[The
Obama administration]… is to a unique degree a presidency of inference.
Peggy
Noonan
Un homme est qu'il fait, pas qu'il dit.
André Malraux
In a column in the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan suggested that Barack Obama’s
Presidency was an unprecedented work of inference. One can hardly exaggerate the significance
of this observation. Indeed. Somewhere in those dark, vast rhetorical regions bordered
on one side by the soaring words, “there
is not a black America and white
America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of
America”, and, “We’re
gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with
us on issues that are important to us,” on the other, the real political
convictions of this man reside. What are
they? What is he really about? As Ms. Noonan astutely concludes, even after
three and a half years one can only infer what these might be. Making these inferences seems to be a full
time occupation for the pundits.
The verb “to infer” has at least two
basic meanings: (1) to derive conclusions from facts or premises, and, (2) to
guess or surmise. It does not seem unreasonable
at this juncture to surmise that “Hope
and Change”, the campaign slogan of 2008 was a cynical but brilliantly crafted
ruse calculated to make it possible for any voter in that broad middle spectrum
of the electorate to infer that the young, fresh earnest candidate from
Illinois was … The One, exactly the right person to replace the man everyone
seemed to have grown tired of. The premise used to make this inference was
completely and deliberately vacuous – inviting a blind leap of faith, so to
speak – compensated for by the pastoral, inspirational tone of Barack Obama and
a soothing personal imagery unfortunately with no connections to any empirical
reality. Complicit also was the press corps who forsook their professionally mandated
oversight and signed up with the self-proclaimed “genius” routinely demonstrating
his modesty with tropes like: “we're
going to change the country and change the world.” Overnight the so-called
reporters turned into groupies, surrendering themselves to a man who was
promising to “heal the planet” and
proclaiming to his followers “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time.
We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” In retrospect, how could this vapid effusion from such a
bloated ego have been taken seriously by sober or grown up people, much less
news people who are supposed to be critical and skeptical?
The
unprecedented strategy by Obama’s fantasist-managers was not to expose him –
his personal history, beliefs, or accomplishments – to the electorate but to
conceal him. The concealment was aimed to put the voters in the position of
guessing what the translation of Hope and Change into practical politics from a
man with a meager political career might look like and what its enactor really
believed and wanted to accomplish. A few
of his detractors suggested that he might be, of all things, a “socialist,” a
charge sneeringly dismissed by the camp following legions. What nonsense! This was only an inference
based upon facts about the man’s many long and close associations
with friends and mentors, in writing and in person, who actually were socialists, as
well as his actual political record which was far to the left of most of his
political colleagues.
Obama was as some have observed a Rorschach
candidate. The absence of a lengthy and substantive political career meant for
the aspirant and his handlers that he could be … whatever. From the vacuity of Hope and Change one could
“infer” anything which was exactly how it was supposed to work, and did work.
However, the first definition above of
“infer” – “to derive conclusions from
facts or premises” is also highly germane in the contemplation of this
“presidency of inference.” In 2008 whatever
was actually known about Barack Obama
that might be relevant to his fitness to be President was ignored or
misrepresented as noted above. Specifically: his lack of executive experience,
his questionable associations, his penchant for “going for the groin” with his
political opposition. Never before was
the manufactured image of a candidate
– post partisan, post racial, moderate, transparent – such a glaring departure
from the flesh and blood individual.
A
highly relevant document from which conclusions about the President’s political
beliefs, attitudes and personality might actually be derived is his
autobiography, Dreams from my Father. Did anyone who voted for him actually read it? Consider this angry and bitterly tinged extract
from it, an account of his gravitation toward Marxism during his undergraduate
college years, how it was expressed and how in retrospect he considered it.
To avoid being mistaken for a
sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black
students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist Professors and the
structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets…. At night, in the dorms, we discussed
neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground
out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the
walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints.
We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated." [From,
Dreams from my Father, 100-101]
For
those inclined to think of Mr. Obama as a pragmatist, a moderate, a seeker of
bi-partisan compromise, what sort of inference should be made of this? By itself and without much context one should
perhaps be generous and dismiss it as hyperbole and melodrama, unfortunate utterings
of a spoiled and prolonged adolescence, transcended by eventual maturity – from
Marx at twenty to Milton Friedman at forty.
But this is not a confession. The
last sentence gives it away – “We were
alienated.” This is a vindication. Never in the book does the author show a change of heart or
perspective in this regard nor give any evidence of having moved beyond this
tortured perspective of being a victim in an unjust and rigged system.
Nowhere in the book is there any indication that the future President ever came
to believe that his “alienation” was in large part a product of his own
immaturity and limited experience, that the “constraints of bourgeois society”
were not “stifling”, and that, the America that nurtured him and eventually raised
him to its highest legislative body was not, as his wife put it during the 2008
campaign, “just down right mean.”
One
important personality feature that can be reasonably attributed to Obama after
a reading of Dreams is that author
(around 30 at the time of the writing) was a deeply alienated and resentful man. From
his own writing it is quite clear that resentment was and is the driving force
of his
political career, and that his growing up was shaped by a lasting sense of
anger and grievance. Also clear is that this resentment was played out in his
choice of friends, associates and mentors, individuals also deeply alienated
from American traditions and filled with grievance and hostility toward American
traditions and customs.
The
man in 2007 who told his audience, “I
don't want to pit Red America against Blue America. I want to be President of
the United States of America,” is no longer around. The Audacity of Hope, lifted from one of Pastor Wright's sermons, became the audacity of bait-and-switch. Unfortunately, the real political convictions
of Obama, the ones he has carried from
his university days and artfully concealed, came
out in
his Univision radio interview in late 2010, “We’re gonna punish our enemies and
we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important
to us.”
Hope and Change, whatever it was supposed to mean, has given way to condescension
and condemnation and the pursuit and destruction of his enemies, the rich. His message for reelection, “fairness” now is built on the foundation
of his primal motivation – resentment, converted with considerable demagogic
skill into righteous indignation. Those
who have more are to blame for those who have less. The resentful young man who “ground out his cigarette butts in the
hallway carpet” never relinquished the anger and hostility that guided him
to “chose [his] friends carefully.”
Early in his
Presidency the smitten adulators in the media were comparing him with Lincoln,
FDR, and JFK. He now looks and sounds
more like Huey Long or Juan Perón. But perhaps the President might look to Oscar
Benevides, President of Peru in the 1930s for his 2012 campaign slogan, one
quite consistent with his words and deeds – “For my friends, anything: for my enemies, the law.”
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