PREDICTING anything about Barack Obama is a dangerous business. The media had written his political obituary several times; yet, his remarkable story lives on, as he was elected president this week. But the political scientist in me still thirsts for a forecast of how President Obama will govern the country.
An Obama administration will probably exude coolness and control. His overzealous, botched bid against Rep. Bobby Rush in 2000 tempered his raging ambition with a tinge of political realism. He has successfully tamed the childhood demons that haunted him throughout his tortured search for racial identity as a mixed child. The wounded, lost Obama of “Dreams From My Father” has been replaced by what David Brooks calls a “homeostasis machine” of first-class temperament.
The sole indicator of Obama’s executive style comes from his campaign management. Hence, he will most likely run the White House with the same ruthless discipline and finite tolerance he has shown thus far. His campaign slogan of “No Drama” will become a governing mantra. There will be no room for bitter factional struggles and no tolerance for leaks. Dissenting opinions will be heard and valued, but only with an insistence on completion. There won’t be a return to the endless Socratic debates in the Clinton administration. But there may be a danger of replicating the culture of secrecy and opaqueness that characterized the Bush administration.
Obama’s outlook will be pragmatic and practical in both style and substance. His record bears this out. He transcended titanic ideological struggles as president of the Harvard Law Review. He was “extremely results-oriented” as Illinois state senator according to biographer David Mendell, with a high rate of bill passage and a deep commitment to reaching across the aisle on tough issues like welfare reform. His advisers and potential administration picks also run the gamut from centrists like Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee on the economy and moderate Republicans such as Robert Gates and Colin Powell.
Some wonder whether Obama’s coolness, pragmatism and discipline will collapse like a house of cards once he achieves a “liberal super-majority” in Congress. Is America poised for another Democratic overreach resembling FDR’s 100 days or Clinton’s two-year bulldozing of liberal reforms? Will the National Journal’s 2007 most liberal senator finally show his true colors by giving in to party leaders Pelosi and Reid?
But Obama’s record suggests that he is a staunch liberal, not a wayward radical; a pragmatic listener, not a blinkered ideologue. That’s why all this Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright stuff hasn’t stuck. Nor is he a stranger to taking on his base or taking the scars from it. He strove for ideological harmony as president of the Harvard Law Review in the face of African-American discontent. And he muddled through his failed 2000 House bid despite having his black credentials questioned due to his affiliation with “white power” institutions in Harvard and Chicago.
He is also a deft politician who understands the limits of his power. As Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet put it, his willingness to sacrifice the “perfect for the good” suggests he would revel in the executive ability to pick his priorities strategically. Experts also expressed confidence at a Miller Center event last Friday that the Democratic Party leadership itself had internalized the failures of going for broke in the past (some of them were backbenchers during Clinton’s first term bungle). Given all this, Obama and a Democratic Congress will most likely view the election as a chance to advance their agenda rather than a mandate to shove it down their opponents’ throats.
Finally, Joe Biden’s suggestion that Obama will be tested in the first six months of his presidency was politically incorrect but is substantively plausible. Think back to the Vienna summit between John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, where Khrushchev concluded Kennedy was a weak president who could be pushed around. Some historians still claim that this may have prompted Khrushchev to trigger the Cuban Missile Crisis to test his adversary.
But a closer examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis reveals the merits of Obama’s governing method during such a foreign policy “test.” When the crisis began Oct. 15, 1962, Kennedy convened his group of 12 most important advisers. They debated the issue secretly for seven days. Kennedy eschewed hawkish and dovish approaches in favor of pragmatism. Exercising restraint under pressure, he called for a blockade and then concluded a secret deal to dismantle U.S. missiles in Turkey in exchange for removing Soviet missiles in Cuba. The coolness, pragmatism, and discipline displayed by Kennedy are all critical elements of Obama’s likely governing philosophy. They are also the same ingredients needed to resolve America’s other crises, including Iran.
Winning a campaign is prologue; governing is the real act. Barack Obama has excelled at the former. Now let’s see how he makes the transition to the latter.
Prashanth Parameswaran’s column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at p.parameswaran@cavalierdaily.com.
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