In American politics, the ultimate contest is trying to get elected President. But the very few people who manage to win that contest then enter another, less visible game, with even longer odds: the race to become one of the handful of Presidents who really matter. Excitement about Barack Obama is at such a high level, and the times are so dire, that he is already well into this second race. The air is thick with comparisons of him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. George W. Bush, meanwhile, is slinking back to Texas with such low ratings that we forget that he made his own run at Presidential greatness. That ambition became apparent after the 9/11 attacks, when Bush adeptly, if briefly, harnessed the hunger for leadership that always follows a major crisis. In those days, incredible as it may seem now, Bush was often compared to Lincoln.
For Bush and the people around him, though, the grand ambition was always there, even during the 2000 campaign. Bush was uncannily good at finding slogans that could have a number of different meanings. He often used to say, “Government should do a few things and do them well”; to most of us this sounded like “I’m going to take it easy,” but to him, evidently, it sounded like “Make no small plans!”
O.K., it’s armchair psychology, but the idea that most of what Bush did was aimed at restoring the family honor by outperforming his father has seldom steered us wrong. Forty-One came across as pure Connecticut; Forty-Three was a real Texan. Forty-One was a moderate Republican; Forty-Three was a true-blue conservative. And Forty-One was an in-box President who waited for events to unfold and then responded, while Forty-Three changed the course of history. He was working toward this even before 9/11. Without the prodding of any crisis, the Bush Administration dropped out of important international treaties and took a unilateral, anti-diplomatic stance in foreign affairs. It cut taxes deeply and set the federal government on a course from surpluses to deficits. It passed the No Child Left Behind education law, which may be the single most influential piece of domestic legislation in a generation. Within days of 9/11, Bush set in motion a great downgrading of civil liberties and the conquest of Iraq, neither of which followed logically from the attacks; they were, instead, attempts to remake the country and the world.
Two days after being reëlected, Bush announced, “I earned . . . political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” What he mainly spent it on was an attempt to initiate the partial privatization of the Social Security system. Leaving aside its merits as public policy, Social Security is the foundation on which the Democratic Party rests. To begin changing the system into one that allowed individual stock-market accounts (can you imagine how that would have worked out?) might have made it possible to realize the long-running conservative dream of a truly dominant Republican Party.
That Bush had bad grandiose plans should not be taken as proof that grandiose Presidential plans are a bad thing. Bill Clinton had them, too. He helped to resurrect the Democratic Party by persuading a lot of disaffected Reagan Democrats to come back into the fold, without sacrificing the Party’s natural growth stemming from the country’s increasing ethnic diversity. His health-care plan didn’t work, but it was an attempt to create a core government benefit that would be as powerful as Social Security. Obama, for his part, has never been accused of being insufficiently ambitious. He’ll swing for the fences, too.
Obama’s election was a landmark in American history, but it will, we hope, be a self-negating landmark, because Americans will no longer unconsciously treat not being white as an insuperable barrier to the highest office. His campaign was also a landmark (how many e-mails a week did you get from Obama-land?), but what he did will now be copied to the point of becoming universal. He and the people around him ought to be thinking about what enduring achievements they can accomplish while in office. If that’s the test—and it should be—then Obama can’t meet it merely by exercising his staggering eloquence, or by quickly putting into place short-term solutions to crises, like the stimulus package, or by changing the tone and the symbolic valence of the government. He has to create institutions that will outlast him.
Lincoln and Roosevelt not only rallied the nation through crisis but also, respectively, made and remade their parties in ways that kept their policies alive. NATO and the United Nations, started on Harry Truman’s watch, are still basic shaping forces in the world, in ways that even the most deft Presidential response to even the most urgent international crisis can never be. The same principle applies in domestic affairs: legislation and regulation that affect very large numbers of people and are built to last politically and economically are what great Presidencies are made of.
Obama is a star. So are many of the people around him. A lot of them, like him, rose to adulthood inside the upper reaches of the American meritocracy, which oriented them toward analytic brilliance and felicity of expression, and gave them experience in dealing with fast-moving, high-stakes transactions. Running poky bureaucracies is not what they were trained to do, or even to think of as important. (That may be one reason that Obama is appointing so many czars and considering special envoys to handle situations of the highest urgency, rather than handing them to existing agencies.) It also matters that Obama and his advisers are so obviously alive to the danger of appearing to be big-government liberals and thereby reawakening the great snarling beast of American attack conservatism.
Part of the appeal of Obama’s awesomely vague campaign slogan, “Change,” was that it evoked the civil-rights movement without saying so directly. This is something that Obama is good at doing in speeches, too: just compare, for subtlety, his references on the night he won the election to having broken the racial barrier with those of everybody else who talked or wrote about it. The implied analogy between the civil-rights movement and the campaign might be carried forward into the Presidency. The movement succeeded for a lot of reasons—inspirational leadership and eloquence among them. But it also succeeded by creating new government agencies with enforcement powers and enough new voters to put several generations of black politicians into power. If you’re running the American government, change based on governance and politics matters a whole lot more than change based on intelligence and charisma. ♦
