This from a Diary by David Bromwich in London Review of Books from May 13. Intelligent offerings and certainly a reminder that Obama's presidency is a work in progress at a very contentious time in world history. BP

Many people continue to feel a certain relief at having Obama as their president; and I can’t deny sharing that feeling. It springs from the possibility that after eight years of catastrophe we have a leader who at least is capable of understanding the size and nature of the problems he confronts. The change of feeling is a fact, if only a psychological fact, and it exists elsewhere in the world, too. But it corresponds to actual changes. On 8 April, the Muslim religious reformer Tariq Ramadan spoke at Cooper Union in New York City and, on an occasion that was part colloquium and part debate, a crowd of the curious were permitted to hear a leading moderate voice of world Islam. This would not have been possible under Cheney and Bush: Ramadan’s visa had been revoked by the State Department in 2004, and it took the leadership of Hillary Clinton to reverse the ban. Whatever speed Obama works at, this is the sort of opening that seems possible in his presidency.

Though one may regret the temperament that moves him in the direction of pre-emptive concession, one has to be aware of the obstacles he faces on many sides. A reminder appeared again in the recent controversy over Israel’s announcement that it intended to build 1600 colonising units in East Jerusalem. That the plan was declared with impolitic brazenness, in the middle of a state visit by Joe Biden, enabled Obama to establish vividly his differences with Netanyahu. Here, after a year of delays, with considerable craft the president marched behind not only the vice president but a statement by the most famous American general, David Petraeus, in testimony before Congress. Petraeus said that the unsolved question of Palestine was the largest ‘root’ danger to American security at home and abroad. For this resistance to Netanyahu, President Obama has been assailed in an open letter by Ron Lauder (president of the World Jewish Congress), an open letter by Elie Wiesel, and a Senate petition got up by Aipac and signed by 76 senators, 38 of them Democrats.

The opposition to Obama’s policies within America has probably not yet peaked. The consistent project of the Republican Party since 1970 has been the southernisation of American politics; and those who deplore the Democrats for ending segregation in the South are apt to admire the Israelis for trying to maintain it in their fashion. Lyndon Johnson said as he signed the Civil Rights Bill on 2 July 1964: ‘We have lost the South for a generation.’ It has been two generations now, and there is no sign of the South returning. Political control of the region has reverted to the party of Abraham Lincoln; and that party in 2010 is heavily involved in the celebration of Confederate History Month. The new orthodoxy of the Republican South holds that the Civil War was not about slavery so much as ‘economic disagreements’.

This extrusion from the ideology of the modern-day Republican Party of the sentiment of constitutional equality – the right of equal treatment under the law, and the justice, as Lincoln put it, of lifting the ‘artificial weights from all shoulders’ – must be accounted one of the strangest twists in all of American history. Yet Lincoln himself noticed something like it in the reversion, by the first Americans to call themselves Democrats, from the libertarian party of Jefferson to the party of territorial expansion and property rights under Andrew Jackson and Stephen Douglas; while the Whig party, once associated with John Adams, under the new name of Republicans extended the cause of liberty beyond the right of property. ‘I remember,’ Lincoln wrote in 1859,

once being amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long, and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat, and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat as the two drunken men.

John Boehner was far into the sleeves of his new great-coat when he bellowed his ‘Hell no!’ rejection speech against Obama’s healthcare bill to close the Republican side of the congressional debate. Boehner – a capable speaker, a callous man, and a politician who treads the brink of disorder – was using the voice and words one would use to harangue a crowd to string up a wretch the sheriff was holding. A step down in class, for a national politician, but akin to the shout of ‘You lie!’ to the president on the floor of Congress last September.

Probably racism was a necessary but not a sufficient cause for the launching of the Tea Party movement. The organised right-wing crowd, whom Obama is tempted to ignore but who will certainly play a part in the next two elections, are not appeasable in the mass. Yet some of its members can be reached (some of them voted for him). What, then, could he say to them? It is curious that one asks the question in that way, rather than, for example: ‘What should he do?’ But an odd thing about Obama’s presidency has been the extent to which his speeches are taken to be the site of the real action. ‘There’s something weird,’ a close observer of politics said the other day, ‘about the way when you talk to people about Obama, they mention his speeches and compare them to his other speeches. “Oh, it’s like that great moment in the Race Speech.” Or: “The West Point Speech was a disappointment but he really recouped it in the Nobel Prize Speech.” They talk about what he says and compare it to what he says.’ A species of aesthetic judgment has never been allowed to supplant political judgment in quite this way for any previous president. Obama must be aware of the unearned allowance, widely evident in the respectable media, and it can only encourage a false belief that his words are the moral equivalent of actions, as the words of other politicians somehow are not.

Off-script, Obama speaks so deliberately – with such compunction lest a misjudged word escape – that he seems a lucid expositor of sentiments and intentions. Yet he lacks the ad lib skill of the born politician, skill at making the explanation that actually explains. He has not yet given an entire speech that unfolds a coherent policy in any area of governance; and all of his speeches bear the impress of his belief in the transparent soundness of his own position. He talks as if by full certification of the relevant establishment, corporate, financial, military, medical, and he never takes the trouble to imagine a strong opponent. He is, by nature, a man of tendencies rather than commitments.

He would like things to improve for everyone, even for the rich, but especially for the poor because they need it. Yet he shuns the language of economic equality. He is a Fabian non-socialist. Libertarians are right to see him as an outsize admirer of legitimate authority who relies on state power far too much and too implicitly. This is the assumption guiding his increased use of Predator and Reaper drone-surveillance and the robot-killings by Hellfire missiles. He tends to dislike war and would prefer to wind down the military action in Afghanistan. But it would take more than a tendency, it would demand a commitment for a president to say at this moment: we can no longer live beyond our political, financial and psychological means, we can’t have multiple wars abroad and taxes that subsidise them on the backs of future generations, and rising debts and deficits, and all the while maintain our constitutional integrity.

A single-minded leader, one who planted himself in convictions more definite than tendencies, would use the word ‘empire’ often in a neutral and non-endorsing manner. He would make Americans wary of it as an unpleasant fact. And while acknowledging the necessity of this or that measure of emergency defence, he would convey the burden of the unloading of billions of dollars that renders the maintenance of empire untenable. This is a work of persuasion Obama has not come close to beginning. Yet he has made interesting promises that are being closely watched. If he can keep one or two – say regarding nuclear proliferation and Palestine – he may gain a credit that widens other possibilities. That is the hope that many cherish already from healthcare. Meanwhile, agents are working against him at home, sometimes in collaboration with others abroad, and their impact will be felt in the nomination of candidates for office, in elections and election tactics, on billboards and in radio soundbites. To push through even one more victory on the order of healthcare, Obama will have to give up the posture of mediator that comes naturally to him. He will have to admit in his political practice that there are parties; that he is the leader of a party; that there is a worse and a better cause; that it feels like a fight because it really is a fight. This does not mean just the adoption of a new set of tactics. It will require almost the emergence of a new character.

David Bromwich

London Review of Books, 13May10