The
current troubles of the Obama presidency can be read back into its
beginnings. Rule by personal charisma has met its proper fate. The spell
has been broken, and the magician stands exposed. We need no pollsters
to tell us of the loss of faith in Mr. Obama's policies—and, more
significantly, in the man himself. Charisma is like that. Crowds come
together and they project their needs onto an imagined redeemer. The
redeemer leaves the crowd to its imagination: For as long as the
charismatic moment lasts—a year, an era—the redeemer is above and beyond
judgment. He glides through crises, he knits together groups of varied,
often clashing, interests. Always there is that magical moment, and its
beauty, as a reference point.
Mr. Obama gave voice to this sentiment in a speech on Nov. 6 in
Dallas: "Sometimes I worry because everybody had such a fun experience
in '08, at least that's how it seemed in retrospect. And, 'yes we can,'
and the slogans and the posters, et cetera, sometimes I worry that
people forget change in this country has always been hard." It's a pity
we can't stay in that moment, says the redeemer: The fault lies in the
country itself—everywhere, that is, except in the magician's
performance.
Forgive the personal reference, but from the very beginning of Mr.
Obama's astonishing rise, I felt that I was witnessing something old and
familiar. My advantage owed nothing to any mastery of American
political history. I was guided by my immersion in the political history
of the Arab world and of a life studying Third World societies.
In 2008, seeing the Obama crowds in Portland, Denver and St. Louis
spurred memories of the spectacles that had attended the rise and fall
of Arab political pretenders. I had lived through the era of the
Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser. He had emerged from a military cabal
to become a demigod, immune to judgment. His followers clung to him
even as he led the Arabs to a catastrophic military defeat in the Six
Day War of 1967. He issued a kind of apology for his performance. But
his reign was never about policies and performance. It was about
political magic.
In trying to grapple with, and write about, the Obama phenomenon, I
found guidance in a book of breathtaking erudition, "Crowds and Power"
(1962) by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti. Born in Bulgaria in 1905 and
educated in Vienna and Britain, Canetti was unmatched in his
understanding of the passions, and the delusions, of crowds. The crowd
is a "mysterious and universal phenomenon," he writes. It forms where
there was nothing before. There comes a moment when "all who belong to
the crowd get rid of their difference and feel equal." Density gives the
illusion of equality, a blessed moment when "no one is greater or
better than another." But the crowd also has a presentiment of its own
disintegration, a time when those who belong to the crowd "creep back
under their private burdens."
Five years on, we can still recall how the Obama coalition was
formed. There were the African-Americans justifiably proud of one of
their own. There were upper-class white professionals who were drawn to
the candidate's "cool." There were Latinos swayed by the promise of
immigration reform. The white working class in the Rust Belt was the
last bloc to embrace Mr. Obama—he wasn't one of them, but they put their
reservations aside during an economic storm and voted for the
redistributive state and its protections. There were no economic or
cultural bonds among this coalition. There was the new leader, all
things to all people.
A nemesis awaited the promise of this new presidency: Mr. Obama would
turn out to be among the most polarizing of American leaders. No, it
wasn't his race, as Harry Reid would contend, that stirred up the
opposition to him. It was his exalted views of himself, and his mission.
The sharp lines were sharp between those who raised his banners and
those who objected to his policies.
America holds presidential elections, we know. But Mr. Obama took his
victory as a plebiscite on his reading of the American social contract.
A president who constantly reminded his critics that he had won at the
ballot box was bound to deepen the opposition of his critics.
A leader who set out to remake the health-care system in the country,
a sixth of the national economy, on a razor-thin majority with no
support whatsoever from the opposition party, misunderstood the nature
of democratic politics. An election victory is the beginning of things,
not the culmination. With Air Force One and the other prerogatives of
office come the need for compromise, and for the disputations of
democracy. A president who sought consensus would have never left his
agenda on Capitol Hill in the hands of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.
Mr. Obama has shown scant regard for precedent in American history.
To him, and to the coterie around him, his presidency was a radical
discontinuity in American politics. There is no evidence in the record
that Mr. Obama read, with discernment and appreciation, of the ordeal
and struggles of his predecessors. At best there was a willful reading
of that history. Early on, he was Abraham Lincoln resurrected (the new
president, who hailed from Illinois, took the oath of office on the
Lincoln Bible). He had been sworn in during an economic crisis, and thus
he was FDR restored to the White House. He was stylish with two young
children, so the Kennedy precedent was on offer.
In the oddest of twists, Mr. Obama claimed that his foreign policy
was in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower's . But Eisenhower knew war and
peace, and the foreign world held him in high regard.
During his first campaign, Mr. Obama had paid tribute to Ronald
Reagan as a "transformational" president and hinted that he aspired to a
presidency of that kind. But the Reagan presidency was about America,
and never about Ronald Reagan. Reagan was never a scold or a narcissist.
He stood in awe of America, and of its capacity for renewal. There was
forgiveness in Reagan, right alongside the belief in the things that
mattered about America—free people charting their own path.
If Barack Obama seems like a man alone, with nervous Democrats up for
re-election next year running for cover, and away from him, this was
the world he made. No advisers of stature can question his policies; the
price of access in the Obama court is quiescence before the leader's
will. The imperial presidency is in full bloom.
There are no stars in the Obama cabinet today, men and women of
independent stature and outlook. It was after a walk on the White House
grounds with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, that Mr. Obama called
off the attacks on the Syrian regime that he had threatened. If he had
taken that walk with Henry Kissinger or George Shultz, one of those
skilled statesmen might have explained to him the consequences of so
abject a retreat. But Mr. Obama needs no sage advice, he rules through
political handlers.
Valerie Jarrett, the president's most trusted, probably most
powerful, aide, once said in admiration that Mr. Obama has been bored
his whole life. The implication was that he is above things, a man
alone, and anointed. Perhaps this moment—a presidency coming apart, the
incompetent social engineering of an entire health-care system—will now
claim Mr. Obama's attention.
Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “The Syrian Rebellion.”
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