Obama and the vision thing
by digby
The other day Ezra Klein wrote a piece about how Obama has lost his mojo by not running on the vision thing as he did in 2008. He reported that the campaign thinks the American people are skeptical of big promises so they don't think it's helpful for him to run on his real second term agenda --- of huge change. They apparently don't think that change message has quite the resonance that it once did. Go figure.
First of all, I'm a little bit surprised that the guy who wrote this thinks such lofty speechifying would have that much of an impact. Granted, it's a campaign so people are perhaps more motivated to listen, but if the bully pulpit is completely superfluous during the president's term it's hard to see how it's so powerful during the election campaign, particularly for the incumbent.
But anyway, Ezra wrote:
Romney prevailed in last week’s debate in part because his vision filled the stage. Reading Obama’s answers, it’s startling how many of them are about Romney. On the heels of a workmanlike convention speech that was particularly lacking in what used to be called “the vision thing,” his debate performance speaks of a deeper problem. Obama, at the moment, doesn’t have anything particularly inspiring to say.
It might be that polls and focus groups have given the Obama campaign reason to retreat from presenting a bold agenda for a second term. But the dulling of the vision has led to the dulling of the candidate. A quick glance at the polls suggests voters don’t seem to like that, either.
I think the problem here is something else. Obama was very inspiring to a lot of people during the last campaign, most certainly to Ezra, who wrote at the time:
Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.
I'm sure Ezra is just a tiny bit embarrassed by that now, but he was far from alone in feeling that way. And that's the problem. Obama never had that power. People just wanted to believe he did. His speeches were larded with those fatuous phrases like "we are the one's we've been waiting for" and "yes we can" but I can tell you from experience asking many, many people during that campaign, most of them didn't have the vaguest idea what it was they were supposed to be doing other than voting for Barack Obama. I asked dozens of them, "what does he really care about?" and the vast majority said he cared about "changing Washington" and "bringing the two sides together." Well, that didn't work out too well, as anyone who had been observing the political dynamic closely could have told them. There were a few wonkish types who said they really though he cared about civil liberties and changing America's foreign policy. A couple said it was climate change. But overall, the consensus was that he was going to change the way our politics works. And it was quite clear he would do this by the pure force of his personality. (And he believed his own hype for a very long time.)
My point is this: Obama didn't "overpromise" as Ezra claims all presidents do and are then hit by a cold splash of reality once in office. He promised things that were fantasies. They were nice fantasies, but they weren't a "bold agenda" of major change. Sure, his platform had some good liberal objectives in them, but they weren't substantially different than any other center-leftish Democrat in this era. And he even managed to obtain some of them, despite an obstructionist opposition party like we haven't seen for more than a century, which is an achievement. But the central promise of his campaign was always that he was "the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair" and now that he is just another president, his claim to office has become just another prosaic exercise in partisan politics. And that's pretty damned dull compared to the promise of 2008.
I still do not know what his vision is aside from that glittering promise to transcend all divisions and make us all one. If he has a policy vision that's consumed him for his entire first term, I'd say it's what Matt Yglesias called his white whale: the Grand Bargain. But I still have no idea why he thinks that's such a worthy goal, except as a way to tick off a bunch of discrete policy objectives all at once, ostensibly in order to clear contentious politics from the deck so we can all get together an govern for the common good. More fantasy.
Ezra claims that he could run on his jobs proposal and other big ticket items that would inspire the nation. In a memo declaring their data shows the people want bold change more than ever, Democracy Corps wrote that he needs to express a huge message of change like this:
I agree with that. So do two-thirds of the respondents. And it's the polar opposite of the message of crippling debt that's overtaken Washington (partially at the direction of the president.) I'd be downright inspired myself if he'd used that idea to parry all the deficit talk during his first term and run on it throughout this campaign.
At this point I have to hope that the tepid reception to his speech at the convention, the downright poor reception to his debate performance (and the clear potential for an upset in this election) will have finally shaken the last of the gauzy cobwebs of 2008 out of the campaign's memories --- and forced them to recognize that for all the happy talk on the trail about how "we" did this and that, the problem is that people don't know what "he" is going to do. I don't think they need any more big vision statements about "bringing people together" -- they've learned about that the hard way. What they probably would like to hear from the president is some conviction that he will fight for them.
Tonight is the beginning of the last leg of this campaign and it's looking very close. I really hate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and I think the world will be worse off if they are elected. So, I'm sincerely rooting for the president to do well tonight. I assume he has it in him --- he's a talented, professional politician with far more human appeal than that corporation in a suit Mitt Romney. I think people still want to believe in him. Here's hoping he's searched his soul and found a different vision, tempered by hard experience, that will make the American people see that he's no longer up in the clouds promising unattainable dreams but down in the political trenches leading the battle on their behalf.
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