It was a promise of redemption.

Obama sought work with all the civil rights organisations he could think of, without success; then, in 1985, he was offered a job as a trainee community organiser with the Developing Communities Project in the neglected neighbourhoods on Chicago’s South Side, working with local Catholic churches. The Chicago chapters of Dreams from My Father are devoted mostly to Obama’s conversations with the black men and, especially, the black women of these and other South Side communities – or rather, to recounting what they said in conversation with him about their lives. But the Developing Communities Project’s lack of success prompted him to turn his attention to black Protestant churches that were running successful community organisations in other areas of the South Side. The pastor of one of these churches, Reverend Philips, was to ask him: at which church did he worship? Obama had no religion. His humane and inclusive values were those instilled by his free-thinking mother. He was an outsider. As he puts it in The Audacity of Hope, his dilemma was that he “had no community or shared traditions in which to ground [his] most deeply held beliefs.” The black church was “the centre of the community’s political, economic, and social as well as spiritual life,” but he was held back by his lack of faith in something more than himself.

This is where, arguably, the man who was to exercise the greatest influence over Obama’s world view entered his life: the charismatic Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ. By this stage in Wright’s ministry, Trinity members had multiplied from two hundred to four thousand, along with church programs and organisations. With an introduction from Reverend Philips, Obama visited Wright. An ex-marine with a PhD in the history of religion, Reverend Wright was knowledgeable in Hebrew and Greek, in “the literature of Tillich and Niebuhr and the black liberation theologians,” and in African history. He told Obama that critics regarded Trinity as too radical. The church’s brochure listed as its guiding principles, first, commitment to God, then a “Black Value System” that included “Black Christian activism, Black freedom and the dignity of all humankind,” and a “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.” By then, Obama had already applied for and been accepted at Harvard Law School. His plan was to bring back his legal knowledge to benefit the South Side communities, but he knew that with a Harvard law degree, “middleclassness” would be an option. To stay committed to serving the black communities required sacrifice, he realised, and the sort of faith that sustained men like Reverend Philips.

One Sunday Obama went along to Trinity to hear Jeremiah Wright preach. His sermon was on “the audacity of hope” and Obama reproduces it in Dreams from My Father, along with the responses and clapping of the black congregation, as the moment of his conversion to Christianity. For the first time, he says, he realised that the Bible stories – Old Testament and New – are the old and new stories of ordinary black people: “our story, my story… at once unique and universal.”

The Audacity of Hope became the title of Obama’s second book, published in 2006. In the chapter on religion, he writes of another insight gained in the black church at the time of his conversion: “faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts.” He goes on:

It was because of these newfound understandings – that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved – that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptised.

For the next twenty years Jeremiah Wright was Obama’s spiritual mentor and religious adviser. At Harvard Law School, Obama excelled. His presidency of the Harvard Law Review led to the contract for Dreams From My Father, written after he graduated magna cum laude in 1991. Recruited by the University of Chicago Law School, he was to teach constitutional law there for twelve years. He also practised as a civil rights lawyer. In 1992 Jeremiah Wright officiated at Obama’s wedding to fellow lawyer Michelle Robinson; he later baptised their two daughters. The family worshipped at his church until 2008, when some of Wright’s outspoken criticisms of America, excerpted from his sermons, were broadcast to nationwide outrage. Interviewed on television, Wright compounded the scandal with statements Obama found even more offensive. Obama broke with his pastor, and in one of his finest speeches, entitled “A More Perfect Union,” he spoke about the thorny subject of race in America, from the original failure of the founding fathers to deal with slavery in the Constitution, to its legacy in the angry sermons of Jeremiah Wright. The difference between him and his pastor, Obama said, was that whereas Wright believed that America’s racism was ineradicable, he believed that “the true genius of the nation is that America can change.”

Critics on the left, says Kloppenberg, attacked this speech because Obama had abandoned Wright, while critics on the right attacked him for excusing Wright’s anti-Americanism. To Kloppenberg, the speech was imbued with the values of philosophic pragmatism: “It provides one of the clearest expositions of [Obama’s] attitude to the contingency and partiality of cultural values.”

This seems to me to ignore the message Obama repeated over and over at the end of his speech. Instead of exchanging racial slurs, he talked about talk as an end in itself:

We can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools… This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills… This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care… This time we want to talk about the men and women of every colour and creed who serve together…

Talk as an end in itself means compromise. Obama’s election promise of “change” meant change brought about by talk, by listening, by compromise. In 2007, when he returned to Chicago’s South Side to announce his bid for the presidency, he declared: “It was in these neighbourhoods that I received the best education I ever had.” His work there, Obama said, “taught me a lot about listening to people as opposed to coming in with a predetermined agenda.” Michelle Obama went further: “His work as a community organiser was really a defining moment in his life, not just his career.”

Pace Kloppenberg, I can only conclude that Obama was drawing on that South Side education in “listening to people” when he wrote in The Audacity of Hope:

What the framework of our Constitution can do is organise the way by which we argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery – its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights – are designed to force us into a conversation, a “deliberative democracy” in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.

What about the role of the president in a deliberative democracy? Obama found his model in Lincoln:

… who like no man before or since understood both the deliberative function of our democracy and the limits of such deliberation. We remember him for the firmness and depth of his convictions – his unyielding opposition to slavery and his determination that a house divided could not stand. But his presidency was guided by a practicality that would distress us today…

Obama was warning us that, as president, he too would be “guided by a practicality,” and on issues such as carbon trading, closing Guantanamo Bay, and offshore oil drilling, he has either backed down or capitulated to furious opposition. On gun control, he has been silent. In The Audacity of Hope he declared: “I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby.” After the mass shooting in Tucson on 8 January 2011, when Democrat congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, twelve others suffered gunshot wounds, and six people died, Obama was widely expected to take a stand on gun control, if not at the memorial service, then in his State of the Union Address in January. Again, he disappointed many of his supporters.

Others continue to see Obama as the new Lincoln. When the president spoke at the memorial service for those killed and wounded at Tucson, he “had to rise above the acrimonious debate about what caused the gunman in Tucson to kill and injure so many people,” wrote the American historian, Garry Wills, writing in the New York Review of Books under the headline, “His Finest Hour.” When the president “sidestepped that issue by celebrating the fallen and the wounded and those who rushed to their assistance,” Wills (Pulitzer-Prize–winning author of a book on Lincoln) was reminded of the Gettysburg Address, when Lincoln abjured blame, instead “praising the dead and urging others to learn from them.” Wills went on to invoke Shakespeare: “[Obama’s] sharing of praise for all who suffered and aided the suffering made me think of another speech, Henry V’s at Agincourt.” And that brought to mind Shakespeare’s reference to the king’s “healing touch” as he visited his soldiers on the eve of the battle. In a flight of hyperbole, Wills fantasised that Obama might himself be blessed with “the healing touch,” since Gabrielle Giffords, the unconscious congresswoman, victim of the Tucson gunman, “miraculously” opened her eyes immediately after the president visited her. •