Can Obama Lead?   

Dan Shanahan reviews Obama's past as a community organizer and finds in his experience roots to Obama's present problems.

The Other Obama

During the long run-up to the 2008 Presidential Election, America – and especially America’s media outlets – tried to come up with a handle for dealing with the elusive phenomenon of Barack Obama. In its search for a “tag” that could distill this seemingly one-of-a-kind candidate into a usable “eau de”-whatever moniker, media discourse and public perception of Candidate Obama ranged widely. Some viewed Candidate Obama as a post-multicultural messiah, others as a staid, lecturing law professor. Finally the search seemed to be abandoned in the face of the overwhelming perception that he was a political prodigy, destined by the stars to outstrip anyone’s ability to pin a label on him.

But curiously, the media punditry which once dwelt on such things as Ronald Reagan’s B-grade stardom to explain his almost soap-operatic appeal (The Great Lowbrow Communicator, they might have called him), or George W. Bush’s string of personal and professional failures to get at his managerial "style," failed to do the obvious with Barack Obama: trace his roots to his teeth-cutting experience as a community organizer.

Whether one thinks of the campaign’s mastery of the Internet as a political tool, or the candidate’s own ability to reach out to the electorate without declaring himself too forcefully on issues or articulating policy positions with much detail, clearly Obama’s style owed much – arguably almost everything – to his early experience as a community organizer in the neighborhoods of Chicago. Community organizers must, first and foremost, earn the trust of those they hope to organize; they must demonstrate an understanding of the problems and frustrations faced by their potential clientele. But above all community organizers must get the community to recognize its commonality, to pool its resources in the service of addressing its common problems and sometimes to guide the process whereby it can recognize its problems as problems. If one looks closely at the tenor and style of the Obama campaign, and of the first year of the Obama presidency – most especially in the administration’s health care “initiative” – this is exactly what took place. The campaign was big on sincerity; it adopted a low-key version of the Clinton “I share your pain” motif; and it worked hard to create a common conviction that challenges could be met (“Yes we can”) – though without tainting the identification of problems with ideological markers such as “racism,” “big government,” “war mongering” or “family values.”

So too with health care. The very fact that the administration did not take the initiative with health care reform, sending its own legislation to Capitol Hill, bespoke of the now-president’s days in Chicago neighborhoods. Rather than risk being over-directive, Obama the former community organizer saw an opportunity to allow the community to come together, discuss “the problem,” find common ground and pose common solutions. Not only would the problem of health care reform be addressed, a sense of common purpose – one that could be very useful in the many policy initiatives to follow – would emerge as well. The process could be as much an achievement as the product.

Unfortunately, the American community – if we can even call it that – has been a badly divided one for longer than anyone is willing to admit. While the “red state-blue state” divide has been recognized as a defining aspect of the American political landscape at least since the election of George W. Bush, its origins clearly go as far back as the Reagan era, probably to the battle lines defined by the deep divisions over war and peace, wealth and poverty, and racism and equal opportunity which emerged in the Sixties. Trench warfare has been a fact of life for the entire lives of many of today’s young voters – and a feature of politics heavily depended upon by the likes of Fox News and Sarah Palin.

Much as we might wish it to be otherwise, ours is not an electorate that can be put in a room with coffee and donuts and expected to find common ground, let alone common solutions to common problems. Perhaps more appropriate to the political realities of America today than the community organizer is the role played by the labor mediator who locks both parties in a room, forbids both coffee and bathroom visits and then instructs the principals to “find a solution – period.” But a president who wants to play the role of tough labor mediator has to have considerable political clout to wield, and even a popular mandate such as Candidate Obama received is not sufficient to provide that kind of clout. Only success in the trenches of political warfare – the kind that comes with years of political experience – allows a politician to take a “get tough” approach, and President Obama simply has not been in combat long enough to earn the stripes it would take to forbid latrine visits to the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. In the face of that simple reality, there is only one thing that can provide the muscle that would allow a politician to overcome deep divisions and forge a sufficient sense of common purpose to address, not only health care reform, but the myriad of problems created by the Bush-Cheney legacy and by the new global and domestic gravitational fields that are part of the 21^st century. It’s called “leadership.”

During the prolonged Democratic primary campaign that produced enough debates, interviews and appearances to have filled a dozen such campaigns only a generation ago, many progressive voters found themselves uncertain about who to support. Had they known then about John Edwards’ monumentally stupid philandering, or Hillary Clinton’s willingness to set herself up as the representative of “white America,” their minds might have been made up. But it wasn’t until March of 2008 that many of us turned the corner. It was Barack Obama’s speech, given to quell the uproar over remarks made by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, that showed a light in the maze of dim tunnels that allowed thinking progressives to set their sights and not look back. For in his speech addressing the anger and resentment reflected in Reverend Wright’s remarks, Candidate Obama did what few political operators ever do: he called it the way he saw it, “chips fall where they may"-style, and he did so with such insight, clarity and honesty, that the “Wright problem” just went away. Period. That was leadership.

In his speech, Obama gave a cogent analysis of black frustration that both recognized its sources, acknowledged how it was an understandable response to the experience of African Americans, and set himself sufficiently above the fray to demonstrate he chose the higher ground in addressing the problem. But he did so with a foot in the camp of many white Americans who, out of a sense of fair play more endemic in the American character than many progressives are willing to recognize, want to be sympathetic but feel susceptible to liberal guilt – which itself has never produced anything. Moreover, like the good community organizer he is, Obama said nothing to inflame the resentments felt by those who feel affirmative action violates their sense of fair play, those who harbor fears that black advancement will take place at their expense, etc., etc. He may not have convinced any of them that Wright’s sentiments were understandable; but by avoiding a moral diatribe, he reassured them that understanding, not making political points, was his goal.

This was, in one important sense, “a different Obama” from the one we saw so much throughout the primary campaign, the presidential campaign itself, and the first year of the Obama presidency. Perhaps the best example of the style of Obama the community organizer came in his speech about health care reform to the joint session of Congress last September. Coming before Congress was, itself, a bold political move. But the real tenor of the speech and of the President’s position came in the intonations he repeatedly gave to words at certain points in his address, intonations which meant to communicate urgency but, because they rang with earnestness rather than authority, gave the emphasis, the tenor of a plea – the kind of plea a friend might make with another friend about the necessity or obviousness of something ("Don’t you see what this could mean for us?") or the kind of plea a community organizer might make to a group that had so much to lose from finding common ground ("We are so close to an agreement."). But this was neither of those. This was a group from whom came the unprecedented shout of “You lie!” While no one attacked Obama with a cane, as had happened in that very chamber in the lead-up to the Civil War, the remark, calculated in today’s currency, was revealing of splits almost as deep and hostile.

That America has no national insurance plan going into the second decade of the 21^st century, that millions of Americans still lack the assurance of getting adequate health care without facing bankruptcy, and that we are the only modern industrial democracy about which this can be said is morally outrageous. That free enterprise cant, “self-reliant” posturing and anti-socialist hysteria can be used to block the erasure of this outrage is deeply alarming. It is no exaggeration to say that when a society’s ideological divisions blind it to solutions which have no real ideological consequence and every practical and moral motive possible to recommend them, those divisions threaten the continuity of the social fabric itself. In such a case, the handbook for community organizers offers little in the way of guidance: leadership – strong, calm and visionary leadership – provides the only hope.

Candidate Obama demonstrated that leadership in the March 2008 speech. The real question is whether that “other” Obama can retake the stage – not once, but for an entire presidential term, perhaps two. The Bush-Cheney legacy was a toxic one for civil rights, foreign affairs, and a host of other policy matters. Climbing out of the deep pit dug during the eight years of the Bush presidency will require near superhuman determination and visionary decision making. (And not a little willingness among those on the left to accept small, incremental moves upward to rationality rather than a miraculous leap out of the depths.) But the divisions that legacy exacerbated go much further back in America, back in some ways to the Civil War itself. And healing those divisions will take more than earnest pleading, much more.

Pundits will search for new buzz words and catch phrases to characterize the political landscape we face and those that will come: the Internet campaign, the hockey mom phenomenon, the newly reinstated power of corporate political spending. Some of those tags may apply, superficially at least; many will not. But the real measure of whether or not American democracy will meet the challenges of the new century – a matter in which the outcome is far from certain – is leadership. And real leadership comes, not from B-grade communicators, flight-suited clowns on the decks of carriers, or the shrill squawking of media commentators – of the left and the right. Real leadership comes from deeper understanding, unflinching truth-telling, visionary stewardship – and the gravitas that binds them all together. Barack Obama demonstrated some of those qualities in dealing with race in America – no small feat. The question is whether that same Obama can step forward and lead America back onto the path.

Dan Shanahan

Charles University

Prague