Obama gains power to change world
January 19th, 2009Service, accountability, responsibility in a new era of just goals
Rare mix of ideals, ideas, and freedom from partisan ideology
Bush loots till, shutters operation after pawning furniture
As George Bush smiles atop his tattered 22% approval base, and waves off his last round of deregulation as a parting gift to his successor, our new grown up President has arrived in Washington to deal with the mess – the smoking ruins of the US and world economy, the collapsing global environment and the dysfunctional military operations abroad – that is his inheritance. But is Obama up to the job?
We believe he is more than up to it. We still believe that Obama is possibly the only man in the world that can and will save us from ruin.
Obama’s cool warmth
Not only is he notoriously cool, calm, collected and determined in the face of possibly the greatest challenges ever to face a new President, but as we never tire of celebrating, this man has the independent intellect to develop his own ideas and the vocabulary to express them, drawing on the best information, proposals and ideas from the contacts and advisors he has harvested over the years from seemingly every strata of society in widely disparate regions of the world, including even his political opponents, such as John McCain.
Of course, worrywort progressives who are infatuated with Ralph Nader and other truthtellers, who Alas have little or no idea how to win the power needed to implement their idealistic vision of human behavior, have already given up on Obama for choosing a largely centrist, Clinton graduate and often hawkish Cabinet, with the sole exception of the Labor secretary.
What they don’t seem to appreciate is that now that Obama has received proper briefings as to what is really going in at the top echelons of US and world government and politics, he has swiftly adjusted to the new data. Naturally laptop critics on the Web and in armchairs around the world, lacking these insider briefings, will not understand why Obama has changed, as they see it, from the man they imagined from his campaign pledges.
But as the New York Times has made clear, in a front page article yesterday by David E. Sanger, Obama’s change in image is merely the result of tacking before the winds of reality that are invisible to outsiders. Or only partly visible. Many of the changes that have taken place over the 710 days since Obama announced his brilliantly successful run for the Presidency are obvious enough, since at that time the ticking time bomb of subprime mortgages and the global credit freeze it harbingered had not exploded on the front pages:
2 Years After Campaign Began, a Different World
The Dow was at 12,580, on the way to 14,000 that summer. General Motors was making money selling cars even while reporting some concerns about “nonprime mortgages” held by its financing division. And the greatest worries about China and India were that their economies were growing so fast they could overheat.
Obama reassesses
In support of our argument that Obama is adapting to cold reality in the privileged context of proper briefings, we have these lines in the same article:
But the shifting reality has done more than force a change in focus. It also led Mr. Obama to re-examine his assumptions about a range of issues, hone his thinking and reach out to new advisers, some of them drawn from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, some of his aides said.
When it comes to national security in particular, some of his aides see a subtle but distinct shift over the last several years, opening him to the influence of advisers who sound significantly more hawkish than he did two years ago.
So while the world has changed, Mr. Obama has changed with it. But how much?
Aides to Mr. Obama since his arrival in the Senate say his views have not changed as much as some liberal supporters and commentators contend. From the day in 2002 when he stated opposition to the Iraq war, he has said he is not against all wars. And on some issues, including that of striking at terrorism targets in Pakistan, he has sometimes been to the right of both Democratic and Republican rivals.
Yet while he might have been less ideological all along than his initial campaign positioning suggested, his emphasis since the election has been on pragmatism. It is particularly striking that he has signaled, without saying so, that his breaks with the Bush administration will not be as complete as many liberals are hoping. In response to Vice President Dick Cheney’s admonition not to turn his campaign rhetoric into policy until he has taken office and learned “precisely what it is we did and how we did it,” Mr. Obama told ABC News last week that it was “pretty good advice.”
Not that Obama with his varied background is a sucker, as Sanger notes:
Two years ago, Mr. Obama’s views on Iraq dominated the headlines as he began his campaign by emphasizing his differences with Mrs. Clinton.
That day in Springfield, Mr. Obama animated his supporters with talk about how Iraq was the wrong war. “It’s time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else’s civil war,” he said.
Then, it would have been hard to imagine that in less than two years he would ask President Bush’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, to stay on, along with the White House “war czar” for Iraq and Afghanistan. Or that he would choose a secretary of state who portrayed herself as more hawkish than himself and a national security adviser who is a former Marine commandant.
In March, as it was becoming increasingly evident that he would prevail over Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama began talking about Iran as the nation that “poses the greatest challenge to American interests in the Middle East in a generation,” and he vowed a few months later never to let the country obtain a nuclear weapon.
His openness to a broad range of viewpoints on national security has become more pronounced with each daily presidential briefing and with deeper dives into National Intelligence Estimates, which his staff says he reads with some skepticism. That is not only because of what the intelligence agencies got wrong in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
“He approaches the intelligence reports the same way he approaches a lot of the things he reads, whether it’s a story in The New York Times or a report from the ground,” said Denis McDonough, a longtime foreign policy aide who is often charged with finding answers to questions Mr. Obama raises. He contends that those who think Mr. Obama has drifted toward more hawkish views were not listening to what he said during the campaign about Iran or Pakistan or Hamas.
In other words, Obama is a literate man who has learned to take what is written by anybody within a system with a pinch of salt. Added to this is the fact that he has to take over whatever President Bush has implemented secretly, such as the covert effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program.
As far as we are concerned, a thoughtful family man with a way with words is a President we can trust.
From Books, New President Found Voice
Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.
In the same front page article in the Times today, Michiko Kakutani reports dead pan that President Bush “raced through” 95 books in 2006.
Nice comparison, Michiko.
The practical idealist
Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Gaza – Obama will have his hands full on the foreign policy front as soon as he ascends the Oval Office throne. None of this is our business, of course, except that we wanted to point out how it all signifies Obama’s essential pragmatism, and a not unscientific tendency to act on information and evidence rather than pure and often petty ideology.
Anyhow, that is why we think it is appropriate here at this point to list the basic parameters of the problem which concerns us most of all, the economic fizzle. How much air has been let out of the balloon so far? How much money has the government/will the government devote to reinflating the barrage balloon of hopes and expectations and will it succeed and when in lifting it off the ground?
But before that, we wanted to celebrate once again the literacy, the open mindedness, the empathy, the wide and deep roots and the informed scientific practicality of our new Pres, whose chief overriding virtue is his evident desire to bring the country together and serve the whole community of the country and the world, and not narrow interests.
Tomorrow, we fully expect 27 minutes of an address to equal Lincoln’s in word and spirit.
