No longer ‘The One?’

PERHAPS you’ve heard. Every commentator with a digital pen (or near a TV camera) has been piling on about President Obama’s alleged populism problem.

The sheer abundance of pontification is approaching the surreal. Firing wildly, a great deal of it reflects shallow or simplistic thinking on the part of pundits.

Virtually all of it, I think, misses the real issue: This really isn’t about Obama’s failings (though he has skin in the game), it’s about ours.

Get comfortable. I’m going to deconstruct this in detail. Hell, somebody has to.

Christopher Orr, senior editor at The Atlantic, sets the table and gives us a pretty good idea of what the chattering class is spilling ink over, over and over again:

”Barack Obama is aloof. Barack Obama is cerebral. Barack Obama lacks Bill Clinton's gift for political empathy. Barack Obama is out of touch with the angry, frustrated mood of the country. If he hopes to rebound from the Democrats' midterm wipe out, Barack Obama will have to adopt a more populist tone. If you've read any political journalism this week, you'll have come across variations of this analysis, and probably not for the first time. The idea that Obama should ditch his unflappable aura in exchange for a little populist fervor has been near-ubiquitous among the chatterati throughout his presidency.”

Later, wading into tricky racial territory, Orr says "there's a reason why Obama has, to a striking degree in contemporary politics, played up superego at the expense of id. His composed, borderline uptight demeanor allayed white anxiety about his race; and, less self-evident but no less real, his being black saved him from the nerd purgatory of Adlai Stevensonism.”

Andrew Sullivan, Orr’s colleague at The Atlantic, then takes a bite at the apple:

Some kind of left-populism would simply empower right-populism. I think the key to Obama's long-term success is being Obama: the calm, restrained, sober, reasonable adult in the room, always focused on actual problems and their feasible solutions. And Chris is right: his race actually helps balance this cerebral and temperamental calm. He's an Eisenhower in a room full of McCarthys. It may take some patience but we all know who won that game in the end.

Sullivan is spot on with the Ike verses “Bomber Joe” analogy. But I think the well-meaning Orr and Sullivan are off the mark on the white anxiety/angry black man construct. Both overstate it. This is one of those whitewater stretches in our cultural river where misunderstanding between black and white is widest, I think. To the extent there is a modicum of merit in Orr/Sullivan’s ideas about how race plays into all of this, Ta-Nehisi Coates – yet another Atlantic editor but who happens to be black – makes this observation: “Granted it's been decades, but I think Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis are still instructive here.” I agree. So does Black America, I think. So does Obama, I think. Enough said.

At bottom (and beyond race), the problem is not Obama. The problem is us.

Stated simply, the nation is traumatized, perhaps in a way not seen since the Civil War. That trauma affects both left and right. Its deeper causes are multifaceted. For the left, it began with the bruising Gore v. Bush presidential contest in 2000. The dispute over who won was nightmarish. The outcome was shocking. “We was robbed,” as the old saying goes. It left a scar, and deep ambivalence toward the political system.

THEN 9/11 happened. When the Twin Towers collapsed into rubble, it took our illusion of perceptual security with them. If Al Qaeda’s goal was to terrorize, then it worked. The gnawing sense fear and helplessness it engendered remains palpable. Bush’s military rush into Iraq war turned America into a pariah in the eyes of many, deeply hurting our pride. Bush told us to return to the malls for the sake of the economy. He said it was "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq and promised the war was well in hand. It wasn't. Abu Ghraib and the administration's appalling justifications for the use of torture shocked our moral sensibilities. And the constant color-coded alerts kept our fears at fever pitch.

Then, in 2004, in Bush v. Kerry, Dems took yet another body blow. Their man was unscrupulously “swift-boated.” Although the hapless Kerry had brought only a dull knife to a gunfight, we still felt as if we “was robbed” again. And all of us heard the incredulous snickering echoing across the Atlantic from Europe. And then the real estate market imploded, sparking the Great Recession. Skyrocketing unemployment and financial uncertainty added fuel to the raging wildfire of national anxiety.

Into this cauldron stepped Barack Hussein Obama, the skinny guy with a funny name. With his sublime message of hope and change, underpinned by dazzling charisma and intelligence, how could he possibly not be seen as anything other than a Messiah (“The One”) to a nation desperately yearning for a way out of its malaise? Obama became a Rorschach inkblot upon which people projected their preconceived notions (good or bad). It was salve for aching souls.

But if Obama was seen as salvation incarnate on the left, he was perceived as the mysterious “Other” on the right, and quickly demonized by the smaller (but loudest) far right sects. To wary conservatives, Obama symbolized a profound end to Traditional White America. Though irrational (we have been multi-hued from the start), Obama deepened fears in those who clung to both their guns and “Father Knows Best” fantasies. That fear remains the wellspring of the endless birther-Muslim quackery.

AND THEN, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, destiny took a hand. The inaugural clock chimed noon on January 20, 2009, and Obama had to govern. And he had to do so as the last adult standing in Washington, all while fighting two wars, staring an economic calamity in the face, and crossing swords with a recalcitrant GOP cynically dedicated to ending him.

Governance meant compromise. It meant making hard choices. It sometimes meant making unpopular decisions (e.g., bank bailouts) in the interests of a nation only dimly aware of what’s good for it. When perception met reality, not unlike When Sally Met Harry, adoring Democrats learned Obama neither wore a halo nor owned a Hogwarts wand. He couldn’t plug the hole with a finger snap. Obama, in turn, learned his liberal base was like a high-maintenance girlfriend: If he didn’t shower her daily with roses and swear his undying love every 10 minutes, she’d go all hysterically weepy on him, then sulk and then threaten to leave him forever if he didn’t “change” (think DADT). The Democrat romance, conceived in a magical moment of electoral delusion, was bound to hit the political shoals.

All of which brings us back to today’s quandary.

Our evident insecurity (the mother of frustration and fear) is borne out of the multiple traumas – real or imagined – that I have sketched out. They date back at least a decade. It affects all political persuasions, all classes and all races. It is structurally rooted in uncertainty, the result of terrorism and economic instability. It saps our traditional “can do” attitude and encourages infantilism. It feeds our obsession with celebrity, trivial pursuits and reality shows, which is really the equivalent of pulling the sheets over our heads as we hide from the shadowy things that go bump in the night.

When the threat of terrorism fades (or we grow numb to it) and the economy recovers (and it will), America will crawl out from under the sheets, shake off its malaise, course-correct and face reality again. But until it does, Obama is stuck with the task of being the biggest reality star of them all. That’s not his fault. It’s ours.

We The People, spurred along by an idealistic chattering class prone to handwringing, insist that Obama be the new Bill Cosby, America’s Dad – whether he likes it or not. And America, like sweet first daughter Malia, desperately wants Daddy to make it all better. Like, by the end of next week.

And what will Mr. Obama do given this surreal state of affairs?

Beyond additional, better choreographed outreach to his base (gotta keep Ms. Libby High-Maintenance happy), probably not much. Despite it all, Obama understands what underpins the nation’s current anxieties. He knows that if the economy adequately rebounds by 2012 and he diligently tends to the nation’s business, keeps terror at bay and the “river don’t rise,” America will not only reelect him, she’ll be tripping over herself in the rush to put him Mount Rushmore. And the chattering classes, in full A.D.D. in-patient mode, will fill the air with songs of praise while tossing hosannas at the feet of their new American Caesar. (I’d bet money on it.)

At Grant Park, Obama memorably said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” He is still waiting. And we, who have not lost faith in him (and there are many of us), are waiting, too. Grow up, America. Daddy is too busy saving your world to tell you a bedtime story tonight.