Obama wanted JFK, got FDR

My latest from the Guelph Mercury. (View pdf of newspaper page here)

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On January 20th, Barack Obama will accede to the presidential rostrum a proponent of change, swear before God to become its agent, and intone its themes before an anxious, innumerable audience.

Though Obama’s inauguration will mark, as JFK said, not so much the triumph of a political party as that of a democratic process, the inaugural address is nonetheless the new president’s most critical opportunity to define his mandate and fortify it with the chainmail of popular support.

Inaugural addresses, like the one no doubt being drafted and redrafted presently, represent the high-water mark of political oratory in the Western world. We inhabitants of the British Commonwealth – exposed much more to pageantry than portentous speechifying in our political tradition – can look on only with a sense of awe at the magnitude of one man’s opportunity to lead his country toward a new set of goals, illuminated by a new set of ideals.

The ideals part is the trick of it – the essence of the major presidential address. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Obama has to achieve any number of objectives: he has to indicate where he’s willing to compromise with congress and where he isn’t; how he intends to engage with the global community and where he intends to lead it; and he has to place his administration in historical context, appropriating as imagery those moments when America has shone most brightly.

But above all else, he must give his presidency an intellectual and political ballast. He needs to fashion a few sentences or words that will reveal the grain and firmness of his administration.

To do this, the president-elect’s team should look to the two Democratic legends of the 20th century.

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After the stockmarket crash of 1929, and fed up with President Herbert Hoover’s unflinching commitment to laissez faire economics, Americans came to feel that unfettered capitalism was no longer a safe or just economic system. In response, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt devised his “New Deal”, which called for state intervention in the economy for the benefit of the working man.

Those two simple words wrought determination from despair, and changed America forever.

Roosevelt’s theme was unmatched in meaning or popularity by his immediate successor’s “Fair Deal”, and was not worthily replaced until John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” rang forth from Washington and reverberated endlessly afield.

The “New Frontier”, as Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger has written, seemed to make Washington a “brighter, gayer, more intellectual, more resolute” centre of action. The very words themselves evoke images drawn straight from the American Settlement, and were equally representative of the Kennedy administration’s pursuit of a new, less hostile phase in the Cold War, its forward steps on race relations, and, eventually, its race to the moon.

Other, more recent presidential themes have penetrated the public psyche, but with less depth and staying power.

Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” and George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” each evoked a feeling of centrism and compromise, and helped define their subjects for the electorate. But neither have stamped American history with the force or figure of FDR’s slogan or Kennedy’s theme.

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As tight credit and consumer anxiety continue to vitiate America’s economy, one can’t help but feel that Mr. Obama is finding himself the victim of a malevolent historical bait-and-switch that will forcefully impact his presidential tone and tenure.

Obama began his pursuit of the presidency wanting to galvanise public support for a progressive and energetic transfiguration of American foreign policy; instead, he gets to resuscitate an ailing economy.

He wanted to vastly expand federal support for public education and health services, and find creative solutions to America’s broken immigration system; instead, he gets to reform credit markets.

He wanted to precipitate a new era of environmental stewardship, and build a legacy of progressive social activism; instead, he gets to deflect bids by other nations to replace the US dollar as the world’s currency standard.

Obama wanted JFK, but he got FDR.
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The new president’s ability to play the hand he’s been dealt – a faltering economy, an over-stretched military and a world full of tight diplomatic knots – will do much to determine whether he is a man of words only, or one of action.

But for January 20th, words will be the focus, and rightly so. As President Nixon said of the importance of presidential communications, style must rank with substance.

Mr. Obama’s inaugural address must make Americans feel resilient in the face of economic disaster, renewed in the defence both of American interests and ideals around the globe, and defiant in a time that lends itself more readily to despair.

Do these things he must, because he now stewards the American presidency; and that, as the great man said, is where the buck stops.