Now I challenge you to find online any photographic record of this particular Michelle Obama fashion shoot (Annie Leibovitz, no less).  Although the accompanying article, written in that Vogueish effervescent style, is readily available, the photographs—well, it’s as if they never existed.

Also missing from what now constitutes the public record—a Google search—are the photographs of (then) Senator Obama’s wife sitting in the front row at American couture shows during New York Fashion Week.

Curious that these photographs reappear every so often in European publications but never in American ones.

These anomalies might lead an inquiring journalist, particularly one with a seven-figure book advance in her pocket, to dig and delve for the possibility that the current White House has its own Fixer, that staple of the modern corporation—and if so, who, what, when, how.

Alas, Jodi Kantor does not seem to have such mettle.  Her just-published book The Obamas, an account of both the marriage and early days in the White House, is a huge disappointment—all the more so because Kantor is a terrific sketch artist, as her recent biographical piece for The New York Times on Mitt Romney well illustrates.

Although Kantor writes at some length about Michelle Obama’s appearance on the cover of the March 2009 Vogue, as well as the accompanying in-house debate over whether or not the First Lady should do it, Kantor never mentions the earlier photo spread.  The omission of the 2007 Vogue appearance—a telling contrast with the 2009 article—encapsulates much of what is missing, woefully missing, from Kantor’s book.

First, research.  Kantor has not done enough of it. Although she traveled to Chicago to interview Obama friends and acquaintances, Kantor did not dig deeper, and into much more important detail than the existence of a previous appearance in Vogue.  The result—peculiar for a book written by a Times reporter—is a near-hagiographic re-telling of the Obama campaign version of the “Obamas-in-Chicago” backstory.

“The Obamas were horrified,” Kantor writes, “their worst suspicions about that world [Chicago politics] confirmed.”  Kantor allows this assessment from an unnamed Obama friend(s) to stand.  She fails to point out that through his association with Tony Rezko Obama was very much a part of that world.

Kantor lets stand Michelle’s remark, apropos “all white Irish Catholic” running city and state politics, “’You shouldn’t have a better chance if you’re a Kennedy than if you’re an Obama.  Why is it that they have the right to this?’”  Kantor does not point out any of the obverse:  African-Americans are also very powerful in Chicago politics; the Obamas, part of an Ivy League-educated African-American Chicago elite, had an early, quick entrée to civic and cultural boards and the kind of recognition and access this provides; Barack was already taking advantage of a Kennedy-esque rise to power unprecedented since the 1960s.

Kantor fails to investigate Michelle Obama’s tenure at Chicago law firm Sidley Austin (the supposition in the legal world for why she left is quite different from her own assessment that she wanted to have a more direct impact on people’s lives).  Kantor fails to comment upon the conclusion in some Chicago circles that the work Michelle’s father did at the water plant was a patronage job—nothing wrong there, except that, if true, it complicates Michelle’s disdain for Chicago politics.

The result for Kantor’s book is that Barack and Michelle Obama come off as peevish, spoiled, out-of-touch.  “Underlying issues of poverty and education had little chance of being addressed,” Kantor quotes a Kevin Thompson on Michelle’s thoughts about Chicago. Kantor does not mention the “small schools movement” then taking place in Chicago, or any of the other local experiments in educational reform that have, among other results, propelled Arnie Duncan to an Obama cabinet position.  Surely, Michelle Obama knew what was going on in Chicago education.  The salient question here:  does Jodi Kantor know?–because her indirect quote on Michelle Obama’s thoughts on Chicago education makes it look like Michelle felt she was alone in her concern.

I feel (almost) sure that Jodi Kantor admires and likes the Obamas, for all their very human faults, as much as I do.  Through lack of thorough research, however, she inadvertently creates a negative portrait of the First Couple.  (The only adult, by the way, who comes off well and with dignity in the book is Michelle’s mother, Marian Robinson.)

An even better example of this backwash effect is Kantor’s acceptance of the Obama version of their marriage at face value.  Early in her book, and at some length, Kantor describes the Oahu wedding of Barack Obama’s half-sister Maya Soetoro, where Barack defines the right spouse as “’somebody who sees you as you deserve to be seen.’”  Here would have been the perfect moment to give some context to Obama’s remark by investigating his previous girlfriends as a way of shedding some light on his courting of Michelle Robinson.

Kantor seems not to have interviewed any of Obama’s Harvard classmates who were romantically involved with him and/or who were on Harvard Law Review during his tenure as editor-in-chief.  One wag, the spouse of another law review editor, calls this “the time of auditions for the role of Mrs. Obama.”  The phrasing of this eyewitness account reveals, among other things, that Barack Obama’s protestation that he was reluctant to enter politics, a protestation woven sans context throughout the Kantor narrative, is not the whole truth.

After research, context is everything.  An insightful book on the occupants of the White House would be a weaving of many different contexts and the complicated ways in which they interact with the specifics of the Obamas’ lives.  The two instances where the book fitfully comes alive Kantor does precisely this.  She describes, briefly, the weirdness of the White House architecturally and therefore the logistical discomforts for anybody living there—but—believe me, as someone who has wandered the corridors—she could have gone into much more vivid detail.

Also briefly, Kantor touches on the one uniqueness of the Obama White House experience:  they are its first African-American First Family.  The observations and feelings Kantor chronicles, via the Obamas’ best friends the Whitakers and Nesbitts, are riveting.  Again, Kantor could have, and should have, pursued here in much greater depth.  I can think of a few pool reports, such as the Oval Office gathering and party to honor Obama’s hanging on its wall a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation—easy source material for a reporter, but accounts unknown to most Americans—that would have enriched Kantor’s narrative.

Otherwise, however, the Kantor version of Obama White House life and marriage is without best context.  The structure for her narrative is the political drama unfolding, largely on Capitol Hill, at the same time.  Not only is this a recounting of the known (we all are well aware of what happened in Washington over the last three years) and therefore boring, but the unknowns Kantor recounts (the White House infighting) have recently been chronicled much more incisively by Ron Suskind in Confidence Men. Using political wins and losses as the book’s structure has the effect, moreover, of skewing the narrative so that Michelle Obama emerges as the crux of various legislative battles. In Kantor’s recounting of the passing of health insurance reform, for example, Michelle is a key player.  Nancy Pelosi is not even mentioned.

Kantor does not even begin to set Michelle Obama and her marriage and her White House sojourn in the context for which she will be remembered:  her place in that long line of First Ladies who have gone before her.

How is Michelle Obama’s life in the White House like and not like the tenures of previous First Ladies?  Are the discomforts experienced by the Obamas, repeated to Kantor in some detail by Obama intimates, more or less, or typical, for First Families?

“Without the effective and intelligent aid they [First Ladies] rendered, no administration would have been satisfactory; and though the political historian may ignore such service, the right-thinking, honorable men or women of this country have a higher appreciation of the services rendered by these ladies, who were the power behind the throne, equal in social influence to the throne itself, and a historical work bearing upon their lives is a valuable contribution to the nation’s official history.”

The use of the adjective “honorable” is a giveaway that the observation I have quoted above is old.  Otherwise the conceit is one that seems to us to express a recent historical development:  First Ladies now can, if they so choose, exert great influence on an administration.  What I have excerpted, however, was written in 1880.  This is part of Laura Holloway’s preface to her Ladies of the White House (Martha Washington through Lucretia Rudolph Garfield).

Reading Kantor’s book, you might think that Michelle Obama’s First Lady role is unprecedented, a successful working out of what Hillary Clinton aimed for but failed to achieve:  prompter of social change.  As Holloway’s book makes clear, however, we Americans have always seen our First Ladies in this role.  We have always wanted her to be what chroniclers used to call “a moral, civilizing influence” on public affairs.  And this is exactly the role that Michelle Obama has played in her husband’s life and in his White House.

Moreover, Michelle is playing the role in a more traditional way than some of her recent forebears—not only Hillary Clinton (politically ambitious), but also Barbara Bush (outspoken) and Nancy Reagan (managing; edgier First Lady cause—taking on drug use).  Equally, if not more importantly, for the average American spectator, Michelle Obama is the first First Lady since Nancy Reagan and before her Jackie Kennedy to be interested in fashion.

Not only does Kantor fail to place Michelle Obama in the context of previous First Ladies.  Kantor fails to call Michelle on her own ignorance of First Lady history.  At one point in her book, Kantor mentions that Michelle had no interest in researching what previous inhabitants of the White House had done.  Kantor writes:  “The new first lady did not identify much with those who had filled the role before her, and she showed limited interest in studying their examples.”

There have been consequences to Michelle’s choice—huge consequences if this book gains traction among political Independents—because Michelle often comes across as overly whiny and complaining about White House life.  Get a grip, Michelle! I want to say to her after a few Kantor chapters.  Like Mary Todd Lincoln and Jackie Kennedy, have you lost a child while living in the White House?  When you look at the White House’s most famous portrait of George Washington, hanging now in the East Room, don’t you put all in perspective by remembering Dorothy P. Madison?

Here is Dolley, as we know her, writing to her sister in August, 1814:

“Three o’clock.—Will you believe it, my sister?  We have had a battle or skirmish near Bladensburg, and I am still here within sound of the cannon!  Mr. Madison comes not; may God protect him!  Two messengers covered with dust come to bid me fly; but I wait for him. . . . At this late hour a wagon has been procured; I have had it filled with the plate and most valuable portable articles belonging to the house; whether it will reach its destination, the Bank of Maryland, or fall into the hands of British soldiery, events must determine.  Our kind friend, Mr. Carroll, has come to hasten my departure, and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall.  This process was found too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas taken out; it is done—and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of New York for safekeeping.  And now, my dear sister, I must leave this house, or the retreating army will make me a prisoner in it, by filling up the road I am directed to take.  When I shall again write to you, or where I shall be to-morrow, I cannot tell!”

Canniness, savvy, intelligence, instinct, experience—who knows now?—gave Mrs. Madison a sense of place.  Yes, her husband was president—but General Washington in importance and priority above all.  Michelle Obama has yet to acquire that sense of place.  One way of looking at her White House vegetable garden is that it is an attempt on her part, on some level, to find that ground.  But if there is one thing Kantor’s book reveals it is that Michelle Obama has yet to put her own White House experience, however burdensome, in perspective.  After all, she has yet to flee the British.

Ideally, a living historical personage at some point becomes fully aware of the larger context in which he or she is privileged to play a part.  A problem for early in medias res books like Kantor’s is that sometimes, as with Michelle Obama, the subject is still on that journey to sense of place.  But this is no excuse, really, for Kantor’s own failure to “place” Michelle Obama.  Against the historical unfolding that her husband’s female supporters of 2008 hoped for, Michelle is first and foremost that traditional First Lady I described earlier.

However, Kantor—and here is her argument’s structural weakness—cannot relinquish a personal, generational affinity for the fashionable liberal narrative “marriage of equals.”  Therefore, she does not examine the harder, in many ways sadder, truth that all First Ladies, even a Michelle, subsume their desires, their choices, their lives to power.  Furthermore, and here is the modern twist on the old story, the Michelle we see is not a real person.  The Obamas of the White House are not a real couple.

This is the political irony of the times.  We live in an information-saturated culture; we are bombarded by media.  Despite this reality—and in part because of it—people who become public figures learn, are helped, are coached to present simulacrums of themselves.  The Michelle Obama of today is the pruned personal story, the honed and refined personality, the airbrushed image Team Obama presents to us.

Apparently with the blessing of the White House, friends and former staffers spoke with Kantor.  (She did not interview either Obama for her book.)  Team Obama was right to trust these people to present the Obamas and their life in a positive light.  What no one seemed to anticipate (and indeed this is curious for a communications team—where is Robert Gibbs, Enforcer when you need him?) is this:  an account can sound one way coming straight from the observer’s mouth and sound very differently in juxtaposition with other accounts.

Therefore, the (likely) wry and slightly confiding recounting of this or that His and Her Obama foible, (likely) proffered to attest to their humanity and to fill out their personalities, becomes in the aggregate, in Kantor’s retelling, an overwhelming impression of Obamic arrogance and self-pity.

“The Obamas came to the depressing realization that the simple act of going home had now become, as one staff member put it, ‘an ordeal.’”

“When she inherited the list of annual Washington-spouse events from Laura Bush’s office, she [Michelle] asked her staff if she could skip all of them, including the Congressional Club luncheon.”

“Now, as far as she [Michelle] could tell, she was stuck in a position with little definition and no clear goals.  Whatever little structure the role [First Lady] carried was dictated by a series of mandatory events [like the Congressional Club luncheon].”

“The longest-running headache was over redecoration.”

“The president’s dawning sense of political powerlessness, the first lady’s sense of personal powerlessness:  the two were not entirely separate.”

“She wasn’t doing one little thing here, another event there.”  Not unless she got a new dress out of it.  (Here is another Kantor takeaway that is not going to help the First Lady’s image.)

For Pete’s sake, Obamas! I kept asking rhetorically.  How is it that any average American knows what to expect from life in the White House fishbowl and yet you two somehow did not?

Obama friends and former staffers gave Kantor impressions—impressions that were intended, surely, to add up to a sympathetic portrait—of Obama life in the White House.  Seldom in her book does Kantor question these accounts or try to put them into the context of what other White House families may have felt and done during their own days of adjustment.  As a writer, I usually have some sense of another writer’s intention and strategy.  With Jodi Kantor, however, I have no sense that she realizes what an overwhelmingly negative impression overall of the Obamas she is creating—a picture I believe to be false, by the way.  She is too intent on the “marriage of equals” meme—as if Michelle’s ability to hold her own weight (or not) with Barack has the rest of the country waiting, with bated breath, to see how that relationship works out.

For Kantor, using these accounts about Obama White House life, without examining them, without holding them up to the light, this way and that, substitutes for deconstructing the presidential personae.  In this way, her book manages to compound misimpression.  The Obamas is an oxymoronic execution:  the Kantor narrative preserves the airbrushed Obama personae perfected in 2008 by Team Obama while at the same time presenting the First Couple in a negative and false light.

As the cover-up of the lavish Alice in Wonderland Halloween party at the White House in 2009—the take-away from Kantor’s book that has received the most press—shows us, Team Obama continues to try to be Master of the Universe of Image Control.  To be fair, any modern White House communications team would do the same.  As is often the case with take-aways and scoops, the meaning of the revelation about the Halloween party has eluded the more perfervid members of the fourth estate.

It’s not that the White House press are biased in favor of Obama, and therefore the Obama White House can count on “curtains” over certain stories.  On the contrary.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The relationship between the press and this particular White House is poisonous—both because the Man at the Top respects only press elites like Peter Baker of the Times (when most of the corps are working class proles) and because the Obama White House is so stingy with morsels for feeding the news beast.

This is where the withholding of details about the White House Halloween party in 2009—namely, that Tim Burton turned the State Dining Room into Alice’s Wonderland and that Johnny Depp lent his services as Mad Hatter—is relevant.  I know one White House reporter was stonewalled when she asked, at the time, who was performing at the Halloween party.  She was still simmering mad about the information black-out when we met up a month later.  This is really her story to tell, if she so chooses, so I don’t want to say more than that.  Except this.  The White House counts on the rapid passing of news.  Halloween, even at the White House, is soon stale fodder, and overburdened reporters quickly have to move on.

The nature of the quotidian press is one reason a White House book, any White House book, which permits time for investigation and reflection, is so important.  And in the current press vs. White House environment the telling detail that manages somehow to escape the attention of White House Politburo Central is necessary for the kind of book Kantor tried to write.  The garish and vulgar Halloween-as-Wonderland transformation of the State Dining Room (the original Washington portrait room, no less!) is one of the few instances where she provides a counter-narrative.  She should have found more—not only evidence of the re-crafting of the Michelle persona like the September 2007 appearance in Vogue but also the quadrennial (and ever-failing) attempts by White House newbies to buck Tradition and what the specific instances here tell us about the current occupants of the People’s House.  I am thinking in particular of Desiree Rogers’s (and Michelle Obama’s?) early attempt to do away with the White House Christmas crèche.  Rogers was such an important East Wing personage for awhile, and yet Kantor hardly mentions her.

Where is the reportorial hustle and investigative chutzpah that a contemporary account such as Kantor’s should have?  For contrast, please read Marian Burros on “What Michelle Ate–and Where She Ate It,” the one really good piece—revealing in so many ways—written about Michelle Obama recently.

Curiosity and skepticism are any reporter’s best gifts.  But Kantor hardly brings hers to bear.  Therefore, she is seldom able to turn the pablum Obama friends, family and staffers have provided her into a complicated, deeper, richer, and finally true, narrative.  The irony, as I said earlier, is that the Obamas are the poorer for it.

Finally, The Obamas should be a lesson to all friends and family of presidents.  Never speak to reporters.  Remember what Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon said when asked about Mary and Abe.  Six words.  “All that I know ennobles both.”

January 11, 2012

Enough of that.  On to Iowa.  Here is the one thing you need to know about tonight.

The candidate who wins the caucuses is the one with the cleverest, nimblest field team.  The caucuses are not a “one-man-one-vote” democratic process carried out in an agreed-upon, deliberative way.  In Iowa, the first Tuesday in January is a mid-winter political bacchanal organized like a sheep-herding competition.  This was not the original intention–years ago–when only die-hard politcos came out in the dark and bitter cold, when media was not omnipresent.  Then lovers of national politics could sit and talk and sip and munch while listening to stemwinders about the candidates before deciding for whom to caucus.  It was a local occasion.  Like a meeting of the chess club or the Order of Masons.

But now?  Greater turn-out (a consequence of grassroots campaigning) has changed everything.  The school cafeterias and gyms (venues of choice) are crowded, hot, noisy.  Consequence?  It takes longer to go through the simplest order of business.  Therefore, less time for speeches.  Much less time to deliberate.  Likely less than a handful of those present know the math–rather complicated–that ends caucusing and sets the results.

Four years ago, I watched young precinct captains for Edwards and Obama in Iowa City take a second-place win away from Hillary Clinton.  Even though the young man and young woman did not know one another, they had come to the caucus precinct armed with a mutual plan that they executed flawlessly and quickly.  Their aim (hatched between the two local Edwards and Obama teams) was to give Obama as big a win as possible while making sure Edwards came in second.  How and why had they come together to create such a plan?  Mutual hatred of Hillary Clinton.  And so they culled and herded the Richardson, Dodd and Biden supporters–and then the Clinton supporters, even though they were legion–before they knew what had happened to them.  The very minute–almost the second–the Obama and Edwards captains had the mathematical balance they needed–as many caucusers for Obama as possible while still keeping Edwards in second place–they had the caucus leader call the results.  Suddenly, despite the seeming mayhem, it was over.

There were few Edwards supporters that night.  Between them, Obama and Clinton had the lion’s share.  And then Richardson.

Hillary Clinton, who really came in second in Iowa, placed third in the state.  And so the Machiavellian scheme of a few University of Iowa students may have changed history.  If Hillary Clinton had taken seconds in Iowa City, she would have come in second in the Iowa caucuses at-large.

This is a cautionary tale for all those pundits already predicting tonight.

If the Ron Paul young are well-organized, they can shape the outcome.

If the Romney team has the kind of smarts the Clinton team did not have in 2008, Romney can sweep to a victory that does not really reflect the hearts and minds of Iowans and therefore will be very misleading about Romney’s chances in a general election.

Such is the deviousness of that friendly, salt-of-the-earth, butter cow heartland state Iowa.

January 3, 2012

Houston’s wedding night was memorable enough to have earned a place in family lore.  His young bride was caught by surprise? unable to hide her revulsion? unwilling to hide her revulsion? at the old war wound in Houston’s groin that oozed and stank to high heaven.  Caught off-guard? Shamed? Unmanned?–Houston freaked out and cowered, crouched, naked and gibbering, in the corner of the house’s best bedroom all night long. 

Not unusually for a frontier home, even one as fine as Travellers Rest, really there was only one bedroom.  Most of the household, including children and house slaves, slept catch as catch can.  So the non-consummation of the Houston marriage was a memorable occasion for everybody.  The lack of privacy in the homes of the plantation South, by the by, must have been the reason that newlyweds typically spent the first year of married life in a hotel.

Before I lose myself in past prurience, let me get to the point.  Houston, alone among American politicians the governor of two states, Tennessee and Texas, was, despite the irregularities of his personal life, terrific at his job.  As Governor of Texas, for example, he tried to keep the Lonestar State in the Union.  He knew that the Confederacy would fail; he knew that many lives would be lost in the process; he warned his costituents of both.  When Texas voted to secede, nevertheless, Houston, sparing his fellow citizens bloodshed, refused the offer of Union troops to bring the state to heel.  Then he resigned the governorship and retired to a part of Texas that reminded him of the hills of Middle Tennessee.  

The life of Sam Houston is a corrective for the American tendency to delve for signs of political acumen and leadership among the fits and starts of personal behavior.  What is different about this presidential election is that THE TIMES THEMSELVES are applying the corrective.  The weaknesses that did in Edmund Muskie and Gary Hart–well, people have more important things to worry about right now.  If Herman Cain were displaying as much knowledge of world affairs and governance as he does charm and wit, voters wouldn’t care if the man had been keeping a harem.  If the man convinced us that he could fix the American economy and bring back jobs, we’d let him bring a wife AND a mistress to the White House.  For some reason, likely because “sex sells stories,” political writers haven’t seen the shuffling of priorities here.

Herman Cain killed his chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination with his confusion over which nations have nuclear weapons, which nuclear power.  He crossed a line in the sand for us voters:  we try not to elect a president who looks like he/she will embarrass us on the world stage.

Rick Perry has the looks to play President in a movie, and since the political sideshow has always been entertainment, it’s no wonder he kicked up a lot of excitement upon entering the race.  But really, folks.  And by “folks,” I mean media folks.  Did everybody have to rely on the Texas Monthly article chronicling Perry’s ten straight wins and darn good luck to inform their views?  Couldn’t somebody have done a little research into the 2006 Texas gubernatorial race, when Lonestar Republicans had become kinda disenchanted with Perry?  Wasn’t anybody curious why?

Texans love their boots, and Perry owns any number of really cool pair.  He’s the Imelda Marcos of cowboy footwear.  (The 9/11 commemmorative set are my favorite.)  But even Texans, as the 2006 election (particularly the nominating contest) showed, have their limits.  Boots take a person only so far.

My husband was one of those who succumbed initially to the Perry charm.  (To be fair, he doesn’t spend time in Texas as I do.)  “Perry’s going to get the nomination!”  Knowing that I had been saying since January 2009 that Mitt Romney would be the next Republican nominee (I got my first Romney email the day after the Obama Inauguration), my husband bet me a long back rub, our standard bet, that Perry would prevail.  For the last month, said husband has been teasingly querulous.  “Which one of us bet what?  Are you SURE I’m the one bet on Perry?”

I just got my own comeuppance.  A week ago, suddenly I snapped my head up from the computer screen.  Oh my god. Every Republican I know loves the History Channel.  Newt Gingrich will win the South Carolina primary for that reason alone.  

Republican voters are gonna do a Newt.  Unless his mouth runs away with him.  And that possibility is what makes politics in the age of iPhones so interesting.

[***Note:  Biographies of Sam Houston place his wedding and honeymoon at the bride's parents' house.  However, biographers are relying on secondary sources here.  In the nineteenth century, even newspapers were often only secondary sources--a reality worthy of a blog post--note to self.  Anyway, I am relying on not only family memory but also original documents at Travellers Rest.]

Link for Texas Monthly article:  http://www.texasmonthly.com/2011-09-01/feature7.php

Complex thought is a disadvantage in the political sphere.  For this reason, among others, President Obama has been losing our confidence.  His fellow Democrats, Washington pundits and voters alike have placed the blame here solely upon the president himself, whereas most of the burden is ours.  Why?  Because all of us—with just the few exceptions to prove the rule—are refusing to lift our chins to that bar of higher complexity.

We are having a much harder time adapting to the world’s new requirements than poorer nations are.  I will speak to this irony in time, but first I want to consider our civilization and its roots from a large perspective.  Then I will be taking the lion’s share of this essay to talk about the new global demand for mastery of complexity versus the pervasive American desire for simplicity.  Our future prosperity hinges upon our making the shift to twenty-first century thinking.  A successful Obama presidency must, at minimum, lay the groundwork for this change.

Where have we come from? Where are we going?

Always western civilization has mastered a shift in thinking with great difficulty and upheaval, because mental reset is damn hard.  Here are a few of the changes to which we have, nevertheless, adapted.  Note that each has been more demanding than the previous one.

The Pre-Christian Mediterranean:  Don’t kill outsiders right off the bat.  Deal with these vaguely displeasing and threatening creatures.  Because we can trade with them!

Protestant Christian Europe:  Asking a priest for absolution and giving money to the church do not take the place of personal responsibility for your actions. To lead a moral, Christian life, you cannot rely on somebody else to tell you right from wrong. You must know the Bible, and to do that you must learn to read.

Age of Exploration:  The world is so much bigger than we thought. Those other civilizations we have encountered—sophisticated, worthy of our interest and investment, although, of course, inferior to our Judaeo-Christian one.

Age of Science:  The way the world is made, the way we humans have developed as a species, is so much more complicated than we thought.  Unsettling.  But we can deal, because we are harvesting so many good things from this new river of knowledge.

Age of Globalism:  Hyper-connected!  This close contact with other peoples is enlightening, entertaining, exciting, teeming with possibilities for wealth. . . . Exhausting.  We are not used to so many disparate things quick in mind and at hand at once. . . . This river of knowledge has become a torrent.  Maybe we should step back from it.  Rivers can be dangerous.  And this one is threatening our sense of self. . . . These other cultures are not as inferior as we once assumed.  What does that mean for ours?  What if Judaeo-Christian western civilization is not the center of the world’s moral geography?  Too disturbing a thought.  One we cannot deal with, especially now, with this increased competitiveness forcing us to work harder, learn faster, learn more.

Although this summary of western life does not take into account, for example, the influences of Islamic thought and culture on what we call the Middle Ages, nevertheless, we recognize these few stages among the many I do not have time and space here to mention.

Recorded time is a series of enlightenments, as if homo sapiens were moving, ever so painfully, slowly and with many regressions, towards some full knowledge.  Once again we humans have to up our game.  The process is awkward and messy.  Not everyone travels at the same pace.  Parts of American culture, for example, have yet to understand the import of evidence-based research and therefore to embrace scientific thinking.  Some of us are still struggling to deal with the Age of Science.

In this age of globalism, hyper-connectedness means that all urban-dwelling humans everywhere have to rise to this new challenge of grasping complexity.  Americans (and other Westerners) would seem to have the advantage.  Ironically, however, we have not adapted as well to the new geography as the hungry and the recently-hungry, who have a visceral appreciation of what happens if they do not.  We are disoriented, furthermore, by the realization to which some (although not all) countries and cultures have already adjusted:  a particular heritage—in other words, one’s own—may not necessarily point towards the best path in the here and now of this much more complicated world.

Recalling the rich harvests from the earlier shifts in thinking makes adaptation to the new no less onerous.  With the plethora of information available, we might infer that it should be easy for Americans to see that an assertion like “we are the greatest nation on earth” is not an objective statement.  But we should not so infer.  For we cling to a Ptolemaic view in which the United States is the center of the world’s moral and political geography.

Here we are stuck, unable to move in the new alignment of spheres.  We are trapped in a limbo of perception that prevents us from rising to meet the exigent challenges of education, money, science and trade.  What is this limbo of perception?  Its name is Entitlement.

We Americans, in all walks of life, of all political persuasions, have come to believe that we are entitled to certain things. What these things are vary from person to person, group to group.  Together, however, our sense of entitlement is enormous.  It is an illusion, of course.  Human beings are entitled to nothing, except, perhaps, death.  Everything else is either a gift or must be paid for, usually with hard work.

This illusion of entitlement has become the dark companion to our past prosperity.  It is now a heavy burden, and we must lighten ourselves of it in order to move forward.  If Barack Obama fulfills his promise of leadership, it will be here, in moving us into the twenty-first century Copernican universe.

In the new Copernican universe the United States is not the center.  Nations and historical forces do not move in response to our own movement.  We Americans are but one body—however large and central a body—among many, all of us trying to figure fully, usually by trial and error, this century’s dynamics .  The constellation is so large and close-orbited that necessarily every body is affected in staccato rhythms by all the rest.  None of us have yet found a modern music of the spheres.  But we do have a starting point:  there is no alpha nation here.  Willingly, wisely, blindly, grudgingly, coerced—we all will work together because “in harness” “yoked” “necessarily connected”—however we name it—is globalism’s first law of dynamics.

Now let’s leave the macro level for the micro. The new Copernicanism is the only way the United States can work now internally, as well.  But here, unlike internationally, we have made no progress.  Why?  Of course, there are many reasons.  Decision-making in foreign affairs is concentrated in the hands of a few.  One man, in this instance President Obama, can decide to “lead from behind” on the civil war in Libya.  One woman, in this instance Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, can realize that conflict and resolution in the South China Sea are actions to which the United States is only one among several contributors, and she can shape policy according to the reality that the sea lanes there are no longer in our control alone.

Domestically, however, we are a democracy, and many of us must come together to shape policy and direction.  But our sense of entitlement immures us in stasis. Tea Partiers feel that they are the final arbiters of the Republican pick for presidential nominee.  Progressives feel that Barack Obama has betrayed them because he has not enacted their full agenda.  Younger Americans, not much interested in foreign affairs, want their country similarly dis-involved.  Older people feel entitled to Social Security and Medicare.  Take almost any hot-button item—abortion, fully automatic weapons, government/employer-paid health care, low taxes, income equality—we are entitled to none of these things.  But entitlement is the delusion to which individualism, increasingly dominant in our culture, has brought us.

Make no mistake.  We soon will no longer matter much to the world at large unless we figure out how to work together towards a few common goals.  More importantly, we will become increasingly marginalized even within our own country because change is inexorable and will carry us along, with or without any direction or shaping vision from us.  Within another generation, for example, Hispanic voters will be determining the dialogue in the United States, with or without the example of “the now,” which is our mainstream Anglo culture.

Most important of all, we will have betrayed our heritage if we cannot work this out.  We will lose—worse than lose—squander, defile—that more perfect union dearly purchased at Gettysburg.  And make no mistake about the Obama Presidency.  Obama himself set the terms for his success:  bridging the red state blue state divide, which, as Obama’s early speeches make clear, he has always seen predominantly  in cultural rather than political terms.  Either he finds his way here, or he will not be the seminal president a few writers (myself included) have always thought he would be.

Where can we as individuals begin?  By realizing that each of us is not a little Ptolemy.

With the relinquishing of alpha dog assumptions comes humility.  With humility comes the realization that answers today often come about through the process of give-and-take.  With humility comes forbearance with fellow Americans who, for example, do not accept the evolution of species.  After all, I (or we or you) could be blinkered on a thing or two, as well.  This awareness and acceptance of individual limitation leads to a larger perspective.

Scanning the horizon for the larger perspective leads to, first, genuine and not gamed speculation about, and then, second, consideration for, the Other.  After all, the larger perspective is the territory of different points of view, as well as my (our/your) own.  The binding of consideration for others to personal humility (I do not know it all) is the essential step to passing through the limbo in which entitlement has trapped us.

But this is not the direction in which most Americans—and we think we are so true-thinking, whether in the heartland or on the coasts!—are headed.  We have retreated into cocoons of dogma and that yearning for simplicity I mentioned earlier.  But larger perspectives require an embrace of the difficult, an ability to handle uncertainty, a tolerance for the nuanced moment.  Bridging the cultural/political chasm in our country requires this.  Globalism requires this.  Only the societies that can work with complexity, and the complexity-embracing individuals in the other societies that cannot, will prosper in this new age of globalism.

Leadership comes into play here.  A leader can do for a group what they cannot as individuals always do for themselves.  And the key here for Barack Obama, among all his essential traits, is his comfort with complexity.  It is a Janus key, for it has laid him open to the nearer harsh political winds even as it has helped him locate the farther distance.  If he can move us as a nation from our comfort zone of easy simplicities, which are ever more appealing in this the Great Recession, then he will have fulfilled his potential to be one of our greatest presidents.

This is a strange moment to be writing about Obama’s defining quality and greatest strength, because his political and presidential fortunes have sunk low.

Where are we now? Where is Obama?

What we see, both for ourselves and for the President, is a depressing landscape.  Because perception and reality are not the same, I emphasize the verb see.  Remember our enormous sense of entitlement, versus what is due us?  Our situation, and Obama’s, could get so much worse.  Nevertheless, it has been a hard summer and fall in 2011.

Here is a partial litany.  House prices are expected to fall another 2.5% this year.  Household net worth fell 0.3% in the spring.  The base unemployment rate remains stuck around 9 %.  The gap between rich and poor in this country has not been as great for a century.

President Obama has been out and about flogging another jobs bill, less than well-received by Democrats and Republicans alike.  This is the man who only a year ago was touting 2010 “the recovery summer.”  Not surprisingly, his approval rating has slipped below 50% and he is fast losing much of his base.

The timing for Obama’s renewed assault on joblessness could hardly have been worse.  Competing with the speech to Congress that launched his proposal was the possibility of a new terrorist attack and the worsening fiscal crisis in the EU.  Fresh in mind was the recent debt ceiling debate/debacle. Furthermore, Obama no longer wields speech power as he once did.  We are all a little tired of The Obama Speech. The stock market has responded with a few worst weeks since 2008.  The collapse of Solyndra, with taxpayers on the hook for another half a billion—has been the coup de gras.

This month saw the publication of Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, a devastating portrait of administration infighting, confused decision-making and an economics-uncertain president.  Suskind captures the ongoing cronyism, influence-peddling and lack of transparency in the dealings between Washington and Wall Street, even as Obama has been continuing to promise change.  In Suskind’s view, Obama, with a Democratic House and Senate in 2009, had a golden opportunity to enact much-needed banking and finance reform and yet blew his opportunity to be a second FDR.

With the exception of Mark Ambinder, Obama has lost (by my tally) the respect of every influential political pundit.  Democrats brace themselves for a one-term presidency.  Conservative commentator David Brooks, in a New York Times column called “Obama Rejects Obamaism,” has rejected Obama in turn, lamenting, “the White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths.  To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used.”

It would be hard to overstate the influence of Suskind’s book and once-sympatico Brooks’s loss of faith on the journalist herd mentality du jour.  Obama has always complained about the press.  But now he actually has something to complain about.  Desertion is not a pleasant experience.

Overlooked, for the most part, in the bad news torrent is the collapse of Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia.  Even as he wrestles with intractable domestic problems, nevertheless, Obama is most at risk, at this moment, of being remembered as America’s Anthony Eden, of failing to steer our ship of state into a new berth in that changing world order I have been describing.  Caught between a rock and a hard place with Israel, damned if does and damned if he doesn’t politically here at home with pro-Israel voters, Obama is nevertheless stranding us on the wrong side of Palestinian history.  As the Palestinian push for recognition at the U.N., despite our efforts to the contrary, dramatized, the United States has lost the role of Middle East powerbroker that we have held since the Suez Crisis.  Turkey and Iran, among other nations, are jockeying to take our place.

This diminution of American influence has accelerated on Obama’s watch.  Meanwhile we are losing Pakistan (despite a huge courtship on our part during Obama’s first two years in office), leaving Iraq (to Iran and its nemesis Saudi Arabia) and Afghanistan (to Pakistan, Iran, China and India) and lessening the force of pax americana in the South and East China Seas.  Where was the Obama Administration when Vietnam and the Philippines concluded their anti-China pact last month?  The possibility for war in South Asia has just ratcheted up a notch.

This is the Copernican universe of nations.  President Obama, however, has yet to explain to the American people the first thing about it.  In my observation, Obama—precisely because he understands through complexity and nuance—hesitates to share with his fellow citizens what he sees.  This is a sad irony, potentially tragic.  Sad because ordinary Americans have what it takes to grasp a bigger picture.  Ironic because Obama, the great speech-maker, is a terrible communicator.  Potentially tragic because Obama has what it takes to help us accept the reality that “it’s complicated.” And yet he continues to dumb down what he conveys to the American people.

Why is this a time of such yearning for simplicity?

Trying to set a good example here, I am not going to settle for the obvious suspects on which to pin my point.  Yes, the Tea Party’s suspicion of government is simple-minded.  So is Ron Paul’s.  Ditto the inchoate anger of the Occupy Movement against banks and the rich.

Leafing through recent back issues of The New Yorker, I came upon “The Answer Man,” an essay by Stephen Greenblatt, a preeminent Shakespearean scholar whose work I have followed over the years.  In “Answer Man,” Greenblatt begins with a charming anecdote about his discovery as a student of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, a foundational text (in Latin verse, no less) for anybody contemplating medieval and Renaissance western literature.  Immediately, I was taken back to my days as a graduate student, so long ago, when I, too, read Lucretius.

For those of you whose eyes are glazing at the mere mention of a Roman poet, let me get to the point.  I offer Greenblatt’s New Yorker essay as an example of the meretricious simplicity infecting our culture, at all levels, and not just that, say, of a conservative state school board.  For Greenblatt goes on to describe the importance of Lucretius for Renaissance thought (true) in terms decidedly untrue.

Lucretius “enabled people [in the Renaissance] to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and to focus instead on things in this world . . . to contemplate without terror the death of the soul,” Greenblatt writes.

Why is this untrue?  Because Renaissance thought is complicated.  Just because the intelligentsia rediscovered the pagan Ancients does not mean that they abandoned Judaeo-Christian faith.  If anything, liberal arts scholarship over the last two centuries has created a body of knowledge, not only about the Renaissance but the Middle Ages, of ever-greater nuance, nourished by contradictory evidence.  The easy verities I learned in the 1960s (angels and demons = medievalism) have long since collapsed.  In the last two decades, for example, scholars have discovered that there was much more influence of Muslim music, poetry and science upon medieval European culture than previously determined.

How then to account for Greenblatt’s simplistic characterization of Lucretius’ influence on the Renaissance?  First of all, he could do it.  In other words, he has a reputation of great enough stature to survive his promulgation of a simplistic account.  But why did he do it?  Why?  Here’s the crux.

In one of those serendipities that often characterize New Yorker pieces, Greenblatt links Lucretius’ celebration of pleasure in the here and now to his own mother, whose “fear of death” dominated his early years.  The thrust of his essay, therefore, is not a recounting of Lucretius’ place in history but closure to his own blighted childhood.  However interesting and charming  Greenblatt’s account of Lucretius—and it is—the heart of the essay is personal.  In short, Greenblatt mis-characterizes cultural history in pursuit of a moment of self-indulgence.

Why is this particular bit of simplicity revealing?  And, to my mind, appalling?  Because the world of scholarship is a group project in which individual researchers and thinkers build upon a body of knowledge painstakingly created by previous generations of scholars.  Even though this body of knowledge (Lucretius, for example) may offer little interest for the general population, scholars hold it in trust, as it were, for all of us.  Greenblatt has betrayed his role as trustee.  He has put himself, the “I,” before the group.  However stellar his reputation, however great his remuneration compared to other academics, however olympian his position in the academic hierarchy, nevertheless he is but one among many who have compiled and continue to compile our knowledge of the Renaissance.  With the New Yorker article, he has undermined a legacy to which many people have devoted their life and work.

This is where individualism in America has brought us.  To the false simplicity. To self-indulgence.  To self-righteousness.  To the narrowing of truth to that which can be seen from personal perspective.   But the lens of personal experience a priori is too narrow to encompass the complicatedness of the interconnected, information-saturated world.

Finding another current.  How Obama is tacking against our slipstreams of simplicity.

Barack Obama has what it takes to bring American life and culture around again to the sense of group identity that has fortified this country from its beginning.  Why Obama?  Because he knows that his own personal experience is too unique and, frankly, strange (a combination of the bizarre and the lucky), to be a lens through which to see the nation.  He internalized the experience of group identity just as many of his fellow Americans were losing it.  He chose, among many possbilities, to be a Christian, and to be part of African-American culture.  And yet his relationship to both groups is fraught.  He is both of, and not of, each group.  He understands, therefore, the limitations and dangers of group-think.

Loss of national identity can be laid at the feet of my generation, the baby-boomers.  We are a bridge between our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, whose experience of war (hot and cold) and austerity (the Depression) gave them a shared sense of purpose, and our more recently balkanized culture. As children, we baby-boomers lived the Sputnik moment; as young adults, we were the vanguard of “do your own thing.”   In the 1950s, that my classmates and I were not interested in math did not matter; like most other American schoolchildren we set ourselves to the national task:  beating the Russians in math and science.  What our personal preferences might have been were of no consequence–not even to us. Such a sense of national purpose–driven and sustained by oneness–is inconceivable today. As I have written before, our time for Sputnik moments has come and gone–a result, in part, of the growth of individualism and entitlement.

The turning point was the schism in American politics and society over Vietnam.  We boomers, too young to be the leaders, nevertheless were the foot soldiers, both in the anti-war movement and in the military. The dynamics of the rift are still playing themselves out in American life and culture.  Obama, once again, is  the Janus figure, our first post-Vietnam president with no connection, personal or political, to that war and therefore knowledgeable of it but not burdened by it.

Pre-occupied by domestic problems, Obama has not been able to concentrate on reshaping American foreign policy as much as he had planned.  So far–in Libya, in his relationship with former Defense Secretary Gates, in his determination to leave Afghanistan, in drone warfare, in small secret selective military missions–Obama has given us nevertheless promise of new policy, on the one hand, even as he has made big mistakes (not following up on his Cairo speech, re-launching the “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians prematurely, imagining a reset button for Russia) and has had to bow to the reality that for primarily financial reasons we no longer enjoy the influence we once had, on the other.

This is complexity.  It is easier to spot in foreign affairs.  Sometimes we are as powerful as we once were; sometimes we are not.  I do not sense that most Americans, with the exception of policy wonks, care very much here.  The nation as a whole is resigned to a gradual loss of influence.  (And if any Republican candidate for president thinks that making us Number One again is a viable campaign platform, he will be disabused.)   In all matters domestic, however, we are lost.  And here is where Obama has failed us as leader.  He has not talked openly and honestly to us about the consequences of the changes we face.  Yes, yes, Obama talks about change constantly.  The need for better education, for cleaner energy, for rebuilding infrastructure.  But he never talks about the consequences.

What are the consequences of change?  The biggest consequence is the need for patience and delayed gratification–not to mention sacrifice.  Why?  Because all the good changes about which Obama talks need time to come to pass, even as the changes whose harbingers we have long ignored (cheaper labor abroad, unsustainable spending on Medicare, a larger need to rein in government spending) are now battering us right and left.

Better education will take at least a generation to achieve.  Finding that cheap, abundant, renewable clean energy will be a process of trial and error.  Infrastructure projects, intricacies of cooperation among all levels of government and jurisdiction, involving all sorts of legal and environmental issues, do not break ground quickly.  Education, energy, infrastructure–all take time.  And in the meanwhile the old jobs are not coming back.  We will continue to be poorer.  To keep us whole, to keep our society from falling apart, the American middle class must re-orient itself.  We must move away from materialism  as a defining characteristic, because who we are will no longer be what we can buy.  And why should it be so?  For most of our history, self-sufficiency–not money and things–has been the dream.

With his decision to spend an enormous amount of political capital (all he had, really) on medical insurance reform, Obama has laid the cornerstone for harnessing change.  Yes, the bill is a mess, a compromise and a hodge-podge.  Yes, it is smoke and mirrors when it comes to reining in cost.  But it has cracked open the door of possibility.  My generation, the baby boomers, will use the bill’s thousand pages to change how we live in old age and how we die.  Through the rest of the century, we will be experimenting here.  This will lead to an obsession with health, with aging, with gradual decrepitude, with end of life choices–and, most importantly, with how we as a society apportion our medical resources among various generations.  Health will be one of the new ways in which the American middle class is defined.

If Obama does nothing else, his decision to push for health insurance reform has already made his presidency.

Elsewhere Obama has fallen short because he does not know how to talk to the American middle class.  His unusual upbringing and his quick good fortune (Ivy League, coterie of movers and shakers in Chicago, bestselling author, wealthy senator) explain this difficulty, in part.  But personal history does not excuse it.  Patricians from FDR to Bush (father and son) have been able to connect.  Obama’s problem, like Lincoln’s, is that he does not really like ordinary folk.  Therefore, Obama over-compensates by prettifying us, by colorizing us in a life story that is not really us.

Having given many examples of the false Obama narrative previously, I add to the list this curiosity.  Again and again, in speech after speech, in town hall meetings and on factory floors and at fundraisers, Obama characterizes the goal of the middle class as giving our children a better life materially.  Upward mobility.  However, there is little in the course of American history to support this.  Until sixty years ago, when we realized we had shifted from a primarily agricultural to an industrial society, each generation, except for he or she who inherited the family homestead, had to begin anew.  This is the story of the westward migration:  leaving an easier life in the East for a scrappier existence as pioneers.  And each generation of parents expected their children to start out on their own, without a hand up–just as they had done.

This is the story of the American immigrant:  leaving a heritage, a language, a network of friends and family–and often prominence and comfort–for the promise of America.  What is this promise?  It is not the house, the automobiles, the disposable income.  Over the past half century, we have increasingly characterized the American dream in material terms and thereby diminished it.  But the American dream is not so easily defined.  It is privacy, self-sufficiency, self-determination, entrepreneurship–all made possible by the rule of law.  Paradoxically, this is a shared experience.  This is the group identity, mystical at times, that binds us together as Americans because a society based not upon corruption but upon enforceable rights is rare in the world.

If Barack Obama fulfills the Lincolnian destiny that he has envisioned, he will return to us that acute sense of group belonging.  And that group will not be “nation of shoppers.”  I have suggested changing habits and practices in health and health care as a new focus.  Reconfiguring the social compact–how to care for a generation or two of the jobless even as government spending diminishes–will be another. There will be more.  Disorder, conflict, false starts, uncertainty–all will be part of the process, part of the complexity in this turn-about for American middle class identity.

Who We Are.

We are the Gettysburg Address.  As a nation, we have lived its dramatic arc, we have internalized its essential truth–the terrible but ultimately sacramental power of bloodshed–just as Lincoln himself had already done when he took a quiet moment to jot down the few words he would say at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg.  The power of this speech lies in the unsaid.  Lincoln never mentions the Confederate soldiers, shoveled into mass graves along the roads around Gettsyburg and not, unlike their Union opponents, individually reinterred at the national cemetery.  But without the opposing force–the Other–there would have been no dedication, no consecration.  In the end, “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live” included all the men.  If few Northerners would have appreciated this hard truth in November, 1863, certainly Lincoln did.  In his speech, he never blames the South for driving the buggy of state into the ditch.

Lincoln’s actions would become more important than his words.  Although the men who fought for the Confederacy were, after all, committing treason, not even the officers were arrested at the close of the war.  Except for Jefferson Davis, briefly incarcerated, the men were allowed to return home, with horse and gun, if they had them.  (They did briefly lose the right to vote.)  In the beginning, when Union forces took the Carolina sea islands, the plan had been to bring to trial and to hang every captured leader.  By the end of the war, Lincoln saw that the rule of law had to be cut with mercy.  This decision–one of Lincoln’s last–not to seek pay back, not to retaliate, assured that we would recapture our acute sense of group belonging.  Within three decades, for example, Tennessee held an elaborate celebration, one of the world fairs then in vogue, to commemorate its statehood centennial, even though–not to put too fine a point upon it, and indeed nobody did at the time–Tennessee had left the Union for awhile and therefore been part of the United States for only 96 years.

Misfortune is the midwife of many good things.  I am quite sure, for example, that our current financial woes, both personal and national, will bring forth the new attitudes and behaviors that we need to thrive in the globalist world.  A hundred and fifty years ago, many sorrows laid the groundwork for Lincoln’s decision not to punish the soldiers on the Other Side:  the interminable years of fighting, the incompetence of his generals, the horrific bloodshed, the death of his own son.  Somewhere in his presidency Lincoln had a dark night of the soul, perhaps after spending one of his afternoons with convalescing soldiers across the river from Washington at the Arlington hospital that had only a few years before been Robert E. Lee’s plantation house.

Lincoln’s rise in the world had been fueled, in part, by his aversion for rural America.  That was the world of his father–illiterate, unknowing, content to stay down on the farm.  Lincoln was a city man, with city wit and city ambition.  But at some point during the Civil War Lincoln was humbled by his coming late to an essential truth about the farm boys of Illinois and Iowa and Ohio and every other state:  they defined themselves, just as much as America’s educated elites, not by their own best interest but in larger terms.  And they were willing to lay down their lives for this.

From all that I can discern, Obama has yet to experience his own presidential dark night of the soul.  But it will come.  And not only because his political fortunes will sink further.  Obama cannot rise, cannot prevail against the forces set against him and us, cannot keep his promise to bridge our divisions until he, like Lincoln, understands who we are.  The revelation in Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men has nothing to do with White House incompetence or infighting.  Speaking in an interview with Suskind, Obama says, “What’s the particular requirement of the president that no one else can do? And what the president can do, that nobody else can do, is tell a story to the American people about where we are and where we are going.”

Tell a story. This is trend-speak–how politicos now hope to present themselves the way a beautiful family photo shoot did in the past.  It is also slightly condescending.  After all, voters are not children.  Nevertheless, it is true.  But Obama has lost himself in the wrong narrative.  In his speeches, he describes who we are.  But he does not know who we are.  This is not the speaking and the writing from personal knowledge that leads to persuasion of an audience.  Furthermore, as both the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement show, we Americans prefer to tell our own stories about who we are.  Both Tea Partiers and Occupiers, different though they may be, demonstrate quite well that we are not, as Obama likes to describe us, a people who “play by the rules” and can be found “sitting around the kitchen table.”

The story Obama knows is the future.  He understands globalism and its many consequences.  He knows where we should be going.  He is–or at least he has been–confident that he can lead us there.  But he never tells the story of “there.”  He never helps us imagine it, so that we can almost see it, taste it, grasp it, want to be in it.  (Bill Clinton was a master here–my god the man made you want to run right out and buy an electric car battery–and Obama would do well to study Clinton’s campaign speeches on behalf of his wife in 2007-2008.)  The story of there is the essential beginning.  For the text is the stony road we will travel to the destination.  And here, in particular, Obama has never spoken forthrightly with us.  Why?  Because just like Lincoln and farm boys, Obama underestimates us.

Politicians often get second acts and second chances.  Almost certainly, Obama will get his.  If Obama is going among us and telling the wrong story wrongly, at least he knows the right story and could tell it if he had to.  Romney, on the other hand, is stuck in last century’s narrative.  In No Apology, Romney writes about preserving “America’s greatness throughout the twenty-first century.”  For Romney, this greatness is all about our “economic and military leadership.”  Here, in short, is why Romney, although he will prove to be a formidable opponent for Obama, will lose.  This is not America’s story in the twenty-first century globalist world.  We voters, even if we feel lost and unable to discern the right story going forward, know that this is no longer our story

Will Obama in his second term move us down the road?  We are a fractious, motley, mulish horde.   Our leader does not have the common touch.  Some of us kicking and screaming, we have been dragged to the open road by the health insurance reform bill, where we are stalled, milling about in confusion. This has not been an auspicious beginning. Nevertheless.  Going forward, Obama has everything he needs to lead: comfort with complexity, innate ruthlessness, knowing where to take us.  God willing, he will.

November 11, 2011

[Many apologies for taking so long to finish this piece.  At first, I thought I had writer's block.  Or was spending too much time lolling about in my new spa and watching the stars.  But I have realized that I have been loathe to say goodbye to writing about Obama.  Nevertheless, the time has come.  I have been away from the action a long time now; I have said all I can say from the perspective of first-hand experience married to distance.]

President Obama, Labor Day speech, Detroit, Michigan

“You’re absolutely right that housing has been at the key—at the core of a lot of the hardships we’ve been going through over the last two and a half years. . . .”

President Obama, town hall meeting, Atkinson, Illinois, two weeks earlier

In keeping with my current scheme of alternating pieces on politics and the personal, today I’m sharing with you thoughts on my husband’s and my failure this spring of 2011 to sell the house we lived in for thirty-seven years.  Our experience speaks to a few of the myriad ways in which the burst of the housing bubble is changing the way Americans live.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Cecelia Holland’s The Sea Beggars, a historical novel set in sixteenth-century Amsterdam that nobody reads anymore.  The effacement of Ms. Holland’s literary career is as good an example as any of the ubiquity of change.  Not so long ago, in the 1970s and 1980s, she was acclaimed the premier historical novelist of the time.  Why?  Because she had a gift for creating past epochs scrubbed of contemporary thought.  But literary fashion changes, and now readers want historical fiction (and film) anchored somewhere within our modern comfort zone on matters of race, feminism, marriage, religion, war and the meaning of violence.

For all that, the opening scene of Sea Beggars is a masterpiece, and it’s that scene to which in my mind’s eye I return again and again.  It’s Sunday in Protestant Amsterdam, and a fiery preacher has just delivered a sermon on the evanescence of human existence to the enormous Calvinist crowd before him.  The characters whose lives briefly we are about to follow leave the Sunday service re-affirmed in their attention to, their love of, Scripture.

But it never occurs to our characters that the biblical verses that they have savored, whose knowledge defines them as Protestants as opposed to Catholics, might actually quite literally be fulfilled in them.  Of course that is exactly what happens. Catholic Spain regains control of the Netherlands and the comfortable lives of our Dutch Protestant burghers are gone in an instant.

Here is human nature, right?  We take from other people’s experience—whether in Scripture, or books, or film, or observation of real life—what we find comfortable, what fits in with the worldview we already possess.

And so this happened to me in the fall of 2007 when I was covering the Obama grassroots movement in one of its smaller incarnations, in Memphis, Tennessee.  On an especially dispiriting evening—a deluge of autumn rain, the venue the common room in a shabby public home for the mentally impaired—I listened to a university professor try to convince his audience, ten to twelve skeptical older African-Americans, that Barack Obama could become the next president of the United States.

Afterwards, over donuts and punch, we talked.  The people who had come out that evening were neighbors, homeowners on the street nearest the group home.  Their street, a semi-circle of small brick homes built nearly seventy years ago but beautifully maintained, was part of the black middle class neighborhood that had settled around the University of Memphis.

I had thought, at first, that Obama’s prospects accounted for the glumness of mood.  I was wrong.  A neighbor, owner on the corner, had died, and just the week before the U.S. government had bought his home for Section 8 housing.  This development did not bode well for the street, much less its property values.

“The renter will be a woman with kids—woman supposedly single—but I guarantee you there’ll be a parade of men coming and going—all hours—ton of people living there—drug deals—you name it.”

This was the gloomy prediction I heard twelve times over.

No prospective private buyer had been interested in the neighbor’s house.  Why?  Because for the same amount of money a Memphian could purchase a new house, with an up-to-the-minute kitchen and a great room, far out in the suburbs.

Having poured their lives into the American dream of home ownership—and done so long ago, not in any housing bubble—these potential Obama supporters had discovered that home ownership was not the bulwark they supposed.  In the advent of one Section 8 housing rental to their street, they saw the future for their own homes, for what they had once thought they had to bequeath their children.

I did a little research and discovered that, indeed, the older middle class neighborhoods—black, white, mixed—around the University of Memphis had begun to decline due to the arrival of Section 8 rentals.

My sympathy for the predicament of these middle class Memphians was the greater because such a thing could never happen to me.  I was white and upper middle class.  My own street was lined with much grander and more expensive homes.  The government does not put Section 8 housing into such a neighborhood.  Even to think of comparing hip and happening Rockridge, Oakland, San Francisco East Bay, California to benighted and struggling Memphis, Tennessee was apples and oranges.

Or so I thought. But this spring I got Sea-Beggared.

When my husband and I bought our Oakland house, it was the best we could afford but not what we wanted.  It was 1975, and housing prices were going up, up and up every month.  The universal fear of young family professionals like us was that we would never be able to “get into the housing market,” as we said then.  Not only the prices were daunting.  At that time, a 20% down payment was de rigueur.  A monthly house note could not exceed 30% of monthly income.  26% was the norm.

Like others of our generation, we borrowed a down payment from my father and lived as poor as church mice (if I remember correctly, our monthly note was actually more like 33% of our monthly income) for the next five years.  But the scrimping was the means to an end.  Eventually, we would be able to “trade up,” if we wanted, as our slightly older friends had done.

Meanwhile we lived in Oakland’s Rockridge, where property values had recently been devastated by the arrival of BART, the Bay Area’s new mass transit system.  The trains ran right through Rockridge, and the building of the tracks and station—not to mention the widening of the throughway to Contra Costa County—had taken out a large swath of old Oakland housing.

In 1975, the commercial district along College Avenue near our new house was comotose.  The transformation of the neighborhood—essentially the raping of an old and aging community for the benefit of newer and whiter suburbs to the east—was raw and ugly.  And it wasn’t just the vista of concrete and steel.  Rockridge was, and is, noisy.  The drone of automobile traffic, the rumbling of trains.

That’s why we could afford to buy there.

We would have liked to have bought in the Berkeley Hills, above the University of California campus.  A house in the Berkeley Hills—that was the dream of every couple we knew.  High up, and as far from anything commercial as possible.

Thank goodness we were able to buy in Upper Rockridge, on the better side of Broadway, blocks away from College Avenue and its storefronts.

Perhaps you already know where I am going with this little history.  Change came to Rockridge.  The kind of change that astute city planners might have foreseen.  Residents grew accustomed to the new shape of the neighborhood.  In California’s rising prosperity, local residential property values recovered.  The Oakland stretch of College Avenue, like its Berkeley counterpart just north, revived.  It is now lined with world-class restaurants and cutting-edge shops.  More importantly, San Francisco commuters decided they liked BART and wanted to live in easy driving distance of its parking lots.

The whiz-bang to the boom for Rockridge was its Who’s Who. Successful writers and artists, musicians and tech entrepreneurs—famous and not so—moved there.  Rockridge developed a cachet and therefore property values beyond what its mere housing stock merited.  This was the kind of change no one, not even an astute architect, could have planned for.  Cachet, delightful as it is, nevertheless is also a warning bell, but we Rockridgeans were too busy counting our virtual house dollars to hear the chiming descant on the theme of change’s inherent unpredictability.

Change has come to Rockridge again.  The burst of the housing bubble accounts for part.  This is the change that could have been predicted—and indeed people did.  A few years ago, I watched a local TV segment on the housing boom at the far reaches of the San Francisco Bay Area commute.  A couple who made $80,000 a year gave the TV  anchor a tour of the new house on which they had a $800,000 mortgage.  I remember being taken aback.  My husband and I had an income several times theirs, and yet we would not be comfortable with an $800,000 mortgage.  But I knew what the couple was feeling.  They were pleased; they were able to rest easy, because they knew they could always sell the house, for more than what they had paid for it, if they ran into financial trouble.

That was a strain of middle class thinking back then, wasn’t it?  Certainly, it wasn’t the only strain.  Although the country did not like to dwell on the fact, and certainly our media did not, pieces of the American middle class, particularly in rural communities and old-tech factory towns, had never recovered from the previous recessions and the larger economic shifts behind them, in the last decades of the twentieth century.  As someone who loves the heartland, I was well acquainted with such places.  I knew what could happen.  And maybe that’s why the TV segment on the couple with the $800,000 mortgage rang ever so small a chime in my head.  I wondered if getting in on the housing boom was what getting in on oil & gas tax shelters in the 1970s had been:  a losing prospect for those who bought last.

The fall of house values is but one part, however, of the change that is taking place in how and where Americans live.  Another part of what I call the Great Inchoateness is that young families today do not want the neighborhoods my friends and I wanted when we were young.  This is unpredictable change.

Who could have guessed that today’s young couples, the lion’s share of Bay Area buyers, would want to live close to commerce?  With their generation’s complicated relationship with cars, they want to live in walking distance of stores and restaurants.  Therefore, the housing market in the East Bay has turned upside down.  The Berkeley and Oakland hills are no longer as desirable as the Elmwood (Berkeley flats) and Rockridge residential blocks to either side of College Avenue.

One reason my husband and I could not sell our house this spring is that it is too far from College Avenue.

Like the arrival of Section 8 to the lovely, curved street south of the University of Memphis, our failure to sell our house, perhaps the best on our block—we had no offers, even after drastically dropping the price—does not bode well for the neighborhood.

Many factors contribute to the particular Great Inchoateness that is now Rockridge residential property.  The burst of the bubble.  (25% of Rockridge mortgages are “under water.”)  The change in buyers’ tastes.  The Berkeley-Oakland Hills Fire of 1991.  (Now families can get an Upper Rockridge house of post-fire vintage, with up-to-the-minute kitchen and great room. Hello, Memphis.)  A paucity of buyers. The national trend of widening income gap, which in practical terms (among many other consequences) has skewered house pricing according to “comparables,” because paying a few hundred thousand more or less for a house means nothing to a twenty-nine year-old working at Pixar or Zynga, with a seven-eight-figure portfolio.

Add to all that uncertainty.  Our real estate broker in March:  “It’s been a hard two years but the market is looking up.”  Our broker in August:  “the market is still falling.”

After this summer’s roiling stock market, debt-ceiling spectacle, downgrading of U.S. debt and August unemployment figures, who can not but suspect that the Rockridge homes bought last spring would sell for slightly less now?

No wonder it’s the rental market that’s thriving.  I’m exaggerating a bit when I say that people were standing in line to rent our house.  But that’s what it felt like, with much interest and several offers.  So now my husband and I are landlords, however reluctantly.  And I have girded myself to be one for the foreseeable future.

Our real estate broker of last spring explains it this way:  people who have been through foreclosures and short sales (those who “bought last”) still have to have somewhere to live.  To her observation I add the growing national realization that buying a house is not the great financial investment it once seemed.

I raise a question that even only two years ago would have been unthinkable:  perhaps the twenty-first century American dream will not be home ownership?

For the sake of historical accuracy, moreover, I point out (to President Obama’s young speechwriters, among others) that the American dream originally was not home but land ownership.  Here again is the work of change.  For how many people today lust for a couple of acres on which to hoe and to graze livestock?

Our forebears, except for a few of the wealthiest, did not care all that much about houses.  Outdoors most of the day, they spent very little time in them.  In a world unaccustomed to bodily privacy, adults, children and servants slept close together and didn’t think much about it.  It was the dream of land ownership (the possibility for which was closed to the common man in the Old World) that brought us to these shores.

What was land ownership about?  Doing a hard day’s work for oneself rather than for somebody else.  Feeding a family.  In England and in Europe, a common man could not hunt or fish, for even the game and the trout belonged to the gentry and nobility.  Reveling in the freedom to do as one damn well pleased on one’s own property.

At heart, the desire for land that built our nation was a yearning for human dignity, to be a man in full just as much as any of the rich and powerful.

Eventually, as American pastoral gave way to urbanization, the specifics of the American dream have changed but the core meaning of human dignity remains the same.  For over a hundred years, to be middle class in America has meant house not land ownership.  For the last fifty years, in an age of enormous prosperity, our American middle class, and its suburbs of single-family detached houses, grew exponentially.

But now we are in the process of shifting the loci of the dream, that possession of dignity that anchors and centers our nation.  Where will the new iteration of the American dream take root and flourish?  Perhaps in the shaping of one’s persona in social media, for our younger generations, just like our seventeenth and eighteenth-century forebears, do not put the value on personal privacy that fed the desire for home ownership from the Victorian Age through my own.

I have always thought that the Obama Administration, through the best of intentions, with a desire to help hurting citizens, made a mistake in trying to bring the housing fall to a soft landing.  The burst of the bubble should have been allowed to spend itself.  Instead we have an approach rather like the slow, excruciatingly drawn-out pain of peeling back a bandaid rather than ripping it free.  Facing the prospect of government’s reconstitution of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with sporadic pressures on banks to write down mortgage balances, the housing market cannot find the ground it needs to re-seed itself.

Philosophically I am not an opponent of government regulation.  It secures our lives in ways that we take for granted.  Just one small example:  dairy inspection.  Therefore, although I know and respect many members of the Tea Party, here is what I say to them about regulation.  You want a society with less of it?  Go to Russia, take your children and live in a place where every time you drink milk you could be exposed to tuberculosis.

Regulation is the warp and woof of a complex society based on the rule of law.  (As opposed to China, a complex society based on corruption and a hieratical structure of authority that is opaque to outsiders, partly because it can shift in an instant.  (My husband says he never knows if a deal is going to go through until suddenly everybody gets out their seals to chop the documents.)

Nevertheless, I have no confidence that trying to regulate the housing market will work.  Here are the two reasons uppermost in my mind.  First of all, so many of the homeowners with troubled mortgages are like the couple making $80,000 a year but holding a mortgage ten times their income.  It’s magical thinking on the part of the Obama Administration to imagine that writing down such a mortgage less than half—maybe even two-thirds—would keep people from defaulting.  And my pessimism here is rooted in the second reason.

For thirty years, we middle class Americans have maintained our lifestyles and pumped up our buying power either by using second mortgages and secured lines of credit or by refinancing our homes as they appreciated in order to take out cash.  This avenue is now closed.  For the first time in almost half a century, we Americans are going to have to live within our incomes, which will have to cover—a new discipline! will take getting used to—all our expenses and purchases, including those we used to dip into house equity to pay.

Furthermore—and if I don’t point this out, one of you readers will—the situation is unfair.  People like the young men working at Pixar and Zynga, like my husband and me, beneficiaries of the rising value of tech stock, are unfazed.  My husband and I did not have to sell our old home in Rockridge in order to buy a new one in Silicon Valley.

But then life is never fair.  Is it?  One way or another—and again the unpredictability of change can be a factor—we all experience unfairness.  This is why President Obama’s constant refrain of “fairness” in his stump speeches troubles me.  Having followed him for so long on the campaign trail, I find little about Barack Obama, President, surprising.  His personality, his priorities, his politics—all are playing themselves out pretty much as I thought they would.  One thing that does surprise me, however, is that he still does not know his fellow Americans well.

He’s intelligent; he’s well-educated (although now that I think about it, he may be, like so many Americans younger than my generation, American history-deficient); he zips in and out of the heartland regularly.  Obama’s favorite trope about the middle class, however—I can’t imagine where he got it.  The ideas that “fairness” and “playing by the rules”—so many Obama speeches hinge on these—are keys to the American Dream are nonsense.  Obama has created a fairy tale for himself that, when you stop to think about it, none of us believe in.  And it certainly is not supported by American history, by the ways in which we settled this land and built a nation.

Who are we Americans?  We are a nation of immigrants.  For the last fifteen years, I’ve spent a lot of time in Queens and in Houston, the two most multi-ethnic cities (Queens along with New York’s other four boroughs) in the United States. I have come to love both for precisely this reason.  I had never felt particularly patriotic until I watched the way in which immigrants who would be slaughtering each other back in Central Europe and the Middle East live cheek-by-jowl in Queens.  Why the civility?—because of both the opportunities America offers and the adherence to rule of law that She asserts.

If I am hopeful about us as a nation—and I am, and I wish I could live to see the day when the ambitions and attitudes of our recent immigrant generations bear a new fruit that I can but dimly picture—it is because of Houston.  Here, even more so than in Queens, an observer cannot miss the spirit of family togetherness, of dedication to hard work and of entrepreneurship that characterizes all the Harris County immigrant populations, otherwise so different.

Let me step back from this praise of immigrants now.  Who are the people who come to America, as opposed to the people who stay behind?  They are the bold ones.  They are the risk takers.  They are willing to do what it takes.  They are the scrappy street fighters.  They may not be endowed with great intelligence, but they know they had better be fast learners if they want to succeed.  They have seen what happens to people who are not.  Back home, they have known the dark side of human nature that we native-born Americans, outside the military, see only in films.  They are survivors.  They are, quixotically, not only survivors but also dreamers.

Only the weak hope, or expect, or delude themselves, that life might be fair.  Only the timid cannot bring themselves to do other than play by the rules.  Fairness and playing by the rules—these have never been part of the way in which our American character—through a process of immigrant self-selection that has been going on since 1620—has taken shape.

Think for a minute about the realization of the American Dream of land ownership that made this nation.  How much of it took place through “playing by the rules?”  The settling of what used to be called the Old Southwest (now the Southern states east of the Mississippi River) was one big land grab, in which sometimes the U.S. government colluded with the rich and powerful in taking Indian land, in which sometimes men defied U.S. government orders and did it anyway. In my home state of Tennessee, along every stage of its history from the end of the Revolution through today, men and women built homesteads, created communities and acquired enough wealth to need last wills and testaments by pushing back against rules.

The Great American Land Grab did not descend into chaos because at the end of the day every man, no matter where he had immigrated from, was willing to play by one rule:  English property law.  Without property law, a man could not be assured of title to the land he had just acquired.  It is not surprising, moreover, that in an inchoate environment there was one law that was sacrosanct.  After all, there was enough land out there, for the taking, for everybody.

This tension, or balance, between two opposing forces—pushing against the rules and respect for law—fueled the entrepreneurship that built this nation and eventually created the American urban middle class.  It is the dynamic through which our latest round of immigrants prospers.  It is the way small businessmen succeed—by having a talent for walking this tightrope.  If President Obama believes that entrepreneurs—heck, if he believes that the GM employees to whom he gave his Labor Day address—follow every rule and pay every tax, well, I have a bridge in China I’d like to sell him.  Assiduousness about rules and taxes and fair play shapes the lives of lawyers and civil servants—but then these groups of Americans, whose lives are shored up by some version of a protective combination of salary, job security and pension, have that luxury.  Most of America’s middle class does not.

President Obama’s harping on “fairness” is particularly worrisome because, however the mortgage crisis ends, fairness is not going to be a factor.  Fairness is not even part of his own administration’s plan to alleviate the problem.  Undoubtedly, different versions of mortgage write-downs will continue, and these will favor the spendthrifts in mortgage trouble over the prudent in the same neighborhoods who never borrowed too much or whose mortgages are not under water.

In this respect, Obama’s fairness focus is eerily—or perhaps I should say ironically—similar to an idée fixe in the Tea Party, exercised because it is not “fair” for illegal immigrants, who have broken the law, to get the same treatment as legal immigrants.   Indeed parts of Obama’s presidential speeches are interchangeable with Tea Party credos, not only about fairness but also about the tilted playing field, where the little middle class guy as opposed to the rich and powerful guy does not have the same number of chances to score.

Somehow everything I write ends up being about Obama, but then, when you think about it, what I believe and observe matters little, whereas what he does matters a great deal.  Just as I could not foresee the change in housing tastes, so he could not foresee his presidency.  He did not get the presidency he assumed he would get.  After all, his qualities and experiences make him especially—some, including me, might say uniquely—qualified to be a president called upon to reshape America’s role in the world.  But that is not the work he has been asked most exigently to do.  As my conservative friends are fond of saying, “This is a man who has never had to meet a payroll.”  Their larger point has been proved true.  Barack Obama does not really understand successful businessmen and seems to be of two minds about them.  Are they greedy fat cats?  Or are they the architects of American prosperity?

So President Obama, too, has been Sea-Beggared. When he called upon CHANGE in 2007 and in 2008, he was speaking rhetorically.  He was not calling upon change to materialize and to take up residence in his own White House.  But that is the change he got.

In the next part of “The Essential Obama,” I will be writing about his ability to grasp complexity.  Here is the strength upon which he is calling in order to deal with the worlds for which he has little previous experience and no special affinity:  those of business & finance and of the middle class.

A final few words on houses and the American Dream.  The little, curved street of small brick houses south of the University of Memphis and my own street of grander houses in Rockridge have now merged in my thoughts.  Both prompt sadness.  But here’s the thing—at once brutal and hopeful.  There may be no remedy for the Memphis street.  The homes will slowly decay; eventually they will be torn down.  If Memphis goes the way of Detroit, the area will return to grass and emptiness.  If Memphis goes the way of Atlanta, something else will be built in its place.  A civic future may be very much in doubt here, but outcome at a personal level always seems to resolve unfairly.  People with more come out better than those with less.

Therefore, I predict that the homes on my Rockridge street will survive, if in a different incarnation.  Someone with the entrepreneurial spirit will see opportunity there.  An Indian, or Pakistani, or Vietnamese, or Maltese immigrant wanna-be real estate mogul will buy the 1930s and 1940s houses because he or she has an idea about how it might be possible to make a fortune in what surely is going to be the next iteration of the American lifestyle:  renting homes and finding that choice attractive because it most easily accommodates mobility, thrift and changes in composition of households.

The American Dream holds out the possibility of living as a man, and now a woman, in full.  Our saving grace as Americans, despite our many flaws, is that our social compact, which fuels the dream, is based on respect for human, individual dignity.  Right now, in 2011, the compact has frayed and too many of us, particularly us native-born Americans, no longer know how or where to reach deep within ourselves to bring forth that respect, particularly for fellow Americans who think and believe differently.  But we will find that wellspring again.  An inexorable consequence of change is that things are never quite the same once the movement has stopped.  And so our revitalized social compact will have a new geography.  And I would not be surprised if the realization that social status and security are not necessarily tied to single family home ownership will be one of the many threads of the future’s warp and woof that helps us find the way.

September 7, 2011

“’But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.

‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’

‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.

‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’”

A frequent truism about Barack Obama is that he plays a long game.  From my observation, this is correct, although only in one sense—and that sense not the one that interests pundits.  Politics is usually the context of long game commentary.  But for Obama politics is merely the means to an end—and I can argue both sides of the debate on whether or not he is especially gifted at the art of politics.

The end game for President Obama, as indeed it should be for any president, is the preservation of the nation.  So many of his speeches include the observation, “It is my job to keep the American people safe.”  Observers assume this is merely a bromide.  Further, when Mr. Obama says “God Bless America” at the end of every one of his public remarks, Beltway wags assume that he is pandering to his audiences.  He ends his speeches so only because the words are on the teleprompter.  Anyway, he isn’t really a Christian; he is a secular humanist.

Now I am sure that more than one coastal elite assumes that any intelligent man must be a secular humanist.  However, nothing in his words and acts shows Mr. Obama to be other than the Christian he professes to be.  As a Christian, I accept him as a fellow believer, if one who needs to learn a few more biblical homilies than “I am my brother’s keeper.”  Even Franklin Graham accepts, if reluctantly, if more reluctantly over time, Obama’s declaration of faith.

No—what the iterations and reiterations about the people’s safety and the “God Bless” reveal is that Mr. Obama is not an ironist.  I talked previously about this peculiarity—one that sets him apart from his intellectual peers in Washington.  He is a literalist verbally, in the way long-gamers often are.  More often than not, he says exactly what he means—no less and no more.

This is a discipline, of course.  I think we all agree that Barack Obama has the gift of discipline.  But it is also the only way that a long-gamer can communicate with other people.  He or she sees (and if a leader, sets) a plethora of strategies and way points that in close-up seem to contradict one another and to fly apart but that at a far horizon form a constellation.

When he opens his mouth, therefore, Mr. Obama says not a tenth of what he is thinking.  (Usually.  Certainly, he has learned that a politician should never muse in public.)  He zeroes in on one or two observations about a problem.  He pegs his remarks in the safe ground of reasonableness.  This is where he is most comfortable interacting with his fellow Americans.  With the possible exception of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he never tries to share difficult insights or to steer our imaginations towards that far horizon.

Personally, I think that Obama’s reticence is not his best choice.  We Americans are perfectly capable of getting at least a bit of the long game.  We have a history of sucking it up, of accepting difficult truths, of maneuvering through troubled waters.  But President Obama underestimates us, partly because he is uncomfortable with other people.  Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, who followed Barack Obama from the earliest days of his political career, told me once that back in Chicago he never had close friends.  Obama’s current golf buddies notwithstanding, Sweet’s comment reads like insight to me.

More than half-way through his first term, we can see the consequences here for Barack Obama, Long-gamer.  First of all, his choosing to speak to us from his comfort zone, that middle ground of reasonableness, has led many pundits and fellow Democrats to conclude that he is a centrist.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Let me give but two examples now.  (More will be coming in subsequent pieces.)

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590), although greatly flawed, although the individual mandate may well be found unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court and overturned, nevertheless is an accomplishment of magnitude.  This is the foot wedged in the door of health care delivery revolution.  This is a beginning all the more astonishing because it was enacted during a time of great financial uncertainty and upheaval.  In short retrospect, it is clear that Barack Obama was right about the choice of initiative and its timing.  It was indeed “now or never.”  Today, the Great Recession still with us, the Republicans recovered from their 2008 funk, such sweeping legislation would be impossible.

Much about that health care act will have to be changed.  As any middle class woman could have told Obama and the Democratic legislators, for example, people with pre-existing conditions are not going to rush out now to buy health coverage, because even with the government subsidies, it is too expensive.  Sick people do not have an extra $4000 a year to spend on anything, much less insurance.  And so this has proved to be true, and Kathleen Sebelius is trying to figure out a solution.

The significance here is not that there are stupidity and wrong assumptions in the health care act but that, unlike the Clintons, Obama was comfortable with backing and launching a work-in-progress whose end or stasis lies decades down the road.

Far from being a centrist, Obama is a gambler.  Nowhere is this more clear than in the ways in which he has abrogated law and increased the power of the presidency.  As a former teacher of constitutional law, surely he appreciates the meaning of precedents, and their possible consequences down the road, in future presidencies.  Engaging in the Libyan War without the consent of Congress.  Circumventing bankruptcy law and creditors in order to save Chrysler and General Motors.  These are enormous gambles for someone who knows jurisprudence, and they will pay off only if American foreign policy shifts course (which I believe it has) and if American auto manufacturing lives to feed another generation of workers.

Obama the Long-gamer has a bigger problem now than the misperception that he is a centrist.  In Washington, most everybody else is a short-gamer.  Pundits look at the wielding of power as if its time frame were quarters and they could call the score every fifteen minutes.

He has deferred to the military on the incarceration of Wiki-leaker Bradley Manning!  Shows he’s weak!

He gave in to the Republicans on keeping the Bush tax cuts!  Shows he’s not a leader!  Shows he’s too eager to compromise!

This is the world of the short game.  Since that is Washington’s game, and since the denizens of our capital tend to assume that anybody who lands there must, ergo, think as they do—well, you see the blind spot.

President Obama’s decision-making is not tethered to the short game.  He has not involved himself as Commander-in-Chief in the Bradley Manning case because the long game here is the preservation of the military command structure.  In the long game, furthermore, Bradley Manning serves as an object lesson for the consequences of treason.

The Bush tax cuts?  Don’t think for a minute that, in the end, President Obama won’t get what he wants.  Like all long-gamers, he has patience.  Therefore, he has the discipline to use one move (tax increases on the wealthy) as a bargaining chip to get something of more exigent value.  What did he get out of the debt ceiling compromise?  Two things:  time (ceiling raises until post-election) and conscripts (a congressional “supercommittee” wrestling with the tax issue).

That President Obama was playing a long game—that he had his eye trained on the horizon where tax increases and spending cuts would come together—does not mean necessarily that he made the right choice.  Sometimes a series of short games is the better move.

Obama’s biggest problem is that he is not the only Long-gamer in the field right now.  The Tea Party faction of the Republican Party is also dedicated to the long game.  Therefore, Obama has lost any advantage that singularity of strategy confers.  Furthermore, he does not understand the other long-game players, if for no other reason than the White House bubble has prevented him from getting to know these fellow Americans who are single-mindedly dedicated to cutting government spending.  Even more significantly—and here is something that Obama surely grasps now—the Teas are willing to be ruthless in pursuit of this long-term goal in a way that he, however ruthless himself, is not.  Obama versus the Tea Party dramatizes an inherent danger:  there is always somebody or something able or willing to take ruthlessness one step further.

I suppose I should say that how this struggle for control of the long game plays out is anybody’s guess.  Mindful of the law of inexorable consequence, however, I predict that President Obama, having engaged in a tactical retreat over the debt ceiling, will nevertheless get the tax revenues he wants in the end.  Why am I fairly sure about this?  Because the spoils of the twenty-first century are going to those who are masters of complexity.  Here is the crux of  the change that globalism has brought us.  Globalism has raised the bar for what it takes to succeed, both as individuals and as nations.  A higher level of education, facility with multi-tasking, nimbleness and speed, coping with increasing competitiveness–these are the new requirements.  And above all these is the ability to see the world for what it is now, a place where nothing is simple anymore.

August 31, 2011

Next up:  The Essential Obama, 3.  Complexifier.

Paul Tsongas, New York Times, January 14, 1987

I’ve been thinking about Tsongas lately because of a comment made to my brother-in-law after my father’s memorial service over Memorial Day weekend.  It was the middle of a hot Saturday afternoon in Houston, at Christ Church Presbyterian, where my two Houston sisters and their families, as well as my dad, worshipped.  We were gathered at the back of the sanctuary for punch and cookies time, which is the (some might say telling) Protestant equivalent of a wake or sitting shiva.

An Exxon executive said to Fred, “The most amazing thing about this memorial service is that none of the tributes mentioned what Paul did for a living.”

This was meant to be a compliment to my father, although some might say revealing of the speaker, as well.

I had just been mulling something similar.  All of us who spoke had been talking about the same person.  This is a kind of harmony that can be rare at funeral events.  If you have attended as many as I have (and I haven’t been to all that many), you know this to be true.

Keeper of Secrets.

The memorable occasion for my four sisters and me was the afternoon we walked into Memphis Funeral Home to hold the visitation hour for my uncle, my mother’s younger brother, who had never married and who the family comfortably assumed to be homosexual.

Uncle Watty’s closest living relative was my mother, who nevertheless did not feel well enough to leave Houston and return to Memphis for her brother’s funeral.  So we her five daughters had travelled to Memphis to take her place.  I hadn’t seen Watty for many years, the last time in San Francisco, where he loved to visit, where he hung out with the coast-to-the-river gay crowd—as I knew well, since Watty and I had a few acquaintances in common there.

Arriving early to the funeral home in preparation for a steady arrival of people we presumed would be our guests, what did my sisters and I encounter?  A room full of grieving men and women—brothers and sisters—exactly our ages—and an older woman, bereft, weeping.  That was the afternoon we discovered that my Uncle Watty had had a secret life.  In his early fifties, he had met a Memphis woman, a widow, a Catholic with five young children, in New Orleans, his second favorite city.  She was a lovely woman.  I was happy to make her acquaintance, if only briefly, for she passed away within a year of my uncle.

After New Orleans, Watty and Joan had lived together in Memphis for the next two decades.  Watty had been a father to her children.  But my uncle had never told his blood relatives any of this.  He kept his bachelor apartment, where my mother and his other sister (then living) thought he lived.  Indeed my mother drove out to this apartment in the Germantown suburbs at least once a week.

What you have to understand here, to begin to grasp my amazement, is that Memphis is not all that large a city.  400,000 people.  Divide that by 2 and you have 200,000 white people.  Whittle down to only the old families—whose purpose in life seems to be, sometimes, keeping track of each other—and truly you have to wonder how my uncle managed to keep to himself the treasure he found late in life.

Well, that was the idea.  Keeping his happiness intact. And away from the scrutiny of the family that might ruin it.  Obviously, another story—a very Southern story—here.  Maybe another day.  This piece is supposed to honor my father.

My father was also a keeper of secrets—a man of his generation, really.  That Greatest Generation, who fought in World War II and never afterwards spoke of it.  Unless, like my father, he had a daughter and later a granddaughter who sat with him, as if they had all the time in the world, and chivvied him into speech.

My sister Paula recorded Dad on his years in the Navy.  At the same time, she researched the medals to which Dad was entitled, acquired them through the VA and framed them for Dad.  Quite an array.  When the War ended, most of these had not yet been designed, much less struck.  And young men were not interested in medals; they just wanted to get on with their lives.

My sister Julia’s daughter Karen spent a summer, home to Houston from Georgetown, recording Dad’s reminiscences about growing up in 1920s Iowa, small town and farm life, the Depression, falling in love and going off to war.  Dad called Karen “Little Bit.”  She took time to hang out with him and was his favorite, deservedly, among the grandchildren.

At Dad’s memorial service in Houston, all the grandchildren read portions of the memoirs Karen had recorded and later, the following summer, transcribed.

Knowing.

My daughter Mayhill Courtney read this excerpt, my dad recalling his last Christmas at home before going off to war.

“At Christmas time at home in Iowa we always had a lot of snow generally speaking, but for you that have never been in a nice quiet snow, and I mean one where the wind isn’t blowing it’s just gently snowing big flakes and in a little town like Clear Lake at night if it was snowing like that if there was any traffic on the streets it would be muffled by the snow. And so if you went out and walked which I had done several times in the past growing up, if you went out when it was just gentle snowing, no wind, but it was really coming down, it was the most peaceful and the most exhilarating feeling that you could feel.  And anybody that’s done that they know that feeling.  Because the whole world is quiet and it is really just something to feel and to have experienced.”

I promise you that the temperature on that hot Houston Saturday afternoon dropped.  During the punch hour, I can’t think how many people (elderly—who else attends a memorial service on a holiday weekend?) said they were off to write their own memoirs.

Dad had never been a wordsmith.  More—he was Scandinavian, half Norwegian, half Danish.  Not saying much was in his genes.  But now for the first time since my parents had moved from Memphis to Houston fifteen years earlier, where my dad had attended Christ Church almost every Sunday, his fellow congregants knew him, at last.

Six Years.

Another truism about the Greatest Generation is that these men were not in touch with their feelings.  From my observation, this is truth.  It would be fair to say of my dad, as well, that he was not in touch with his own body.  He had grown up as a Scandinavian Lutheran, after all.  Therefore, even though he was a religious man, as he grew older he could not nevertheless face the prospect of death.

I used to wonder, jokingly, if he thought, even though he was progressing through his eighties, maybe he was going to be the only man on the planet not to have to face that reality.

After my mom died (horribly, of Alzheimer’s), Dad had more than six great years.  He was the center of a loving quartet (the three women who were his caregivers and Dad); he had an epistolary romance with one of my mother’s sorority sisters; he reaped the benefits (some might say at last) of having five daughters; he enjoyed his grandchildren.  Slowly, he came to accept that his days were numbered.  I remember in particular his last Father’s Day, and how he savored it.

These years were God’s gift, I believe—for his fidelity towards my mother, who was one of the most difficult of women.  Even though she treated him badly, he ever loved her.

For Christians, human relationships exist not in and of and for themselves, but as a pattern through which we can know God.  In the end, that’s the meaning of parenting:  we love our children even though they try us sorely.  Through that experience, we understand how God loves us.  Just one example of what I’m pointing to here.

Somehow, for my dad, I always knew that part of the gift would be a quick dispatch.  And indeed it was.  His caregiver Olga called the paramedics to take him to the ER a Monday afternoon about 4 PM because he had started shaking.  My two Houston sisters joined them there.  The thinking was that a persistent urinary tract infection had flared.  Tests were done.  Dad felt better and demanded to go home.  Suddenly, his eyes rolled back in his head; he was unconscious.  Despite all the ER efforts, he was dead within a few hours, never having regained consciousness, all his organs failing one by one.  Massive septic shock, the tentative diagnosis.

Again, that Scandinavian DNA.  A man with a lower pain threshold might have begun to feel badly days earlier.

My happiest final memory of my dad:  a wedding shower for my Chicago nephew and his fiancée over Easter weekend, at Dad’s house.  He was about to lose the house, because he was running out of money.  The Quartet, and all.  My sisters and I were moving him into an assisted living facility.  But Dad insisted on staying in his house through the wedding shower.

My nephew’s fiancée arrived, wearing a white bandage-style sundress.  She has a beautiful figure and looked drop-dead gorgeous.  Dad’s eyes lit.  He said, “You can pick ‘em, John Mark.”

I laughed to myself, thinking how great it is that at least for some things men never get too old.

The Big Six.

About a month before he died, Dad told my sister Karen, who in the between-caregivers hours put him to bed every night, that he wanted to be cremated.  He wanted part of his ashes scattered at his favorite duck hunting camp down in Mississippi.

And so we honored his wishes.

A Memphis gathering.  On a Saturday in July we buried some of my dad next to my mother, in a family plot that her father had bought for his beloved second wife, who died in her forties of heart trouble, as people said back then.  My sister Nancy had done some research and discovered that any local Veterans group will provide an honor guard and bugler for a veteran.  Two Marines presented my sisters and me with a flag, first folded according to ceremony, while the Navy hymn played on my sister’s tape recorder.

“On behalf of the President of the United States and a grateful nation,” the Marine holding out the flag said.  At the farthest edge of the hill, the Marine bugler played “Taps.”

The next morning, very early, because of the heat and insects, we caravanned down to the Big Six, in Mississippi.  This duck camp, once owned by Dad’s best friend, was named after the bridge the WPA built over a small river tributary there back in the 1930s.  Dad’s friend, confined to a wheel chair, had long since sold the property.  But the new owner, who of course had never known Dad, nevertheless had brought in a tractor and cleared a path for us through the woods.

My sisters and I, several sundry and assorted daughters and husbands, walked in.  The deep woods, which in autumn would be flooded in order to lure the ducks, were mostly dry in July—a paradise for cicadas, frogs and butterflies.  Our expedition was led, and indeed had been facilitated, by the son of Dad’s best friend.  His name is Bill Craddock—just like his dad.

We three oldest sisters had grown up next door to Bill and his sister Linda during the 1950s.  That Sunday morning Bill and Linda accompanied us.  Bill brought his silver wedding goblet and a very large silver spoon, for Dad’s ashes.

And so we scooped Dad and scattered him across the land that in Big Six flood season would become the potholes that had been his favorites to lie in wait for ducks.

My youngest nieces, Mary and Nadia, ages twelve and ten, had cried so much at Dad’s passing.  I like to think that our trip down to the Big Six gave them comfort.  But I don’t know.

The last spot the sisters and I threw Dad was towards a slight opening in the woods.  “You see,” I said to Mary and Nadia, standing next to me, “it’s like Bapa has gone on ahead of us; we can see the beginning of the path he took–no further.  We can’t see the end. But he is making a way for us, and some day long in the future we will follow and join him.”

My brother-in-law, a staunch Christian, retorted, “Of course, we can see where he has gone!”

Nadia scoops ashes from the wedding goblet

Geography.

Closure with Dad had come in many ways, and it, too, was a gift.  Growing up, I had not been particularly close to Dad, although I never doubted his love.  Mother had been the dominant presence in our house; my sisters and I gravitated to her presence.

In my forties, I determined to get to know Dad, to spend as much time with him as with Mom.  I had much to learn and to savor—and a little to let go.  By that time, I had realized that my father had not been the force in my life that some of my friends’ fathers had.  I felt the loss of the paternal advice and guidance that had helped these friends.  But if ever there were a man who kept his own counsel, he was Paul Anderson.

Growing up arises, in part, from a gradual appreciation of the parental point of view.  I had not been perfect either.  I began to see all the ways I had, as a teenager, tried Dad’s patience.  What a little Ivy League know-it-all I had been.  Yet he loved me.  Got past my faults.

So now I got past his. For the next twenty years, Dad and I enjoyed one another’s company.  In conversation.  In companionable silence.  In a growing bond of unspoken understanding.

Through Dad I came to realize that life is, in the end, so much about forgiveness.

That was the big closure.  A small was my moment at the lectern in Christ Church Presbyterian that hot June afternoon.  Whenever I attend church—no matter which—I seldom agree with the sermon, recasting the argument in my head, dissatisfied because the preacher has not hit upon what is most interesting in the Scripture that he or she is elucidating.

At last, on May 23, my turn.  A testament of faith.  A testament to my dad.

‘“The Lord’s foundation is in the holy mountains.’

‘God! How say you to my soul—flee as a bird to your mountain!’

Here are the opening lines of Psalm 87 and Psalm 11, very different in tone, the first sung in faith, the second in peevishness and doubt.  For the past two years, I’ve been reading the Psalms, and among the many striking things about their variety is the oneness of their geography of God.

God does not live far away beyond the stars, or in the heavens—although He created the heavens—but on a mountain.  On one, or many, of the high places on this earth, where birds nest, where we too sometimes can climb.

A mountain:  a geography we can see, we can reach.  Even so, we can know God, for at one and the same time He is always with us even as He dwells apart on that mountain the Bible names Zion.

Imagining death, the Psalmist sings of joining God on His mountain, in every mountain space, under His tent, in His high house, in its grand tabernacle, in its outermost courtyard.

And so, in the fullness of time, my dad, our dad, our grandfather, our Bapa, our friend Paul, has joined our Lord in His holy mountain.

And just as God is with us and away, so our Bapa is both with us always, while now dwelling apart from us, in the holy mountain.  For Bapa lives in our memories and in our hearts, in our faces and in our genes, in our inheritance from him of integrity and steadfastness and fidelity—an inheritance for which we honor him by passing it on to the next generation.

In Psalm 84, the Psalmist sings:

‘How amiable are your tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!

My soul longs, yes, even faints—for the courts of the Lord.  My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.

Yes! The sparrow has found a house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young—even your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God.

Blessed are they who dwell in Your house.  They will still be praising you.

Blessed is the man whose strength is in Thee: in whose heart are the ways of them who passing through the valley make it a well where the rain fills the pools.

They go from strength to strength, every one of them in Zion appears before God.’

And so our Bapa is standing in Zion, appearing before God.  As for us, gathered here together this afternoon, we are at the foot of the mountain, but we are looking up, almost able to touch, almost able to reach both Bapa and our God.  We are very close.  We will always be close.  For that is the geography of faith.

We are gathered together.  It’s like we are holding hands, circled around the foot of the mountain, in the presence of the God of the Psalms, remembering Paul Clair Anderson and giving thanks for this man so dear to us.  He was indeed a strong man, in his faith and in his care of us, and yes, he went “from strength to strength,” and filled the pools of our lives with his steadfastness.

We lift our faces.  We can almost see God and our Bapa with him.  It is not yet our time to join them on the mountain.  But in the living now we try to honor, to keep and to pass on, the gifts that both God and this man we love have given us.”

For Dad, the mountain was the Bix Six.  From the verge of those woods, we said our farewell.

He loves his daughters very much.

He intuits that like both his parents he will not make old bones.

If you accept the truth of the two things I had learned about the man after following him about for a year, then you can come to the most important question you need to ask in order to understand our current President.

But let’s examine my two insights for a minute.  Do they stand up to continued scrutiny?  First of all, surely we agree that Mr. Obama does indeed love his daughters very much. The optics now that he lives in the White House bear out this affection.  (If you are wondering why I did not include his wife, that’s because marital relationships are so much more complicated.)  Furthermore, surely we agree as well that the intensity of Obama’s paternal feelings is likely shaped in part by his father’s abandonment of him.  And, yes, in some fashion all fathers love their daughters.  All politicians love their daughters.  But Barack Obama REALLY loves his girls.

Moving on to my second insight.  An uncomfortable one, yes.  (I didn’t know a man’s eyes could widen so fast until I said this to Eric Boehlert in June 2008.)  But Mr. Obama does now (and always has, from the day he launched his bid for the presidency) hold Abraham Lincoln in the back of his mind.  He mentions Lincoln in key speeches.  He compares himself to Lincoln.  He follows in Lincoln’s footsteps, literally:  throwing his hat in the ring from the steps of the old Illinois capitol building, giving a key speech at Cooper Union in New York City, doing the presidential train tour, complete with nineteenth-century bunting.  Re-decorating the Oval Office with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Talking, again and again, about bridging the partisan divide.

A thinking man–a thinking man who is a president (given our country’s history)–a thinking man who is a president who is also half-black (again, given our country’s history)–does not strive to be another Lincoln without considering all of the historical precedent.  Now, personally, I believe strongly that President Obama will serve two terms–indeed serve out two terms–and if he dies relatively young as his parents did his demise is more likely to be the result of smoking than anything else.  (Americans always associate smoking with lung cancer, but there are so very many other conditions smoking can cause:  bladder cancer, particularly in men; peripheral artery disease;  stroke; abdominal aneurism; normal pressure hydrocephaly–to name a few.)

Barack Obama has thought about meeting Lincoln’s fate.

So.  Why in the world would a man who loves his daughters very much–further, keenly appreciates the consequences of losing a parent–put them at risk of suffering what he did?  And more?  Because assassination would be so much more.

This is the question.

To advance a political and social agenda?

Please.

If Obama’s vision of his life’s work had been to further Democratic objectives, he would have stayed in the U.S.Senate and fed his personal power cravings at the same time by continuing to climb there.  At least until he had exhausted possibilities.

No.  Mere politics is not enough to make a man like Obama put himself and his children’s parenting at risk.  It takes a calling from outside oneself.  From destiny.  From God.  From history.  However you want to name the forces that shape this world.  A calling to some higher purpose, to ends above those of the mundane specifics of legislation.

Obama has moved like a man without much time, like a man on a mission.  He has not waited his turn, as his fellow pols used to complain.  In the future, I will be talking about the practical consequences here that from the start determined that his tenure would be very different from the “successful” presidencies of Clinton and Reagan.

Whether or not you personally accept that Obama had a calling to the presidency is irrelevant.  The point is that Obama heard that call.

Now you know why the Tea Partiers are afraid of Obama.

Mulling over what I have posited here, perhaps you are afraid now, too.

I have no idea if Obama knows–yet–why he was called to the presidency.  Guessing, I think not.  Is your level of discomfort rising?  It should be, even if, like me, you believe in a teleological universe and a beneficent Creator.

Unlike some of my fellow Christians, I am sure of very little when it comes to higher purposes.  But nothing in my reading of history and my personal experience leads me to presume that God called Barack Obama for the divine purpose of providing Americans with better health insurance, or revitalizing our middle class, or even bridging our partisan divide.

He loves his daughters very much.

He intuits that like both his parents he will not make old bones.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the summer of 2008 because this was a time when most political enthusiasts believed they got the Democratic presidential nominee very well indeed.

Although 2011 has given us a summer of disunion, I suspect we all can agree that politicos and press alike are finally disabused of assumptions about our current president.

From the commentariat now:

Peggy Noonan, in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. “The past few weeks I’ve asked Democrats who supported him how they feel about him.  I got back nothing that showed personal investment.  Here are the words of a hard-line progressive and wise veteran of the political wars: ‘I never loved Barack Obama. That said, among my crowd who did “love” him, I can’t think of anyone who still does.’”

Noonan closes her piece with this observation.  “He [Obama] is a loser. And this is America, where nobody loves a loser.”

Ross Douthat, in a Monday New York Times op-ed called The Diminished President. “The voters incline toward Obama on the issues, still likes [sic] him personally, and considers [sic] the Republican opposition too extreme.  But they are increasingly judging his presidency a failure anyway.”

Fouad Ajami in the Monday Wall Street Journal. “By that Reagan standard [optimism], Mr. Obama has been a singular failure. . . . The man at the helm has now played his hand.”

And now for the no-less-damning liberal view.

Paul Krugman Monday, across the Times op-ed page from Ross Douthat.  “For the [debt ceiling] deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. . . . [It is] an abject surrender on the part of the president.”

Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast. “This is the lowest moment of Obama’s presidency.  It makes Bill Clinton’s signing of the welfare reform bill of 1996 look like the founding of the Peace Corps.”

Jonathan Cohn at TNR. “This Is Not Leadership.”

Joshua Green at The Atlantic. “The Invisible Shrinking President.”  James Fallows at same, is  particularly succinct.  The president has been a “pawn.”  “Captured pawn.”

No matter that Cohn and Fallows opine with more nuance below their ledes.  No matter that Tea Party leaders like Judson Phillips now rage about the win-win of “the Obamanomic Plan” and predict that the GOP “is going the way of the Whigs.”  If the fiscal conservatives have carried the day, the triumph would seem to be news to them.  Oblivious, Democrat Robert Reich holds forth, in his customary fashion, at The Huffington Post. “The radical right has now won a huge tactical and strategic victory.  Democrats and the White House have proven they have little by way of tactics or strategy.”

This has been the long, hot summer when most political liberals finally have come to understand that Barack Obama is not one of them.  If his fellow Democrats and the punditocracy had been listening to Mr. Obama in 2007-2008—heard what he was really saying and not what they wanted to hear or assumed they were hearing—the nature of Obama’s leadership would not be a revelation.

The irony here is compounded by what a student of human nature such as myself can regard only as a delicious twist:  small-government conservatives aka the Tea Party, who can be so misguided on much, nevertheless understood from the earliest days of his ascendancy a key fact about our President Obama.

He is willing to be ruthless in the wielding of power.  Small government Republicans got this about Obama from the get-go.  They knew, and they know, that Barack Obama, unlike George W. Bush—whatever Bush’s failings—is not a nice man.  And, of course, these conservatives are right that President Obama will, in some part, bring the United States that much closer to European-style twenty-first century socialism.  We have already taken our first step, through the health care reform act, however the specifics here may be changed over time.

Obama’s is a kind of leadership with which we have little experience, recently.  His long game—whatever that may be—is one we cannot comprehend in the terms we best grasp:  Democrat versus Republican, liberal versus conservative, secular versus faith-based.  Although Mr. Obama—highly intelligent, I think we all agree—can think in such a way, can use polarity as part of strategy, nevertheless he chooses not to when he has his eye on . . . what shall I call it? . . . history and destiny.  His is a world view that is bewildering to the liberals among his peers, whose honed ironies and skepticisms he does not share.  He terrifies beyond-the-beltway conservatives, because they also believe in destiny.  This shared sense of the shaping power of larger forces lies at the heart of the Tea Party’s hatred and fear of President Obama.

Over the next two weeks, I will try to explain the few things I have come to know about Obama and their implications.  For legislation.  For the economy.  For world affairs.  For the presidency.  I will try to show where assumptions have led astray influential politicos in their current assessments.

The last century was defined by three great wars, two hot and one cold.  The century before that:  materialism and colonialism, and their interdependence.  Before that?  The Enlightenment.  Will our current age be as paradigmatic as the eighteenth century?  Probably not.  But for us living it the twenty-first is turning out to be a roiling and unsettling ride, if not quite (yet) on the magnitude of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that shaped  the philosophical debate and insight of that epoch.

This is the first truly global century.  Although American leaders and policy makers have embraced globalism intellectually for decades, only now are we experiencing it.  The advantages our geography once provided us are gone.  We can no longer reach out and touch the rest of the world and not be poked in return.  In different ways, other countries and peoples are undergoing the same phenomenon.  Witness the so-called Arab Spring of the last few months.  The consequence of connectedness is change, profound change, not only in how we live but in how we define ourselves, as nations and groups, and as individuals.

During August, I’ll be writing about the characteristics of change for this century of connectedness, as they are slowly emerging in American life and culture.  First up:  President Obama, change agent.  Then Medicare and the law of unintended consequences.  Joblessness.  Our new role in the world.  Finally, the American Dream.

But I begin in a small way, with five recent and abrupt changes in my own life.

I no longer have a job.  For awhile there I thought I had a gig writing for my hometown newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal.  Somehow that did not work out–for reasons I can only surmise.  Does this mean I am retired?  After all, I turn 65 this month.  Many friends have already taken the plunge.  But I loved my brief sojourn as a journalist too much to give up writing about politics and American life.

I have just moved.  In 1968 I came to Berkeley to go to graduate school at the University of California. There I met my husband.  After our first daughter was born, we left our student apartment for a house on the Berkeley-Oakland border that we lived in for almost forty years, until this spring.  Now we live in Monte Sereno, in Silicon Valley.  If you are a Northern Californian, you can appreciate the magnitude of the move south. Probably I will be commenting now and then on the curiosities of valley life.  Why, for example, have so many women in Los Gatos had breast enhancement surgery?  I won’t rest easy until I figure this out.

I have become a keeper of secrets.  Apple?  Miranda July?  Would that I could tell you a few things about these recent (and in the case of Apple, perennial) media obsessions.  But I cannot.  Miranda is my daughter’s story since it was she and not I who was for awhile the BFF.  (Although I will say, with both bewilderment and sadness, that the Sunday New York Times magazine is bowing and scraping its way into irrelevance.)  What happened between Apple and Facebook?  Great story.  Can’t tell you.  But will say that everything you have read is off-the-mark–so far off I won’t even bother to link to the speculative articles.  Apple in China?  Great story.  With far-reaching consequences.  Tried to tell Michael Lewis to pursue the larger story of American companies in China; he wasn’t interested.  And I can’t tell you even one small detail here.  Not unless I want my husband to lose his job.  Some might say that my current State of Mum is karmic payback for a few revelations I provided in the past.

I have become rich.  This state of affairs is utterly unfair.  Undeserved.  Why me?  Why now?  Especially since wealth is not something I even dreamed about, much less desired, in middle age.  This is the Apple Effect.  When my husband left his old law firm in the spring of 2008 for Apple, I had no inkling that Apple would so worm its way into my own life. I like knowing what’s really going on at 1 Infinity Circle; I’m not so sure about the money.  It is its own power, and I’m not confident I’m up to wielding that power well.  Not many people do.  But I don’t want to pretend to be what I was–indeed I have a distaste for TV personalities with million-dollar contracts who pose as just middle class folks.

I have lost my father, who died May 23 at age 89, and now I am the oldest in my family’s line.  I will be writing more about Dad, in particular the lovely but in retrospect not-at-all-serendipitous manner of his leaving us, and our celebration of him, in three memorials, in three states.  More to the point, for this blog moment, is the feeling of loss, which not only marks a loved one’s passing but also permeates changes in job, home, sense of self.  But then that is American life now, isn’t it?  This is the manner of change in our time.

And so I will begin with Barack Obama, who seemed to promise glorious change in 2008 but would seem to have delivered, three years later, disappointment.