Interestingly, as president Obama has shown virtually no interest in black issues, from affirmative action to hate crimes to inner-city poverty. He ignores those issues, raising the hackles of black activists like Tavis Smiley, Ishmael Reed, Michael Eric Dyson, and Cornel West. Reed charges, “It’s obvious by now that Barack Obama is treating black Americans like one treats a demented uncle, brought out from his room to be ridiculed and scolded before company from time to time.” West contends that Obama “doesn’t care about the black poor.... His policies are generating misery among poor people, disproportionately black and brown.” West terms Obama’s policies “the new Jim Crow.”
10
It’s not hard to see why these complaints are growing. African-Americans have suffered devastating economic losses during Obama’s four years in office. The black unemployment rate is nearly 15 percent, almost double the white rate. Since 2008, blacks have seen their wealth erode, mostly due to plummeting home values. Black wealth used to be around $10,000, one-tenth that of whites. Now median black wealth is a mere $4,900, one-twentieth that of whites. Writing in
The New Republic
, Isabel Wilkerson grimly reports that “one out of every four black households has no assets other than a car.” Many in the Congressional Black Caucus are angry and frustrated with Obama. At a recent Black Caucus meeting in Detroit, Representative Maxine Waters let loose. “Our people are hurting,” she said. “The unemployment level is unconscionable.” Yet she said that Obama was nowhere to be seen. “He’s not in any black community.” Waters confessed that she and other African-American leaders were scared to go after Obama. “If we go after the president too hard,” she said, black voters would be “going after us.” Obama seems confident that he has the black rank-and-file in his camp. Appearing before the Black Caucus in 2011, he pooh-poohed their concerns and gave them his instructions. “Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying . . . take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes.”
11
Many liberals view Obama as a progressive champion, the bold challenger of Wall Street and the big, bad corporations. Yet these same liberals express puzzlement that Obama rails against Americans on top, but he doesn’t express much concern or compassion for Americans at the bottom. Surely, say some, this is because Obama is an intellectual. He’s just too cerebral, preoccupied with scholarly ideas. Maureen Dowd compares Obama to Mr. Spock and notes his “Vulcan-like logic and detachment.” Jacob Weisberg remarks, “His relationship with the world is primarily rational and analytical rather than intuitive or emotional.” A Harvard historian has a whole book,
Reading Obama
, devoted to those ideas. The book proclaims Obama a member of a “rare breed” of “philosopher presidents” and is supposedly focused on Obama’s extensive writings.
12
But the book turns out to be unintentionally humorous because it leads to the revelation that there are no such writings. Obama was editor of the
Harvard Law Review
, but never wrote for it. Nor has he published any scholarly articles on any topic in any other publication. Obama’s main attempts at “scholarship” can be found in two books, both autobiographies. Consequently, his intellectual output largely consists of two works about himself. I don’t deny for an instant that Obama is smart, but the cerebral philosopher label doesn’t quite fit him. If he doesn’t seem to care about poor and ordinary Americans, that’s probably because he doesn’t really care about poor and ordinary Americans.
Some progressives recognize this, and they blast Obama. He’s no progressive, they charge, rather he is a sellout to Wall Street. Writing in the
New York Times Magazine
, Frank Rich faults Obama with “failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests.” Commentator Robert Kuttner laments, “I cannot recall a president who generated so much excitement as a candidate but who turned out to be such a political dud as a chief executive.” Even some union leaders criticize Obama for downplaying jobs and focusing on other issues. “Obama campaigned big, but he’s governing small,” says Larry Hanley, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka says that unions need a new strategy to build an independent voice separate from Obama and his Democratic Party backers. Other progressives, notably Ron Suskind in his book
Confidence Men
, say that Obama is a well-meaning but ineffective guy who has been manipulated by staffers who have sold out to Wall Street.
13
From the conservative side, we hear that Obama is a socialist who wants the government to take over the private sector. Jonah Goldberg reflects this view in his article, “What Kind of a Socialist is Barack Obama?” This is a valid question. Certainly during Obama’s tenure government power has expanded over banks, investment firms, insurance companies, and automobile companies. Yet Obama hasn’t proposed a full-scale government takeover of the means of production, which is what true socialism is. Moreover, even if socialism could explain Obama’s economic policy, it cannot explain his foreign policy.
14
In conservative publications like
National Review
and the
Weekly Standard
, the prevailing take is that Obama is a mainstream liberal Democrat, not very different from Bill Clinton or former Democratic presidential nominees John Kerry, Al Gore, or Michael Dukakis. Mitt Romney terms Obama a “big spending liberal” who “takes his political inspiration” from the “social democrats in Europe.”
15
Yet the European Social Democrats have been imposing stern austerity programs, while Obama has been trying to discourage them from doing so. Moreover, Obama disavows any affiliation with Europe. In
Dreams from My Father
, he writes, following a trip to Europe, “It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful . . . . It just wasn’t mine.” Obama’s European trip takes up just a few paragraphs in Obama’s book, while his subsequent trip to Kenya takes up 130 pages. Perhaps Romney doesn’t know better, but more likely he’s just being polite. Romney doesn’t like to say “socialist” and so he says “social Democrat.” And he doesn’t like to say “African,” so he says “European.” As for the other conservatives, they make accusations against Obama that refute the notion that he’s just another progressive Democrat. “If Obama is re-elected,” the
Weekly Standard
editorializes
,
“it’s quite possible that Americans will never again enjoy the liberty, fiscal solvency, or economic prosperity enjoyed by our forebears.” In this view, Obama is fundamentally endangering the American dream. But this could hardly be said of Clinton, Kerry, Gore, or even the hapless Dukakis; the person who would do this isn’t a garden-variety liberal Democrat.
16
A growing chorus on the right contends that Obama is, well, not very smart. “Over-Rated,” reads one headline. “Obama’s Learning Curve,” reads another. A recent book terms Obama a “Bungler-in-Chief.” This line of criticism was most cogently expressed by Brett Stephens in the
Wall Street Journal
. “The president isn’t very bright,” wrote Stephens, adding that Obama “makes predictions that prove false . . . . He surrenders positions staked in public . . . . Every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of financial capital.” Stephens assumes that Obama does these things because he’s stupid. “Stupid is as stupid does . . . . The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.”
17
Yet if Obama is so stupid, how has he accomplished more than any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson, perhaps since Franklin Roosevelt? He has fundamentally altered the relationship of the citizen to the state, and he has dramatically shifted America’s position in the world, all in one term. Obama may not have been successful in achieving Brett Stephens’s conservative agenda, but he seems remarkably successful in achieving his own agenda.
From less respectable quarters, we hear wilder accusations: Obama hates America, or he is a Muslim whose true commitments can be seen in his support for jihadists and Islamic radicals, or he is a wimp and a pacifist who is allergic to the use of military force. Obama’s resolute action in ordering the killing of Osama Bin Laden has greatly undermined these charges, none of which was convincing in the first place. Obama doesn’t hate America—he does what he does because he believes it is good for America, and for the world. Obama isn’t allergic to the use of force, which he showed not only in the Bin Laden operation but also in Libya. There is no evidence whatsoever that Obama is a Muslim. His father Barack Obama Sr. and his step-father Lolo Soetoro were born and raised as Muslims; but eventually both men became atheists, as did Obama’s mother, Ann. Obama was raised without any religious beliefs. I once asked a conservative Muslim friend if he saw anything in Obama that he recognized as Muslim. “Absolutely not,” he said. Then he added, “Obama would be a much better man if he were in fact a Muslim.”
There is a whole book,
The Manchurian President
, devoted to arguing that Obama is a radical acting on behalf of an anti-American cabal. The book shows that Obama behaves in apparently strange and incomprehensible ways, but it never reveals that anyone else is manipulating him. I was fascinated, however, to read an article by economist Kevin Hassett titled “Manchurian Candidate Starts War on Business.” Hassett is a former colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute and the very opposite of a conspiracy buff. Hassett wrote, “Imagine that some hypothetical enemy state spent years preparing a Manchurian candidate to destroy the U.S. economy once elected. What policies might that leader pursue?” Hassett went on to argue that such a leader would pursue basically the policies that Obama has pursued. But then he concluded, “It’s clear that President Obama wants the best for our country. That makes it all the more puzzling that he would legislate like a Manchurian candidate.”
18
That is the puzzle that this book seeks to solve. Hassett formulates the issue with utter clarity. If Obama is an American president who wants what’s best for America, why is he doing things that clearly hurt America? If we can answer this question, we not only understand Obama, we even understand why so many critics say such disparate and sometimes manifestly foolish things about him.
Obama presents us with a unique challenge. We have to admit that never before has a president inspired such different and contradictory reactions, not only between ideological camps, but also within each ideological camp. With Bush or Clinton or Reagan or Carter, we might love them or hate them, but in general we knew what we were getting. Bush was a Texas cowboy and a right-winger of the swaggering, big-spending type. Reagan was an optimist whose Midwestern origins and California outlook gave him a cosmopolitan conservative flair. Clinton was a bit of a Southern moral reprobate who nevertheless governed, at least after the chastening 1994 midterm election, as a thoughtful centrist. Carter was a moralizing Southerner who proved ineffective in dealing with the issues of his time. Both to their admirers and their critics, these men were recognizable American types.
Obama isn’t. Writing in the
Wall Street Journal
, Dorothy Rabinowitz calls Obama “the alien in the White House.” Rabinowitz goes out of her way to distance herself from the birther allegation. And yet, she says, Obama is “wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents.” Rabinowitz adds, “A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. For example, Americans expect their leaders to take their side, to champion their interests. Yet the Obama White House “has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community . . . of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as the representative at large.” Even Democratic presidents, she notes, have consistently viewed themselves as supporting and advancing American interests. Rabinowitz admits that attitudes favoring global interests over national interests are hardly unique; they are widespread abroad and can be found even in influential precincts in this country. “They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States.”
19
Obama, in Rabinowitz’s view, is not a traditional Democrat; there is something foreign about his outlook. She’s right.
Let’s list some of the Obama anomalies that place Obama outside the standard American political categories. Obama came to office promising to unify America and to govern as a centrist. Go back and read Obama’s 2004 Democratic Convention speech, a speech that could have been given by Ronald Reagan. Or, even earlier, Obama wrote in
The Audacity of Hope
, “At the core of the American experience are a set of ideals that continue to stir our collective conscience, a common set of values that bind us together.... We need a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.” Yet Obama has governed as one of the most divisive presidents in American history. He shoved through health care reform without a single Republican vote. He denounces his opposition as not merely mistaken but greedy, selfish, and, in a word, immoral. At various times Obama has called his Republican opponents “enemies” and “hostage takers” and even likened them to terrorists. “They’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger.” Even Obama supporters concede how inflammatory his rhetoric can be. Historian Sean Wilentz writes that the Obama presidency has “affirmed and deepened the partisan divide as never before.”
20
Despite being repudiated in a midterm election—a result that caused Bill Clinton to become a dedicated centrist—Obama has dug in and refused to change course. A centrist Obama would almost surely be re-elected, but Obama seems to prefer risking setbacks and even electoral defeat in order to advance his ideological agenda.