Thoughts on the Inauguration
posted by Nate Oman
Yesterday I attended Obama’s inauguration. We had seats fairly close to Obama on the west porch of the Capitol. It was a grand piece of political spectacle. I love civic rituals like this, formalized bits of pageantry and ceremony. I was deeply disappointed, needless to say, by the fact that the twenty-one gun salute was truncated for the demands of a TV age. We had three volleys of seven guns rather than the rolling peal of 21 explosions. This is called degeneration.
I thought that Obama gave a good speech but not a great one. As usual, I found his rhetoric compelling, and I am hopeful for what he may be able to accomplish. Any president, I figure, is entitled to euphoria on his inauguration day, but gazing out over the sea of humanity inundating the Mall, I wondered what such an experience does for a person. It can’t be good, psychologically, I decided to be the object of that much concentrated adulation. I have high hopes for Obama’s ability to remain level-headed and centrist in the face of the messianic dreams of his most ardent supporters. We’ll see.
Talking about this after the inauguration, I was reminded by my interlocutor of a story that LBJ was fond of telling. During the waning days of World War II, Sam Rayburn, the plain-talking Texan Speaker of the House, inivted VP Harry S. Truman over for a visit. “Nobody ever tells Harry what is going on,” he said. During the course of their meeting (or in some versions, shortly before the meeting) word came that FDR had died, making Truman president. Rayburn then said to him:
Harry, this is the last time I am going to call you ‘Harry.’ From now on I will only call you ‘Mr. President’ out of respect for the office. You are going to go to the White House, where you are going to be surrounded by people who will tell you that you are the smartest son of a bitch on earth. Harry, both you and I know that isn’t true.
The irony, of course, is that LBJ always told this story as a preface to asking someone for advice, but he was notoriously convinced that he was “the smartest son of a bitch on earth.” Obama, thankfully, is not LBJ, but looking over the cheering, ecstatic crowds I realized that it will take a certain kind of steely detachment to resist the tidal wave of that adulation.
On the substance of the speech, I was disappointed that his economic rhetoric did not quite manage to “get it” on the financial crisis. In his riff on markets, Obama failed to acknowledge the ways in which governments create perverse incentives. While acknowledging the virtues of markets, he presented the story of their failure as a binary of greed and lack of oversight. The housing bubble and the resulting financial crisis, however, were not simple instances of greed and lack of regulatory oversight run amok. The U.S. government has been aggressively pushing households to increase their home mortgage debt through Democratic and Republican administrations for a generation or more. Banks have been actively encouraged to lend money. Finally, it is important to remember that the credit markets are one of the few markets in our economy where the ultimate price is subject to regular control and manipulation by a central government planner, in this case the Federal Reserve. A proper response to the financial crisis and with it the recession requires that policy makers understand that there have been sins of commission as well as omission by the government.
Substance aside, however, frankly part of what worries me about Obama is that so many people whose political instincts I distrust and whose political beliefs I find questionable are so enthusiastic about him. I put much of this down to simple Bush hatred, much of which is justified and much of which is slightly nutty. But there is a sanctimonious messianism in much of Obama-land that I am uncomfortable with. Indeed I find much of Obama-mania slightly creepy, particularly those bits of it the emanate from Hollywood. The succession of YouTube videos of people pledging themselves to Obama or singing vaguley spiritual songs about the future of hope embodied in his person set my teeth on edge. On the other hand, whenever I see this silliness, I remind myself of an after-class conversation that I had with one of my African-American students on the day after Obama’s election. She teared up as she talked about what his election meant for her daughter. “She is going to live in a world where there is nothing that she can’t do.” That statement is moving in a way that the manipulative, pseudo-spiritual pop culture surrounding Obama can never touch.
In the end, I am hopeful but anxious about Obama. You could do worse.
[Cross-posted at Akrasia]
January 21, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Posted in: Politics
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Responses (9)
Amy - January 21, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Wow — extremely insightful post!
Sara - January 21, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Well said. Great post.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - January 22, 2009 at 12:11 am
It seems you travel in far wider circles than I do as I’ve yet to come across an Obama supporter with even the faintest hint of succumbing to “messianic dreams” nor I have encountered any of that “sanctimonious messianism” you reference.
But a “manipulative, pseudo-spiritual pop culture” IS ubiquitous, and Werner Sombart, in “The Sociology of Capitalism,” proffered plausible if not compelling reasons as to why this country lends itself to this particular culturally adolescent expression of a cluster of modern values intrinsic to mature capitalism.
A.W. - January 22, 2009 at 9:20 am
Patty
Yeah, there’s nothing at all messianic about some Obama supporters for The One. Take this non-messianic quote from Lili Hayden, on the Puffington Post:
“Barack Obama is inspiring us like a desert lover, a Washington Valentino… couples all over America are making love again and shouting `yes we can’ as they climax!”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lili-haydn/why-obama-is-like-a-deser_b_89285.html
Indeed, there is a whole website devoted to this kind of dreck, which apparently stopped shortly after the election. http://obamamessiah.blogspot.com/
I think that site is making fun of the phenomenon. At least, God, I hope it is meant to make us laugh at them.
But bluntly some Obama supporters creep me out for exactly that reason. And if you haven’t seen that sort of thing before, you really need to get out more.
Quidpro - January 22, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Great post, Nate. I do not understand how Patrick could have missed the Obamamessiah phenomenon. Especially when Obama did so much to create the image by promising to stop the rise of the oceans and heal the Earth.
Now it is time for him to govern. Although he did not get my vote he will get my prayers. God bless him and America.
AYY - January 23, 2009 at 3:13 am
“I put much of this down to simple Bush hatred, much of which is justified and much of which is slightly nutty.”
How can much of it be justified and much of it be slightly nutty? I think you’re giving too much credit to the Bush haters. My take on the hatred was that it was just plain nutty.
Disagreement with specific policies or appointments might have been justified, but the sheer intensity of the hatred was inexplicable on any rational level, especially when you realize the alternatives were Gore and Kerry for heaven’s sake, and that on balance Bush did a reasonably good job.
Nate, before you let your teeth wear down too much by the videos, see Iowahawk’s take on the Presidential Pledge video.
A.W. - January 23, 2009 at 4:01 pm
That iowahawk transcript left me crying from laughter. But I don’t call that Obama infatuation. More like these celebrities were trying to glom off the success of the ultimate Celebrity: Obama. But the whole thing is riffle with their egotism.
But I am with Krauthammer in his column today. Obama is not needy, and i wouldn’t be surprised if it is hard to make him star struck. That’s good.
AYY - January 24, 2009 at 3:38 am
Well here’s something from Neo Neo Con that might explain the hatred of Bush:
“Bush was hated for many reasons, among them his Texas style, his supposed frat-boy personality, and his alleged lack of intelligence. Obama is seen as the corrective to these things, his exact opposite. But I have come to believe that a very substantial part of the motivation for the depth of the hatred for Bush is that he forced the American people to confront the reality of terrorism, the rot in the fundamentalist Muslim world, and the need to combat it at times with violence.
These things are so markedly un-PC, so dreadfully distasteful, that they must be negated by the intelligentsia of the Left. Bush himself becomes the repository of evil rather than our enemies. Now that he’s gone, the whole thing can be regarded as a bad dream that has miraculously melted away. And ironically, it helps a lot that Bush’s war on terror has been markedly successful, which allows his haters to convince themselves that it was unnecessary.”
SusanS - January 28, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Hopeful but anxious seems about right.
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