What Do We See in Obama?

Gary Younge 
April 11, 2012
This article appeared in the April 30, 2012 edition of The Nation.
http://www.thenation.com/article/167344/what-do-we-see-obama

When Jerry Kellman received an application for a job as
a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s with a
cover letter signed "Barack Obama," he thought, "What
the hell is this? And Honolulu? I thought, Well, he's
Japanese." Once Obama arrived in Chicago, some who heard
his name assumed he was of Irish descent-O'Bama. By the
time he ran for president, the right was more interested
in the fact that his surname rhymed with Osama and his
middle name-Hussein-reminded people of Saddam.

Obama has always been something of a Rorschach test-the
psychological experiment wherein a patient is presented
with a series of inkblots and is asked what they mean.
The blot is the same for everyone. But everyone sees
something different in it.

Similarly, people take one look at Obama-or in the case
of his name, not even that-and project their aspirations
and anxieties onto him. One Zogby poll in 2006 showed
that after being told his parents' race and nationality,
more than half (55 percent) of whites and 61 percent of
Hispanics classified Obama as biracial, while two-thirds
(66 percent) of blacks regarded him as black. The truth,
of course, is that he's both. Same information. Same
man. Different takes.

The notion that people would project their hopes and
fears onto a political leader is not unique to Obama.
But the particular confluence of events and identities
makes the discrepancies between who Obama is and who
people want him to be particularly acute.

This is not news to Obama. In The Audacity of Hope, he
wrote: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of
vastly different political stripes project their own
views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not
all, of them." Back then he chalked it up to his being a
relative newcomer on the political scene. But
familiarity has not attenuated the problem. If anything,
with six months to go before the election, it's
accentuated it.

For as he returns to the campaign trail, he is starting
to sound like the politician many liberals thought they
had voted for: principled, smart and commanding rather
than the compromised, inept moderate negotiator we have
seen so much of. Which raises the question: Where has
this Obama been for the past four years?

So it was when Obama slammed Ryan's budget proposals as
social Darwinism. Obama was right, of course: for a
party so skeptical of evolution, the Republicans seem
curiously at home with the survival of the fittest.
Ryan's plan would not only represent a devastating
attack on poor Americans while redistributing resources
to the rich; it would actually make the deficit worse.
But it's not as though Obama has lacked the opportunity
to face down the Republicans over their misanthropy and
fiscal innumeracy before. Why are we hearing this now?

"Every once in a while he tries to get politically
cute," argued David Brooks in the New York Times. "And
he puts on his Keith Olbermann mask." (It's about the
only accurate line in the piece, which goes on to praise
Ryan's budget.)

That many on the right have distorted Obama's record
beyond recognition is predictable. It's what they do.
Attend enough Rick Santorum rallies and you'd be
forgiven for believing that socialism is imminent and
Obamacare gives Joe Biden the right to break into your
house and administer a pap smear.

The persistence of the fantasies among liberals is more
surprising. It seems that any attempt to discuss Obama's
record must first be tempered by some speculation about
what he would have done (were it not for political
obstacles) or could not do (because the office would not
permit it). As Aileen, a caller in an NPR discussion
about civil liberties, said, "Sometimes on the left we
can be very naïve because after he stopped being a
campaigner and became the president and was privy to
information that we do not see, he changed his mind on a
number of issues, because his primary responsibility is
to protect us."

While we cannot divine his intentions, his record,
clearly, is a mixed bag. The claim that he's achieved
nothing is as untenable as that America would be like
Sweden right now if only the Republicans hadn't gotten
in his way. Obviously, like any elected politician he
must navigate the situation he inherited. But that
doesn't stop people from deluding themselves that he was
more worthy of the wave of optimism that swept him into
power than he ever was. As one person told me while
leaping to the president's defense over the escalation
in Afghanistan, "You don't know what's in his heart."

"True," I replied. "Only his cardiologist can know that.
But that knowledge would make little difference to the
people of Afghanistan."

Obama is no mere passive recipient in this process.
While he does not control it, he has at times tried to
leverage and game it. Rhetorically, at least, he
projected a far more dynamic, idealistic and populist
campaign than the one he was really running. But when it
came to matters of substance, far from raising
expectations too high, he set them quite low. Some of
his first actions in office at a time of war and
economic crisis were to keep Bush's defense secretary,
reinstate Bill Clinton's economic team and put in a
banker at the Treasury.

The man is not a radical. He never was. Nor did he say
he was, though he was happy for some to think he might
be. If he had been, he would never have won. A winner-
take-all voting system where both parties are
corporately financed, Congressional districts are openly
gerrymandered and 40 percent of the upper chamber can
block anything is no vehicle for radical reform. Nor is
the presidency.

This doesn't mean there's no difference between Obama
and his Republican opponents. It means we should not
make excuses for him. He's the best that could be
elected last time, and this time. And that's the
problem.

---

Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The
Nation Institute, is the New York correspondent for the
Guardian and the author of No Place Like Home: A Black
Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (Mississippi)
and Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited
States (New Press). He is also a contributor to The
Notion.

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