Change Has Come, But It Is Not Coming
My apologies for not having had more to say on Election Night itself. First, congratulations to the new President-elect are in order. Throughout the campaign, I kept imagining reasons why he would not be able to do this, and at every turn he kept proving me and so very many others wrong. He mobilized and organized his own grassroots movement, fought the entrenched establishment candidate and party machine and prevailed, and in what he was able to achieve there are lessons for disaffected conservatives. It was interesting to watch the video of Obama giving his victory speech in Grant Park, which I have driven by and walked through so many times over the last seven years, and to behold an unprecedented event there in such familiar surroundings. Here in Hyde Park there was some celebratory honking and shouting the name Obama, but the neighborhood was on the whole very quiet (probably a lot of people were at the speech).
My Culture11 article on what we can expect from the future President makes an argument that will be familiar to many regular readers of Eunomia, stressing as it does Obama’s aversion to political risk, his careful, deliberative approach and his preference for consensus and accommodation. This is my concession to Obama supporters’ emphasis on the man’s temperament, which I think the article explains fairly well, albeit not necessarily in the most flattering way. I set this view of Obama against the interpretations of those inclined to hope for or fear significant policy shifts in the years to come. One point that I want to emphasize is this:
There is an assumption shared by most Obama backers that he will prove to be, in Colin Powell’s formulation, a “transformational” President, particularly with respect to foreign affairs and America’s reputation abroad. But the expected transformation in foreign attitudes seems based largely on temporary foreign enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy that is itself a product of the misconception that Obama’s election will mark some significant or meaningful change in U.S. foreign policy [bold added-DL].
As if on cue, Garry Kasparov offers this comment today:
Bush is practically a bouquet of the classic American stereotypes, the ones so easy to hate: rich, inarticulate, uninterested in the world, stridently religious and hasty to act. (And the images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina seemingly exemplified the stereotype of Americans as racists and were viewed largely without surprise abroad. Of course they wouldn’t rescue poor black people.) Obama would explode these stereotypes. But the world’s multitude of grievances against the Bush administration quickly would be laid on Obama’s doorstep if he were to fail to back up his inspiring rhetoric with decisive action.
Kasparov then goes on to make a predictable argument that Obama will be betraying his promise if he does not share Kasparov’s preoccupation in vilifying the Russian government. That is, according to Kasparov the dramatic improvement in foreign attitudes toward the United States that many Obama supporters expect will be contingent on his ability to introduce changes to U.S. policy that are satisfactory to a great variety of foreign audiences and the American public in a very short period of time after entering office, and if he cannot do this the international hostility towards his administration will be just just about as great as it has been towards Mr. Bush’s. This is to set Obama up for failure. Kasparov may not care about this, but what is remarkable is how much his domestic supporters have also put Obama’s “transformational” potential in the hands of other nations. Having accepted the premise that Obama’s election will repair our reputation and image abroad, they open him up to the charge that he has failed when other nations continue to respond to U.S. policy with the same skeptical or hostile attitudes, even though they are responding to the policy and not to the man.
P.S. Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to the United States, sounds the warning against excessive European expectations:
I do worry that many Germans and other Europeans have developed unrealistically high expectations for an Obama administration. In some of the panels I’ve been participating in recently, you get the sense that everyone expects a trans-Atlantic paradise will emerge with blue skies and constant sunshine. Some disappointment is inevitable.
We know that on many issues there is an obvious, visible divergence of interests across the Atlantic. Europeans will be surprised, for instance, to learn that even with Obama in the White House and a strong Democratic majority in the US Senate, the US is unlikely to ratify the Kyoto protocol or its successor arrangements as they currently exist.
8 Responses to “Change Has Come, But It Is Not Coming”
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Well, judging by the missile deployment statement, at least Medvedev doesn’t seem to suffer from ” unrealistically high expectations”. Actually, that seemed to me to be an overly-confrontive step and I am curious to see your reaction.
I consistently underestimated Obama even as I supported him. Prior to his victory in Iowa I regarded him as little more than an Iraq protest candidate, like a more dynamic version of Denis Kucinich. Then I thought the Clinton machine would grind him down. Then I feared the primaries had weakened him so badly that he would be easy pray for the Republican attack strategy. I was wrong on all counts.
The most moving thing is that Obama believed in the U.S.. Believed that we had come a long, long way from the convulsions of the Civil Rights movement. I didn’t believe it, the Clintons didn’t believe it, Ed Rendell didn’t believe it, Geraldine Ferraro – hey what’s up with her, anyway? Hell, Jesse Jackson didn’t believe it either. So, while I don’t want to fall into all of the self-congratulatory sappiness that is all over the tube and the internets today, I confess that my heart did swell for a moment watching Jesse weep last night. I’m glad the country was worthy of Obama’s confidence.
Jetan said: “The most moving thing is that Obama believed in the U.S.”
Obama believed in detailed polling and focus groups.
Actually I disagree totally with this conclusion. The central plank of Obama’s platform was change and he’s going to be expected to deliver it, and the odds are he will. I don’t think the conservative movement or the Republican party begin to understand what they have on their hands with this guy. Firstly, I believe he is going to join FDR and Kennedy as one of the iconic presidents. The sort that have their pictures hanging in people’s homes. Partly, it’s that he is the first black president but there’s no getting around the fact that he’s a person of astounding charisma and grace. We’re going to see Obama mania on the scale of Roosevelt and Kennedy mania. Then there’s the more tangible skills. He has the luminous intelligence of Clinton with 100 times the self discipline, and all the guile and political savvy of Clinton and FDR. Add in a congressional caucus that will be eating out of his hand and he’s going to completely control both the agenda and the public storyline. The conservative reaction will be reckless obstruction. I can see Flake and Cantor now egged on by the pundits from WS and NR trying to create mayhem and being completely outmaneuvered. We’re not going to have a lot of silly don’t ask don’t tell or vetting dramas either. I suspect Obama has a very clear agenda and it’s not going to be one that’s very palatable to conservatives including as it does an Iraq withdrawal, universal healthcare of some sort, a slew of new supreme court judges to provide some relief for Ginsburg et al, but there is really nothing to stop it. And furthermore it’s all going to be very popular. If you don’t believe me just think for a moment what the reaction will be when 140,000 guys come marching home from Iraq which will bump along just fine and be even less on the national radar than at present. Amidst all the chattering going on the right at the moment there needs to be some realistic appraisal of the dynamic that is likely to unfold over the next four years and quite honestly I see precious little of this.
Well, Anthony, his opponents all had good pollsters and focus groups too. But at the time he decided to make a run the thought that he might actually win seemed laughably far-fetched to me.
Obviously I hope he is a great President, but I have no idea how he’ll do. The problems he is inheriting seem to bode either a very good Presidency or a god-awful one. I don’t see a “caretaker” option out there.
I read your Culture 11 article and I don’t disagree with your notion that Obama will be cautious and thoughtful, rather than radical and impulsive. But I continue to disagree with your ongoing theme that Obama is a “disappointment generating machine”. So far, you’ve been proven wrong on that. The notion that he will fail to live up to expectations is gaining currency among conservative critics, and while there’s some possible validity to it, you ignore just how easy it will be for Obama to please most people out there.
In foreign policy, all Obama has to do is make nice, begin withdrawals from Iraq, and smile a lot, and the world will love him because he looks like the opposite of Bush. Getting out of Iraq is going to be a piece of cake, in particular because the Iraqis want us out, so “conditions on the ground” require us to leave no matter who is President. Afghanistan may prove troublesome, but no one has very high expectations there anyway. As for Russia, I can’t believe you think Kasparov speaks for the majority of Europeans. The Bush/McCain hostility to Russia is very, very unpopular in Europe, and around the world, and disappointing Kasparov is not going to make Obama unpopular, quite the opposite. In general, Obama is going to be a lot like Kennedy, a hugely popular figure among foreigners on style and idealism alone, regardless of his actual policies. No one is expecting him to solve the imposssible Middle East situation, but he will win points for being positively engaged regardless of actual results. He gets a huge boost simply by not being Bush, and by engaging in foreign policy in a thoughtful, cooperative way, which is all the rest of the world really expects from him, and which is going to be easy for him to deliver on. Expect him to be a defuser of conflict and tension rather than an exploiter of it like Bush, and that will be enough.
Domestically, I think Obama will begin with energy policy, and successfully pass bills on that issue. He’ll also pass a stimulus package and his tax cuts for the middle class, plus some economic reforms and regulations of the markets. This will all be rather popular. Then he’ll tackle health care, and be compromising in a way that will disappoint the radicals, but at least represent a start in the direction such people want to go. So it’s hard to see where he will actually falter and fail to meet expectations. Your criticism is pretty short on the specifics of what you think is expected of Obama, and where he will fail to meet those expectations. Maybe you could spell those specifics out in some kind of tangible detail?
I certainly don’t think it’s impossible for Obama to fail, or to fail to meet expectations, but you ignore the upside to having high expectations. It means that there’s a strong incentive out there to see Obama succeed, for these people with high expectations to work to see those expectations met. In many ways, this can become self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact that people want Obama to succeed is probably the best thing he has going for himself, just as past a certain point many people wanted to see Bush fail even more, to totally discredit his approach, creating a snowball effect. With Obama, it’s more likely to be the opposite, that waves of positive expectations create a positive feedback situation which makes it far easier for him to succeed than to fail. Likewise, the mere “tone” of Obama, like that of Kennedy, who was no radical revolutionary either, goes a long way towards keeping support going regardless of how his actual policies turn out, unless they are just monumentally disastrous, which I doubt they will be.
Jetan: “But at the time he decided to make a run the thought that he might actually win seemed laughably far-fetched to me.”
That’s right – Obama nobly believed in the U.S.’s willingness to elect *him* – how moving! Seriously, it seemed far-fetched because Hillary Clinton had a monolithic lead across the United States, and he was a first-term Senator with no previous executive experience – who had previously spoken out (himself!) against a first-term Senator running for the Presidency.
It was certainly laughably far-fetched (and a sad testament to the state of U.S. Presidential politics that he won), but to insinuate that Obama’s greatness of heart is what allowed the U.S. the great gift that is himself is odd, and quite frankly, obtuse. He’s a politician, who is seeking power and fame – and has just found it. Hopefully Americans aren’t into deity worship of politicos just yet.
Hmm. I think you’re taking this election thing a little seriously – I assure you it happens every four years, whether one likes the outcome or not.
If it’s obtuse to feel a tad moved by electing our first black President, one with a funny name to boot, then I must plead guilty.
Jetan, my whole point is that it *isn’t* a big deal, and that we shouldn’t get starry-eyed about politicians.
“The most moving thing is that Obama believed in the U.S.. Believed that we had come a long, long way from the convulsions of the Civil Rights movement.”
I wasn’t critiquing you feeling moved that Obama won (great, you’re happy that he won), I was critiquing the idea that it was moving that *Obama* believed in the U.S. That is hagiographic pap. Please.
For goodness’ sake, Larison, stop writing so much stuff. I can barely find this post anymore, and it’s still the same day! :)