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What are the four things that President Obama should keep in mind for 2012?
The consequences of making promises that cannot be kept.
Remember that sure sense that he could close Guantanamo within the first year of his presidency? The 2008 avowal that “we must win in Afghanistan?”
Back then supporters either heard what they wanted to hear or thought Obama could do anything he set his mind to. (Maybe he thought so, as well.) In 2008, many Americans enthused as if the man could walk on water. Belief will not come so easily this time around.
On the contrary, a minor theme of this election cycle may be “loss of faith.” The consequence here is that voter turnout ’12 likely will be low—very low.
That well of forbearance to which he continually returns is his best asset. He should take care not to lose it, either in a fit of arrogance or expression of victimhood—both of which he occasionally indulges.
Voters may not believe Obama this time around, but they will trust him more than any candidate on the Republican horizon. Why? Because he will stump the country, doing what he did in the past election, doing what he has been doing every week for the past two-plus years: talking to small groups of citizens about his vision for the country. Again and again and again. No Republican, not even Sarah Palin, has been as consistent and persistent in outreach and message.
Stumping is not about persuading. Obama will not be able to persuade most of us, increasingly fearful and therefore self-centered, to embrace the idea of a new energy policy or immigration policy. Recall, for example, that half the country dislikes the health care reform bill. Nevertheless, Obama led us there and made us drink.
This is what presidential leadership is about, in part. Taking the country to a place we think we do not want to go. Therefore, the President stands out in front of us. Alone. That’s his perspective. He should embrace it. He should not pretend to be us. (To his credit, seldom does President Obama tell such anecdotes anymore.) He’s not “just folks,” and we know it.
Where do we stand? We may not agree with the President, but we need to know where he’s coming from. Stumping is about telling us—repeating, until we can repeat it back—exactly where that is. Voter uncertainty is the cancer that eats away any candidate’s chances. Forthrightness empowers a candidacy—look how far it has taken the otherwise improbable Donald Trump.
Explaining over and and over is a Sisyphean task that would drive most of us crazy. But somehow Obama has Job’s patience.
There’s something very reassuring about a leader who has the gift of patience. This is one reason Obama will be reelected.
The issue for 2012 will seem to be money—budgets and cuts and taxes and entitlements—but money itself is not the crux. It is the inchoate forces money has unleashed upon us.
For the past decade, middle class Americans have seen one of our worst fears realized: politicians pumping the controls of the engine car of a runaway spending train. First, the Republicans. Then Democrats. You can take the measure of that fear by the outcome of the midterm elections.
The antidote to fear is calm—what John McCain used to call “a steady hand at the tiller.”
Here is the Obama money challenge: to make as sensible stands in 2012 as in 2008. Hillary Clinton was the candidate who touted health care “for everyone.” Remember? The Obama plan was more cautious. He did not jump on board the gas tax refund in summer ’08 like everybody else did. Remember? Pragmatic Americans respected him for that. He showed promise of leadership by taking a different tack. When the economy began to implode a few months later, Obama, unlike opponent McCain, did not scurry about like Chicken Little, darting off to DC one minute and not the next.
Obama’s intellectual strength has always been an ability to embrace the ways in which our world is increasingly complicated and requires nuanced rather than more immediately satisfying acts of decision-making.
Money unsettles like nothing else except war, natural disaster and disease. In our materialist world, it has become the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. With money on the brain, and simultaneously bombarded by more complexity, more data, more human encounter, sought and unsought, more competition, more struggle for our attention, more play for our devotion, Americans, unlike our President, are losing it.
In the public sphere, we see this dangerous phenomenon on both the left and the right. In response to overload, we clamor for quickly gratifying solutions and for clarity.
From liberals: Punish Wall Street, CEOs and the bankers! Our increasing income inequality is their fault.
From conservatives: No new taxes!
From liberals: Out of Afghanistan! And no more foreign wars.
From conservatives: Cut the Pentagon budget, and we’re dead.
And, yes, we are drawn to candidates who promise simple solutions. Deep in our national consciousness, however, we know that globalization, in all its many iterations, has ended the older, easier America, and this knowledge feeds the fear and anger and unreason.
This is a phase. We will learn the new discipline the twenty-first century requires. We are not Americans if we do not rise to the challenge. Meanwhile we have a President who sees a route ahead, and however much we may balk and push back, criticize and complain, Obama is the guy with the telescope. However grudgingly we accept this reality—to some a great unpleasantness—there isn’t a Republican candidate on the horizon who can hold a tiller and adjust a lens at one and the same time.
April 29, 2011
[Tomorrow: How Republicans can win in 2012 without getting the White House.]
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