DANCING NEBULA

DANCING NEBULA
When the gods dance...

Monday, September 3, 2012

Barack Obama, the conventional president

DNC 2012: Barack Obama, the conventional president
  • Barack Obama is shown here at a campaign event. | AP Photo

Obama has not led the transformational presidency his allies and even critics expected. | AP Photo

Barack Obama was a man of uncommon background and uncommon talents, a visionary, a transformational leader. That’s what his supporters believed as Obama accepted a presidential nomination on a stage lined with Greek columns in Denver in 2008.

The skeptics were just as certain of their own view. Obama was a political exotic, a cultural and ideological radical obscuring his real intentions behind billowy phrases and naively adoring crowds.

Four years later, as the president this week arrives in Charlotte, N.C., to justify his first term and make the case for a second, it is clear that one side’s hopes and the other’s fears both failed dramatically to anticipate the reality of Obama. He is not a 21st-century FDR; nor is he a Jeremiah Wright-style radical in the Oval Office.

He is a man of conventional instincts, practicing conventional politics, sitting atop what has been a mostly conventional presidency.

No one could doubt that Obama is governing in extraordinary times: an economy that flirted with depression and is still struggling to stand; two wars abroad; a capital consumed by partisan malice.

The surprise is that a leader who arrived in office amid such unprecedented times and with such an unusual biography would infuse his presidency with such a relentlessly familiar style.

The expectation was that Obama represented a new brand of politics, marshaling ideas, language and tactics in ways that would constitute a break from Democratic orthodoxy. The reality is that Obama, so far, has presented no set of ideas that collectively represent anything that might last beyond his term as “Obamism.” His West Wing staff, and his governing agenda, have their roots deep in the traditional Democratic soil of Chicago and Capitol Hill.

The expectation was that Obama’s governing style would find fresh uses of the presidential platform, inspiring public pressure to forge new governing coalitions. The reality is that Obama by his own admission has not used his pulpit in creative ways — failing to “tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism,” as he told a CBS News interviewer this summer. And, far from breaking a generation-long partisan standoff in Washington, Obama’s presidency has been almost entirely defined by it.

The expectation was that Obama would be a dazzling personal presence in Washington, lighting the capital with an electric surge of power and glamour that would revive JFK’s Camelot with an African-American hue. The reality is that Obama’s cultural impact has been virtually nil. His weekends are that of a typical middle-aged suburban professional, hanging out with wife and daughters, except when he’s not retreating with a small collection of friends to the basketball court or golf course.

To call a politician conventional is hardly a stinging insult. Political customs are the product of experience and consensus among accomplished people. Yet no one was more robust in encouraging the public to think of him as unconventional — not a politician but a phenomenon — as Obama himself. His desire to not simply reverse the policies of George W. Bush’s administration but dramatically change the practice of politics was embedded in most every speech he delivered in 2008.

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