Magnanimity in victory: that was Churchill’s advice. And since his precocious
victory last November, Barack Obama has walked that Churchillian walk. It is
not common in politics, especially after a meteoric rise past every
prejudice, every smear and every Clinton, but Obama has an old soul’s
perspective and an intellectually secure man’s confidence. Perhaps he has
too much confidence — except that every time his friends feared that in the
campaign, he proved them wrong.
From the shallow brittleness of George W Bush to the supple strength of Obama
is a revolution in temperament and style not seen since Jimmy Carter gave
way to Ronald Reagan 28 years ago. It signals the kind of administration
that now looms before us: a conciliatory, inclusive, pragmatic form of
liberalism. It’s a liberalism eager to learn from the insights of
conservatives, and it is pioneered by a president-elect shrewd enough to
know that generosity of spirit means more leverage and influence, not less.
The goal, it now seems clear, is what some deduced many months ago: Obama
wants to become the leader of an American version of the national
governments that Britain relied on in the depths of the last Great
Depression.
We cannot know whether he will succeed, whether partisanship and America’s
culture war will slowly eat him up, or whether in government, as he makes
decisions with winners and losers, his aura will evaporate. But what we can
say is that, so far, he shows every sign of meaning what he said about
leaving that divisive, destructive froth behind. Just reading the papers
every morning, we see every sign that the gravity of the crisis his
predecessor bequeaths him makes this necessary.
The Washington establishment still doesn’t know quite what to make of him. For
almost two decades the town has been divided ideologically and culturally —
red and blue, neoliberal and neoconservative — shying and plunging in mood
swings and feuding. For 16 years, under the guidance of political hatchet
men such as Bill Clinton’s Dick Morris and Bush’s Karl Rove, these divisions
have been seen as ways to wedge your way to short-term political advantage,
to exploit American difference for electoral or PR gain.
The press learnt that cynicism was the only reliable guide to understanding
politics and that world-weariness was the same as wisdom. That fear of
seeming naive was what inhibited many in the press from greater scepticism
about Saddam’s alleged arsenal in the run-up to the Iraq war.
It was an emotionally familiar and comfortable rut. The baby-boomer
generation, reared and suckled on post-Vietnam divides, staged their battles
like bitter spouses after years of a failed marriage who never really
planned on divorce. Now, with this first post-boomer politician, the
children who witnessed their parents’ endless fighting have taken over. And
it’s the children who seem like adults.
Take a few largely symbolic things that Obama has done since November 4. He
gave his chief rival and fierce competitor, Hillary Clinton, the biggest job
in his government. He reached out to John McCain, his opponent in the autumn
campaign, and will hold a dinner in McCain’s honour soon. He asked a
powerful evangelical voice, Rick Warren, to give the inaugural invocation.
Last week he dined with a group of Republican columnists who endorsed his
opponent. The dinner was at the home of George Will, the closest America
gets to a Tory mind. He did this before he talked to any journalists who had
actually supported him. At the Pentagon, Obama has asked Bush’s appointee,
Robert Gates, to stay on. He asked Mark Dybul, Bush’s only openly gay
appointee, to remain as global Aids co-ordinator. This is not Karl Rove’s
America. In so many ways, it symbolises its undoing.
Obama acts like a kind of antacid to the American stomach. He has walked
through the churn of racial and cultural and religious polarisation and
somehow calmed everyone down.
Last spring he faced his biggest crisis — the exploitation by the Republican
right of his incendiary former pastor Jeremiah Wright, a man whose penchant
for polarisation was pathological. At a moment of extreme emotion and
political peril, Obama found a way to give a speech that remains the
greatest of recent times, to remind Americans of their complex and painful
racial past, and not to condescend or cavil. The intellectual achievement of
the speech was impressive enough — sufficient to provoke Garry Wills, the
Lincoln scholar, to compare it to the Gettysburg address. That Obama wrote
and delivered it as he heard in his ears every racial stereotype that had
pummelled his psyche for his entire life bespoke an emotional maturity that
still shocks.
He even managed — and this was a real achievement — to suck the drama out of
the Clintons, to defeat them by quietly and methodically reducing their
oxygen supply until they had no option but to surrender. Then he gave them
their own night at the convention, a concession that many viewed as weakness
but that only strengthened him. In the autumn he never took the Sarah Palin
bait, treating her as one might handle the proverbial nutter on the bus even
as she accused him of being a terrorist-loving socialist and whipped up
largely white, southern crowds with paranoid fervour.
Maybe it’s Michelle Obama who vents everything privately that her husband
seems to absorb publicly. Or maybe he just came that way. But there is
something real about this quality that is not simply a projection of so many
hopes. At several points in the gut-wrenching emotional rollercoaster of
last year he simply disappeared alone into a hotel room for a few minutes to
gather his thoughts and restrain his feelings. It was this emotional balance
and temperamental maturity that led many to see him as a president long
before it ever became feasible or even imaginable.
He doesn’t charm like Clinton did and Bush tried to. Unlike both men, but
especially Clinton, he appears to have no need to be loved by everyone in
the room. He often finds it hard to disguise how tired he feels. He is
capable of evoking enormous inspiration, but he has yet to be able to hide
it when he is bored. There is a wryness to his conversation and a dryness to
his humour, both of which are sustained by an intellect of power. The
revered liberal jurist Larry Tribe has said that in decades of teaching at
Harvard Law School, he has never had a cleverer student than Obama. I don’t
think he’s exaggerating. Intellectually, Obama is in Bill Clinton’s league.
But what he has over Clinton is emotional intelligence to buttress his grasp
of policy.
What he gets, what he seems to intuit, is how to make others feel as if they
are being heard. This is simple enough in theory but hard to pull off
consistently in practice. His model is to figure out what another person
needs and, if it helps Obama to get what he wants, to provide it.
He sensed that Hillary Clinton needed independent respect in defeat. He
couldn’t give her the vice-presidency, which she desperately wanted, because
it would have given her a dangerous rival power base if they succeeded. So
he offered her the next best thing, and she, unlike her husband, was smart
enough to say yes.
He realised that Rick Warren was an egomaniac and wanted some kind of
platform, so he gave him a largely symbolic role at the inauguration and
allowed Warren to preen. He knew that what Washington pundits really craved
was not the truth, but a sense of their own importance. So he let them throw
him a dinner party.
He sensed that McCain was in deep emotional withdrawal after his horrifying
and crude descent into raw partisanship last autumn. And so he celebrated
the old, bipartisan McCain and asked for his support in the Senate.
This is not typical for politicians in any climate and era. In the
post-Clinton, post-Bush divide of the US, it’s a shock of sorts, and one
most Washingtonians have yet to absorb. More shocks, I suspect, are to come,
as people begin to realise that the new politics Obama promised is actually
more than just a marketing device for a campaign.
Take the economy. Obama’s immediate and most pressing crisis is a global
economy teetering on the edge. It is also a resilient banking crisis in the
US that has yet to resolve itself and a collapse in demand that threatens to
turn a recession into something much darker. Worse, the current budget
outlook would make even Bush Republicans blanch — trillions in deficits as
far as the eye can see and a record national debt (outside the second world
war).
The sheer extent of the damage that the outgoing president has done to
American and global financial balance is hard to overstate. He spent like a
trust-fund baby who would never have to balance the books or earn a living.
He made the entitlement crisis worse by adding a massive new healthcare
programme for the elderly in a naked attempt to win Florida for ever.
Because of an ideological insistence on partial privatisation, desperately
needed reform of social security ended in miserable failure. Trillions of
dollars were poured into a war against Iraq waged on the basis of a WMD
threat that didn’t exist.
Obama’s response has been to turn not to ideologues but to the smartest
economic team he could find. His Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, was
integral to the Bush administration’s response to the crisis; no one doubts
that Larry Summers, incoming head of the National Economic Council, is one
of the sharpest economic minds on the planet.
The policy, or what we are beginning to glimpse of it, is just as bipartisan.
There will be a big increase in infrastructure projects, aimed at maximal
impact on growth. But there will also be tax cuts for the middle class and a
bevy of Republican-friendly business tax breaks to maximise the boost to
demand. The tax hikes for the very wealthy — the only real economic
difference between Obama and McCain last autumn — will not happen. No one
wants to suck any money out of the spending economy right now for any reason.
The most striking news of the past week is a strong indication that Obama will
unveil a very tough spending budget, will tackle new financial regulations
early and will put real reform of the entitlement state on the table. In
some ways, he has no choice. Given America’s current level of public and
private debt, the president-elect cannot borrow another few trillion in a
few years without reassuring global markets that there is a long-term
prospect for American fiscal balance.
Obama knows that defence, healthcare and retirement benefits are where the
money is. His proposed fiscal responsibility summit may drift into the usual
irrelevance, but perhaps the depth of the long-term problems could provide
an opening to address the longer-term insolvency of the American state. So
grapple with that: a black urban Democrat is pledging to be far more
fiscally responsible than a Texas Republican.
In foreign policy, the same pragmatism abounds. Although withdrawal of troops
from Iraq will occur, Obama knows all too well that the current lull in
sectarian violence is extremely fragile and that the power vacuum left by
withdrawal could spark a new civil or regional war. So expect some
foot-dragging.
On Afghanistan, the president-elect is too shrewd to raise the kind of utopian
expectations of democracy invoked so glibly by Bush. He plans to increase
troop levels there but is reconciled to the fact that the best that can be
hoped for is prevention or eradication of terrorist training camps that
could directly hurt Americans.
On detention, interrogation and rendition, Obama has also been hemmed in by
the Bush legacy. On torture, Obama is clear enough. The appointment of a
heavyweight enemy of torture, Leon Panetta, to the CIA, and of a civil
libertarian, Dawn Johnsen, in the critical role as head of the White House’s
Office of Legal Counsel, is as blunt a signal as any new president could
send that the days of Bush and Dick Cheney are over. Among Obama’s first
moves will be an executive order closing the torture and detention camp at
Guantanamo.
However, returning to the community of civilised nations in interrogation
techniques does not and cannot resolve the intractable legal problems
created by Cheney. Obama will simply have to tackle these on a case-by-case
basis, with unavoidably unsatisfying results.
Many Guantanamo detainees can be repatriated — the Yemenis alone cut the
numbers in half. Many others have already been released for lack of
evidence. But there will be scores of prisoners who are doubtless dangerous
and yet were tortured for so long and so unequivocally by the US that all
the evidence against them would be thrown out in any non-kangaroo courts
(which excludes Bush’s rigged “military commissions”).
Last week Bush’s own appointee as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo conceded that
torture had made prosecutions of many prisoners impossible. And this, of
course, is the real fruit of the Cheney madness: the worst of the worst will
either get off free or will remain a public relations black eye to the US
for ever.
Obama also understands that restoring America’s moral standing on the torture
question could actually give the US government a little more leeway on
detention and rendition. If the world knows that maltreatment won’t happen,
some sane, constitutional and legal provisions for detention without charge
could be constructed on the British model. The rationale is not torturing
for “intelligence” but protecting the public while evidence is searched for
and doubt remains. Equally, some kind of rendition programme that follows
the lines of Bill Clinton and the first President Bush — and that eschews
any co-operation with regimes that torture — is a reasonable tool in the war
against jihadist terror. It’s the Bush-Cheney innovation of “extraordinary
renditions” and disappearances that has to end.
Will there be prosecutions for war crimes? Obama will not embrace that as a
programme. But he is a former president of the Harvard Law Review and a
teacher of constitutional law. If evidence of war crimes emerges, he will
not prevent his attorney-general from prosecuting, as he must. The law
grinds on — and as the Bush torture era recedes, my bet is that it will
grind rather relentlessly.
What concerns Obama most of all is the Bush assertion of inherent
constitutional powers to designate any human being — citizen or non-citizen,
in America or anywhere else — as an “enemy combatant” and to detain them
indefinitely without trial and torture them at will. This, the
president-elect fully understands, is in effect the abolition of the
constitution. He will take an oath on Tuesday to protect that constitution,
not eviscerate it in the tradition of his predecessor.
On Israel, perhaps, we will see the biggest shift. Obama has so far been
preternaturally silent on the Gaza bombardment, in deference to the “one
president at a time” mantra and because he knows full well that if he were
not about to become president, the Israelis would not have launched their
attack.
Obama does not want to get into a war of words with Israel before he even
takes office, but he shows every sign of tackling the Middle East the way he
has defused America’s culture wars. He will try to prick the passion and lay
out a rational solution.
We all know the contours of the deal that the Israelis and the Palestinians
are too politically divided and weak to agree to: a two-state compromise, a
roll-back of settlements, an international force on the border with the West
Bank, a cessation of terrorism, and financial compensation for displaced
Palestinians seeking a right of return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
My sense is that Clinton, the secretary of state, shares Obama’s views and
that her reflexively neoconservative approach to Israel will moderate once
she is no longer a senator from New York. My sense is also that Obama
intends to use Clinton in ways not seen in a secretary of state for a very
long time. And my guess is that she would not have taken the job if she were
not convinced that she has a chance to go down in history as an architect of
a breakthrough Middle East peace agreement.
Still, if any fight could remain totally immune to Obama’s moderation, it is
surely the Israeli-Palestinian death match. Does this product of Hawaiian
hippiedom really think he can get through to Hamas? Or Benjamin Netanyahu?
I don’t think Obama has many illusions on this score, but he will almost
certainly try to change the game with a very public and early appeal to the
world’s Muslims. He will take the oath of office using his full name, Barack
Hussein Obama, and will likely give a big speech soon that may give his
domestic advisers heartburn. His face remains one of America’s most potent
weapons in the war of ideas that is integral to winning the fight against
jihadist terrorism. What he is looking for is a grand bargain in the Middle
East just as surely as he is seeking a grand bargain in domestic fiscal
matters. Both bargains would be made possible by grave and growing crises
that help to scramble the recent past, by an overarching rhetorical appeal
to the masses behind the political leaders and by a bit of good luck and
planning.
Be assured that Obama is more of a strategist than a tactician. He knows that
all the regional conflicts are interlocked and is often a few steps ahead of
his enemies (just ask Clinton or McCain). To move Israel forward, he needs
to engage Syria. To deal with Gaza, he has to test the waters with Iran. To
achieve minimalist goals in Afghanistan, he needs Pakistan.
When you listen to him rattle off all the dimensions of the broader conflict,
you are aware that this is a president who does not see the world in black
and white or in with-us-or-against-us terms. He sees it as a series of
interconnected conflicts that can be managed by pragmatic solutions,
combined with a little rhetorical fairy dust and willingness to offer
respect where Bush provided merely contempt. This is not a panacea. But it
is not nothing either.
Obama almost certainly believes, for example, that no one is enjoying the Gaza
disaster more than Iran’s government, and that Tehran’s more radical mullahs
fear nothing more than fighting an election at home while Obama appeals to
the Iranian people over their heads. It is perfectly reasonable to be
confident that Obama threatens President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in ways that
Bush never managed. I can hope, at least.
If you close your eyes and imagine what this combination of fiscal and foreign
policy realism portends, you will come to a pretty obvious conclusion. This
Democratic liberal is actually, when it comes down to it, a man almost
entirely within the mainstream spectrum of the European centre right.
Imagine a Cameron-style Tory becoming president of the United States and try
to come up with something he would do differently.
This blend of pragmatism and realism reminds me in the American context of
Eisenhower more than any other recent president. Obama has the unerring
instincts of a conciliator and a moderate Tory. But he has the rhetorical
skills of a Kennedy or a Churchill. That’s a potent combination.
It may be, of course, that the relief at the end of the Bush era is colouring
our hopes. It may also be that events conspire to derail the man, or that
the habits of the past two decades in Washington will return with a
vengeance and do to Obama what was done to Clinton, another centrist
Democrat who came to office on a tide of goodwill. But I don’t think that,
given the immense crises we all face, it is unreasonable to hope for more.
There is something about Obama’s willingness to give others credit, to
approach so many issues with such dispassionate pragmatism, and to shift by
symbols and speeches the mood and tenor of an entire country that gives one
a modest form of optimism. Even now, as the outlook seems so dark, and as
the inheritance seems so insuperable, three words linger in the mind.
Yes, he can.
And two words echo back at me.
Can we?
