The Obama Phenomenon

Close The New Yorker Online Only « The Malia Generation Main November 8, 2012

Obama’s Political Intelligence

Posted by Adam Gopnik



Tuesday night was a beautiful night for those who admire President Obama for his temperament, his intelligence, his calm, his decency, and his refusal, in the face of obviously intense daughterly pressure, to buy a second dog. (Let the word go forth from this day on: one dog is delightful —but one is enough.) It also sealed in place, by real but still smallish margins—and therefore as though it were a fated necessity rather than a contingent achievement— the Obama phenomenon. It is still one of the most singular stories in American history: how a slight black guy from Chicago with an odd African name and no resume except a single shining speech and a fine, introspective literary memoir became the dominant political figure of an American empire still at the height of its power. Nothing so improbable has happened in a big democracy, or semi-democracy, since Disraeli’s day. And, once again, one marvelled at the ability of Obama’s opponents to hate with such a passion a man so seemingly impossible even for his teen-age daughter to dislike—a man who never takes the bait of rage, who sometimes seeks conciliation to crazy fault, and has said scarcely an angry, mean-spirited, or intemperate thing in his public life.





But watching him come to the podium and hold it, some of the reasons for that hatred were discernible. Obama is, above all, calm, cool—not needy in any way, and that absence of neediness, that pervasive cool, which reads to even his admirers at times like a slight, ironic detachment from his own eloquence, must seem to his detractors like an infuriating arrogance and remoteness. John Kennedy, who had the same gift of detachment, was often accused, quite fairly, of the same type of self-absorption and indifference to others. He carried no cash in his coat. Still—hate him? How, exactly? Why, precisely? (Republicans, who once saw the impotence and indignity of Democrats hating Reagan, their own detached man, should know better.) But it’s inevitable. Everybody admires the guy who never breaks a sweat—except the guys running alongside him in the race, who would at least like to see him making an effort. A man who is not needy, a philosopher once said, does not always recognize the needs of others. (One imagines that Bill Clinton would have liked a shout-out in the President’s victory speech; he didn’t get one, though, more sensitive to such things, doubtless would have given one if the roles were reversed.)



The really weird thing is that the President returned, passionately and with evident sincerity, to the themes of that first fine 2004 speech: national unity; we are less divided than our policies suggest; no red states, no blue states. “No, no!” some of his admirers wanted to intervene. “Pay attention to what happened in the past four years, Mr. President! We are every bit as divided as our politics suggest. That is why they are our politics.”



This persistence with a credo in many ways refuted is part of Obama’s gift. While his Presidency had been a true success—health-care reform, sane economic policies, sane Supreme Court Justices, an end to torture, and all the rest—his specific political project has in many ways failed. He clearly thought, at the beginning of his first term, that his evident personal virtues, good will, intelligence, willingness to compromise—virtues evident to him, too, since modesty is not part of the cool man’s arsenal anymore than insecurity is—would bring rational right-wingers in his direction and push out the fringe on both sides. It didn’t happen. Not nearly. So it is easy to see why some of his supporters (cf Chris Matthews) were, despite their euphoria, a little exasperated—we’re not going to do this again, are we?



But the truth is that there are reasons why Obama is a phenomenon, and one of them is that his political intelligence is so keen that he knows when unreality best serves his ends. Political intelligence is as distinct and intuitive a gift as any of the other kinds of intelligence—the situational intelligence of the athlete or the analytic intelligence of the intellectual—and a large component of political intelligence lies in being faithful to your own fictions. The new Spielberg-Kushner-Lewis movie, “Lincoln,” reminds us (or will, once widely released) that Lincoln’s entire conduct in office during the war was based on the fiction that the secession had never happened—that the South was not a rebellious nation but, rather, a bunch of outlaws running around in gang regalia. What you could see had just happened—a bunch of states becoming an alien nation—had not. This fiction of continuity, of an indissoluble union in the face of its rather evident dissolution, was essential to Lincoln’s case and to his credo.



To this list of—what shall we call them?—higher liars (sounds harsh, though it conveys something of the idea) most other great politicians might be added. F.D.R., with his assertion that fear was all there was to fear when there was so much real stuff to be frightened of; and Reagan, for that matter, with his many repeated myths and mantras. By now Obama must know the virtues of fighting and the limits of the invocation of unity, but he knows, too, that a cool man who does not cherish his own warmest rhetoric becomes a mere hot-air artist. If that knowledge can make him seem at times naïve, or even willfully perverse—well, after all, he’s the one who’s the phenomenon, not you. And he’s the one who put his foot down about the second dog.





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