Dispatches by James Fallows and others, and responses from readers, on the nature of leadership in the Obama era, in response to his 2012 cover story “Obama, Explained” and his December, 2015 post, “Obama: Chessmaster, not Pawn.”
Through the past ten days in this space, I’ve had several items on the style and logic of President Obama’s leadership style. First, one on the ISIS speech, which I found very strong in logic but perhaps too coldly logical in affect. Then readers chiming with similar views. Finally, after announcement of the Paris climate deal, an argument that evidence on the timeless “chessmaster? or pawn?” question about Obama’s effectiveness was swinging toward the former.
Now, readers pro and con. I’m kicking off a new Thread on this theme, because a lot of response has come in, and I’ll try to break it up into related installments.
Let’s start with discussions of why 14 (horrible) deaths in San Bernardino can seem an “existential” threat, when the 60 to 80 other Americans killed with guns that day don’t—and whether there is something more, something different, that a logician-leader like Obama could have done to address that fear.
A psychologist on the West Coast, on why the fear of terrorism is so powerful, including relentless hyping by the news media:
Off the top of my head, I’m having trouble thinking of any attempts to dig a little deeper into the question of the “enabling” role of the media. Yes, politicians—some eagerly, others more reluctantly—are much more likely to bloviate about “terrorist” attacks which are motivated by an allegiance to some foreign conspiracy. And yes, for those media and individual journalists who are looking for ways to make a quick buck it's much easier and more lucrative to let yourself be used by politicians as an outlet than to do the hard work of digging into complicated subject. But that still begs the question of why these things are so.
From my own professional perspective, I’d guess that the reason that there’s always a market for the pols and media to pander to in this way is that focusing on an identifiable and theoretically circumscribable threat provides a measure of psychological comfort that you won't get if you look at the data objectively and conclude that at a certain number of these terrible attacks are not going to be preventable.
Putting it slightly different, believing that the problem is one of foreign-inspired fanatics who “hate us because of who we are” is a kind of mass delusion in which many people, assisted by their enablers in the media and the political world, find a tenuous, illusory feeling of safety that they otherwise wouldn’t get. As in the Woody Allen joke about the guy whose brother thinks he’s a chicken, we all need the eggs ...
There’s a parallel with psychologist Jon Haidt’s contribution to the “Coddling of the American Mind” article (that avoidance just feeds the fear). With respect to the fear of terrorist attacks what’s being avoided is the potentially overwhelming “fear itself” from not being able to circumscribe and, hopefully, destroy your enemy. It’s an ancient problem—240 years ago the not-quite-U.S. was on the other side of it.
After the jump, two former Senate staffers with different assessments of the ISIS speech.
Charles Stevenson of SAIS, long-time Senate staffer and former National War College professor, is among those thinking that Obama’s tone in the ISIS speech was too flat:
The logic of the Dec 6 speech was impeccable, but he wasn't persuasive. This article from Defense One makes the same point about this week’s talk at the Pentagon. I think Obama fell short in the Oval Office address because he spoke of more of the SAME, rather than MORE of the same. He should have stressed what he would do and less what he wouldn't. He did a better job of that at the Pentagon.
I hope the journalists following the Republican candidates force them to be specific on what they would do, what they wouldn’t do, and especially how they could guarantee a large Sunni ground force against ISIL.
But Mike Lofgren, who worked for many years for Republicans in the Senate (Stevenson worked for Democrats) says there is nothing Obama could have said that would have slaked the thirst for a “strong” stand:
Critiques of Obama’s rhetorical style are irrelevant side issues; the fact that people make them shows they are lurching around in vain for a panacea. The president could be Pericles of Athens and he could not make a dent in public opinion if he was arguing for restraint, patience, and a sense of proportion.
People who habitually invoke FDR have no conception of how fundamentally the cultural landscape has changed. A large percentage of the public did not know FDR couldn’t walk, an ignorance abetted by a press which carefully shielded the public from any photos or descriptions of his disability. Would that be conceivable today? And the entire universe of Americans’ relationship to governmental authority has been fundamentally altered, particularly over the last three decades.
The Far Right’s assiduous institution building, including a vast media echo chamber, means there are tens of millions of Americans in a subculture that is operant-conditioned to be instinctively opposed to whatever a president or other authority figure says, unless he or she is a conservative Republican. By means of its relentlessness practice of “working the refs,” right-wing media have also “rewired” the mainstream media to be receptive to right-wing themes and concerns, and to self-censor out of fears of bias.
I began to perceive as long ago as the 1990s that many mainstream publications regarded Matt Drudge as their assignment editor. This clearly has an effect on the kind of news that Americans who are not in the right-wing echo chamber consume, and how they perceive Obama. (Ron Fournier of National Journal is a classic example of this syndrome. His leitmotiv is “Obama is a dictator; why won’t he lead?”)
For those reasons and more, there is simply nothing a Democratic president can say. The far more profound issue than the incumbent president’s rhetorical abilities is the headlong rush of a significant chunk of the American public into fascism (I suppose in the last two weeks it’s finally permissible to use the f-word).
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Update in the same vein as Lofgren’s, this note from a current U.S. diplomat:
Few things infuriate me more than the Fournier-esque comments on Obama’s ISIS speech provided by your recent East Coast defense policy commenter [in this post]. The reader acknowledges that he “fully agrees with Obama’s approach as a matter of substance.” He then argues, however, that because Obama has failed to “lead,” by which he appears to mean he has not taken some additional, unspecified action (presumably punitive against Muslims), he has ceded the mantle of leadership to Trump, Cruz, et al.
This is, of course, absurd. Leadership is not about busy work and bluster. It’s not about latching onto the first policy idea that sounds reassuring and presenting it in overblown terms in order to show you’re tough. We tried that in Iraq; how’d that work out? Real leadership, not the Hollywood version, is about having the courage of your convictions and willingness to see plans through over the long term.
The commenter is on stronger ground when he critiques Obama’s rather cold, intellectual style. Obama and Bill Clinton present an interesting contrast in this regard.
But again, I have to push back on the idea that the most fundamental task of a leader is to empathize with the citizenry. Certainly, a leader should understand the concerns and fears of the people, but a smart leader shapes and focuses those fears and concerns. And Obama is absolutely right to channel the focus of our fears away from Islam as a religion and towards those strains and sects that preach violence and hatred. He is right on the merits: our battle is only with a small faction within the Muslim community. And he right because treating this as a battle between Islam and the West plays directly into the hands of those who would do us harm.
Finally, a brief comment on the current national mood. I’m in my mid-forties and remember well the terrorist incidents of the 1980s – the bombing of the US Embassy and the Marine Barracks in Beirut, the bombing of the US Embassy in Kuwait, the kidnapping of CIA Station Chief William Buckley, the high jacking of Kuwait Airlines Flight 221, the high jacking of TWA Flight 847, the high jacking of the Achille Lauro, the bombing of the Rome and Vienna airports, the bombing of the La Belle disco in West Berlin, and the bombing of Pan Am flight 103. It’s quite a list. While these incidents engendered a great deal of fear and concern at the time, they provoked little, if any, of the broader hysteria we are witnessing today.
I think the primary explanation for the divergent attitudes of the American public is the 24-hour cable (and internet) news cycle and an opposition party (with its own supporting media/internet apparatus) that will use anything to whip up public sentiment against the incumbent President. Fortunately, at this point, I believe that the fear of ISIS will recede as the panic over Ebola did last year. The flip-side of the intensity of the current media environment is its short attention span.
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More to come, including some age-20s-something listeners to Obama’s speech heard its logic and themes, and whether the Obama era has really left the national Democratic party in as weak a condition as it seems.
Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross in Family Ties (Wikipedia)
After President Obama’s anti-ISIS speech, I said that I agreed with his strategy and its underlying logic, but could understand why it might not reassure those who felt most fearful. Last night several readers responded, including one who talked about the president’s super-rational “Vulcan”/Spock-like style.
Now, some harsher views. First from a reader on the West Coast, who agrees with the president’s message but disapproves of his tone:
The president's ideas and words were great but the delivery was abysmal. He sounded not like a professor, but like a dad pleading to his wayward teenagers to wise up and stop smoking out in the shed. Do you hear the stress and rising tone in his supposedly declarative statements?
Obama knows that public opinion is out of control, and he’s gone into coping mode. What the country needs instead—and what Roosevelt brought—is a president who brings a posture of commanding authority.
To achieve that, what Obama personally needs—and is not getting from his tone-deaf staff—is theatrical direction. That’s peachy if Obama analyzes issues like a professor. But a great professor knows that in the classroom, he needs to be a great performer.
Next, from a reader on the East Coast who is in the defense-policy business:
I don’t have any sympathy for Trump or Cruz, who are intuitive and calculated demagogues respectively. But I do have sympathy for a lot of their followers. People are scared. Should they be less scared? Perhaps. Should they accept that there is no solution to their fears, and that the over-reaction is the worst option? Again, perhaps.
But that is not realistic. Leaders need to deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. When President Obama comes out, after a terrorist attack, and says, basically, “nothing to worry about, everything is going according to plan, just be patient,” it is nothing short of an abdication of responsibility.
It hands the discourse over to a Trump or a Cruz because even if their policies are crazy, at least they are acknowledging that people are scared and want something done.
The problem with Obama’s “vulcan” response isn’t that white people don’t want to be lectured by a black man. The problem is that in failing to address the angst people are feeling he is failing in the most fundamental task of a political leader—having empathy for his constituents.
Worse, when Obama spends the last quarter of his speech lecturing the public not to hold Muslims responsible, he is again not taking into account the public mood. It is perfectly understandable for people to be mad at Muslims. This isn’t about San Bernardino. It is also about Paris. And the Russian airliner. And Turkey. And Mali. And Somalia. And Yemen. And Syria. And Iraq. And Afghanistan. And basically everywhere in the world where there is any sizable Muslim community.
Yes, the vast majority of the victims of violence are Muslims as well. The Syrian refugees are victims, not perpetrators of violence. But insisting that the fear people have of Muslims is only racism flies in the face of what seems to many people like overwhelming evidence. And a single, anodyne line about how Muslims need to fight extremism as well is not sufficient to calm the public.
Again, I fully agree with Obama’s approach as a matter of substance if policy could be made in an isolated bubble, but it can’t. And refusing to address public concerns because doing so is inconvenient is not leadership.
Michael J. Fox not in his Family Ties incarnation but as a White House aide
As Michael J. Fox’s character in The American President puts it: “People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage. When they discover there's no water there, they'll drink the sand.”
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Finally, from another reader who agrees with the president’s logic and wishes it would be extended:
I just wanted to add a number to your reference to deaths by car crashes and lung cancer. It is a recurring issue, but the estimated number of Americans who die due to medical mistakes every year is over 400,000. See this link.
That is almost 1,100 every day. That is two fully loaded 747’s crashing every day. That is a World Trade Center falling every three days. All year long. And no one notices, no one raises a voice. It is not that doctors are bad, it is just that the medical community is a couple of generations behind the aviation community (old NYT link).
Every death is a tragedy, but there is a question of scale. In 2000, 412 people died by falling off of ladders and scaffolding, that’s over four times more than died in domestic terrorism attacks. When is Trump going to say something about ladders?
There is something to be said that an effective president has to be a bit of a scoundrel, in order to get something done and to bend public opinion. FDR and Johnson come to mind. Obama’s problem is that he isn't a scoundrel. There are enough of them around, it is just that the ones around don't have any positive characteristics.
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For the next week or so I will be off-line, for print-magazine reasons. I’ll check back in by the time of the next GOP debate to see what on Earth has happened with Donald Trump.
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