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All presidents disappoint. It comes with the job, the unreasonable expectations Americans have for their presidents and the inherent conflict and disconnect between campaigning (promising people all they can have) and governing (explaining to people why they won’t get it). |
So Barack Obama isn’t the first president to fail to meet expectations - and he won’t be the last.
But he has come to embody something else, too: the risks and travails of reaching for greatness in the presidency without the crisis, character and capacity necessary to achieve it.
“Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans,” the new president declared in his 2009 inaugural address to a 1.8mn-strong crowd on the National Mall in Washington.
“... What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”
From pledging an Earth-moving transformation, Obama has been reduced to hitting singles and getting his lonely paragraph right. After drawing early comparisons to Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F Kennedy all rolled into one, Obama has fallen so low that journalists wonder whether Jimmy Carter is not a more appropriate parallel.
Plenty of explanations have been offered: Republicans have been unwilling to work with him, or the president hasn’t reached out to them. The stimulus was too small, or it was far too big. Health care reform was a historic achievement, or it was a terrible overreach.
The president has tried to be too bipartisan, even post-partisan, or he has not been partisan enough.
Time is needed to judge the Obama presidency on its merits and in comparison to other occupants of the Oval Office.
Some, like economist Paul Krugman, have concluded that Obama is already “one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history.
But however historians and the public ultimately rate Obama, the greatness that he sought - and that was expected of him - will probably not be his.
As early as 2011, in an extraordinary comment to “60 Minutes”, Obama believed otherwise: “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president - with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln - just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history.”
He has certainly not been a failed president. But neither is Obama likely to be judged a great or iconic one. Unlike FDR, JFK or even LBJ, there will not be a BHO.
Certainly, Obama inherited a unique set of circumstances, as all presidents do, and his were scarier than most. But neither the crises he has faced nor the system in which he has operated have been wholly untethered from his predecessors’ problems and experiences.
The challenges of the post-FDR presidency have plagued Obama: intractable problems, intensifying political polarisation, mistrust of government, an intrusive and ubiquitous news media. This president’s fate has been the same as that of many recent predecessors - the job is just too big and expectations just too high.
The undeniable greatness of presidents such as George Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt requires three elements: a crisis that severely threatens the nation for a sustained period, setting the stage for historic change; the capacity to extract from such a crisis some long-term transformative changes through political smarts, persuasion and deal making with Congress; and the character needed for effective leadership.
Obama’s crisis - a complex recession emerging from the financial and housing sectors - was sufficiently severe that he could not break it easily or quickly, but not so catastrophically encumbering that it enabled him to tame the politics in Washington as Lincoln or FDR had done.
Indeed, it is only a nation-encumbering crisis, hot and relentless, that opens the door to undeniable presidential greatness. “If Lincoln had lived in a time of peace,” Theodore Roosevelt once remarked, “no one would have known his name.”
As for Obama’s governing capacity, the president did not so much miss his FDR/LBJ moment as misread it.
Most of the public wanted a way out of the terrible recession and the long and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Americans also hoped for renewed confidence in their president and faith in their government’s competence. But the public didn’t seek a reformulation of the social contract.
And Obama has had neither the partisan dominance that comes with huge congressional majorities, like those enjoyed by FDR and LBJ, nor the working bipartisanship with the Republicans to bring it about.
The Affordable Care Act of 2010, his signature legislative achievement, will be Obama’s legacy, and in the years to come it may be seen as a moral and economic victory. But there are simply too many complexities and uncertainties to call it transformative now.
Finally, on character, Obama has had a Jekyll-and-Hyde problem. Part pragmatist, part believer, but always capable of seeing all sides of an argument, the president has seemed too often at war with himself on how ambitious he wants to be, whether on climate change, tax reform or the size of the stimulus.
That personal conflict has made it too hard for him to make peace with his public.
By nature, Obama is not a partisan, a populist or a revolutionary. Instead, he finds his comfort zone in conciliation and accommodation, and in the empirical world of rational policy analysis.
Those can be useful qualities in many circumstances, but they won’t make you a transformative president.
♦ Aaron David Miller is a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the author of The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President, from which this essay is adapted.
