My Hope for Obama

Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish is the first blog I ever started to read on any regular basis. I can no longer remember why, but I presume it is because I often buy The Atlantic Monthly when I travel. Something in the magazine must have motivated me to seek out the website, and as Andrew is the first blogger (from left-to-right in the navigation bar) on the site, The Daily Dish is where I landed.

I still haven't made it down to Barbara Wallraff on the right hand edge of the navigation. Maybe she should petition to re-order the bloggers alphabetically by first name (though Andrew would still beat her out for the alpha spot).

But, now that I have a blog of my own, I guess I can cite Sullivan as my blogging godfather in a way.

One of the things about reading someone for a long period of time is you get a real sense for the cadence of their written voice, the pattern of their thoughts, and even the texture of their personality as it leaks through on the screen. Sullivan can be overly-emotional at times (at least for my taste) and given to hyperbole. But, it may simply come with the form.

Given that he blogs so prodigiously, there is less time for real-time editing and considered reflection. Inflamed commentary is "walked back" in future posts if needbe, but what you get most of the time is the immediate gut reaction.

So, taking that grain of salt, I can't help but post this item from Sullivan today in its entirety. I can't say that I feel the claims he makes therein are uncontestable. It may be a matter of heart and hope coloring his eyes (and mine) at this very early stage.

What I can say is that this is what I wanted to see from Obama more than anything else he could do policy-wise as President. But, I believe it is more than simply wishful thinking and projection, as so many have claimed that Obama's campaign was built around -- people casting their own idealized notions of Obama the myth onto the tabula rasa of Obama the actual candidate.

What Sullivan describes is what I thought I saw revealed in Obama under the kleig light glare of the campaign spotlight. It was the measure of the man, not his platform.

And, if he can actually govern in accordance with the spirit that Sullivan identifies below, then I will be one very proud American:

One impression from Obama's interactions with the Republicans and Democrats in Congress: Obama clearly sees the presidency as a different institution than his immediate predecessor. This is a good thing, it seems to me. Bush had imbibed a monarchical sense of the office from his father and his godfather (Cheney). The monarch decided. If you were lucky, you'd get an explanation later, usually dolled up in propaganda. But the president had one accountability moment - the election of 2004 - and the rest of the time he saw the presidency as a form of power that should be used with total boldness and declarative clarity.

At times, Bush's indifference to the system around him bordered on a kind of political autism. And so one of the oddest aspects of Bush's presidency was his tendency to declare things as if merely saying them as president could make them so. The model was clear and dramatically intensified by wartime: the president pronounced; Congress anemically responded; the base rallied. At the start, it felt like magic, but as reality slipped through the fast-eroding firewall of reckless spending and military misadventure, Bush's authority disappeared all the more quickly - because his so-certain predictions were so obviously wrong. The Decider had no response to this. He just had to keep deciding and asserting, to less and less effect, that he was right all along. Hence the excruciating final months. Within a democratic system, we had replicated all the comedy and tragedy of cocooned authoritarianism.

Now look at Obama. What the critics misread in his Inaugural was its classical structure. He was not running any more. He was presiding. His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Hence the obvious shock of some Republican Congressman at debating with a president who seemed interested in actual conversation, as opposed to pure politics. Last Tuesday, there were none of the bold declarative predictions of the Second Bush Inaugural - and none of the slightly creepy Decider idolatry. Yes, Obama set some very clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window of invitation. The invitation is to the other co-equal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order - not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order. And it is rooted in a traditional, small-c conservative understanding of the presidency.

If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. It's fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realize itself in public actions. Somewhere the Founders are smiling. The system is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. But it took the self-restraint of one man to do it.

Let the people say Amen.