Headlines, North America

POLITICS-US: Obama and the Zelig Effect

Daniel Luban

WASHINGTON, Jan 21 2009 (IPS) - President Barack Obama’s inaugural address was in many respects an echo of his campaign rhetoric, offering nods to each side of the political divide in a way that elicited respectful praise from both sides but also deep uncertainty as to the speech’s practical implications.

The day after the speech, reaction in the media was mixed but largely positive. The general consensus on both left and right seemed to be that the speech was slightly underwhelming as oratory, but mature and solid in content.

Still, the praise that the address received from both liberals and conservatives was evidence of Obama’s continued ability to give listeners of every political stripe something to dream on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of those who were critical of the speech’s content accused it of being vague and wishy-washy.

As a presidential candidate, and equally during his presidential transition, Obama’s rhetoric tended to stress themes of post-partisanship and national unity. His famous pronouncement at the 2004 Democratic Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America” was a typical example.

Obama’s actual political positions, however, have been harder to discern. Leftist supporters hoped, and conservative critics feared, that his conciliatory rhetoric disguised a solidly left-wing agenda. But in recent months, Obama had positioned himself as a centrist pragmatist, an image that seems to have become the conventional wisdom.

The final verdict, it was widely agreed, would have to wait until Obama actually took office.

In this respect, the inaugural address was a disappointment to those hoping for a clear signal about the direction that the Obama administration intends to follow. The new president continued his habit of offering rhetoric that every side could get behind and claim as their own.

As a result, reaction to the speech has been largely positive across the political spectrum.

Many found the speech slightly disappointing as a piece of rhetoric – despite Obama’s reputation as the greatest U.S. orator in a generation, there were few lines that seemed likely to endure alongside the best-known words of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt.

But as far as content, most commentators found the inaugural praiseworthy. The New York Times editorialised that the speech offered “the clarity and the respect for which all Americans have hungered”, while the right-leaning Wall Street Journal said that Obama “more than met the moment with an Inaugural Address that invoked America’s historical purposes and optimism”.

Many prominent columnists took Obama at his word when he claimed to want to transcend “stale political arguments”. Centrist Washington Post columnist David Ignatius said that the speech “showed us, once again, that the new president really means it when he says that he wants to create a new kind of politics for a ‘postpartisan’ America”.

And former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, called the address “a serious and sober speech” that set out to capture the political centre.

On foreign policy and defence issues, Obama offered rhetoric that was equally congenial to hawks and doves, realists and idealists.

His claim that “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” was one of the most frequently-quoted lines of the inaugural. Most saw it as the speech’s harshest repudiation in of the Bush administration, with Harold Meyerson writing in the Washington Post that “[w]ith that, the neoconservative perversion of American ideals – and American security – was flushed to its reward”.

But Obama’s line was not so different from the claim made by Bush himself, four years earlier in his second inaugural address, that “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one”. As the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto pointed out, it was likely Bush and his allies would similarly claim to reject the choice that Obama set out as false.

More broadly, Obama resisted any explicit repudiation of the ambitious international vision that Bush had set out in the second inaugural. For the most part he merely set out to execute it more prudently, in concert with allies, and without Bush’s overreliance on brute force.

Obama’s stark warning to terrorists that “we can outlast you, and we will defeat you” won him wide praise among hawks. “For many conservatives,” Thomas Donnelly wrote in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, “this was the signature phrase in Barack Obama’s inaugural.”

On economic issues, Obama similarly rejected the major ideological debates – whether the government is too big or too small, whether the market is a force for good or will – as being “false choices”.

This seemingly pragmatic stance did in fact signal an apparent repudiation of Ronald Reagan’s famous and unequivocal claim, in his 1981 inaugural address, that “[i]n the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”.

And many liberal supporters were heartened by Obama’s stance. John Heilemann of New York magazine wrote that despite the president’s even-handed rhetoric, “it’s also clear in all [these] cases that his implicit critique is stronger of one side than the other”.

Still, few conservatives seemed to take issue with the inaugural’s explicit claims on the economy, even as they braced themselves for what is almost certain to be a major expansion of government economic intervention under the new administration.

To be sure, Obama’s speech was not well-received in all quarters on the left or the right. Conservative flagship National Review editorialised that despite Obama’s “several nods to post-partisanship…[he] does not consider the dogmas of liberalism worn out, as the speech made clear” and called his rhetoric “ideology masquerading as thought”.

In the New Republic, liberal John Judis called the speech “a hodgepodge of themes, injunctions, and applause lines that did not speak directly to the crisis that the country faces”, while Alan Wolfe complained that “[t]his was the time for fire and he gave us too much ice”.

On the whole, though, the inaugural address did nothing to cut short Obama’s political honeymoon. The new president maintained, for one day at least, his remarkable ability to be most things to most people. How long he can maintain it once his administration begins governing remains to be seen.