This week’s ritual on the steps of the United States Capitol honoured tradition in every way — even if the US’s new president stumbled over the time-honoured form of words that was his oath of office.
Americans, lacking a monarchy, attach a near-sacred reverence to the inauguration that serves as a kind of coronation. And Barack Obama did not challenge its precise protocols. True, Aretha Franklin sang My Country ’tis of Thee, and Yitzhak Perlman led a distinctly modern musical interlude written by film composer John Williams. But otherwise, it was an exercise in tradition.
Yet Obama delivered a message that was anything but conservative, offering a thorough rebuttal of his predecessor’s foreign policy and signalling a break in the 30-year grip the notion of limited government has exerted on US politics. Taken together, it suggested that the Obama presidency will be conservative in style, radical in substance.
Note the exclusive presence of Protestant clergy at the proceedings, despite the celebration of inclusivity the inauguration symbolised for so many. The invocation was given by powerful evangelist Rev Rick Warren, an anti-abortionist who backed last year’s California campaign to outlaw gay marriage. The choice outraged many on the left — some of whom booed Warren ÂÂ- but it reassured America’s cultural conservatives.
Obama’s personal style is similarly comforting to the right: he is sober and calm, with a wife and two daughters who could be an advertisement for family values.
They would have warmed as he hymned the virtues required for the US to lift itself from its current hold. The challenges may be new, he said, ”but those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old.”
Obama has written before of the pressure on a black man to appear unthreatening in a mainly white society. His style assures many Americans that there is nothing frighteningly radical about their new president.
But listen to what he said. In one exquisite paragraph, he rebuked the with-us-or-against-us, force-first-not-last, macho foreign policy of the Bush era. Obama recalled the earlier generations who defeated ”fascism and communism, not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions”.
”They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.”
To the Muslim world he pledged ”a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect”. That a president could speak like this, so directly, to Muslims would have been unimaginable just months ago.
Obama seemed to offer a warning to dictatorships that have received US aid and comfort. Egypt’s rulers, among others, might have shifted in their seats as they heard Obama tell them: ”You are on the wrong side of history, but we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
Audiences worldwide would also have been heartened by his unexpectedly intense focus on climate change, one of the speech’s clearest threads. ”Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet,” he said. Later he vowed to ”harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories”.
Once this would have been condemned as dangerous radicalism in an American politician. But Obama’s conservative style — the fact that he invented a new tradition this year by speaking at inauguration eve dinners in honour of Colin Powell and John McCain — gives him the space to act differently where it matters, on the substance.
There is an indirect precedent for this trick: the president Obama once described as ”transformational”. Once elected, Ronald Reagan did not look over his shoulder at the previous consensus; he seized the moment to drive through his own small government agenda, assuming the public would soon come around.
He did not feel obliged to split the difference with the centre-left. And yet he wrapped it all in a warmth and charm that ensured it was not threatening. He, too, was a radical on substance, no matter how cosily traditional the style.
So now it could be Obama’s turn to be transformational, not just in the words of a speech but in the deeds that Americans will expect from him, starting this week.
Early signs are encouraging, including the hint from senior counsellor David Axelrod that the next phase of the federal bailout will be different from the first tranche of spending under the man we can now call — with a deep sigh of relief — former president Bush.
Obama will focus not on bailing out the banks but US workers. Expect hefty government spending on the manufacturing industry, especially on projects with a green tinge.
What could blow Obama off course? Republican pollster Frank Luntz warns of two perils, the first from abroad. Promising to engage America’s adversaries, Obama enters unpredictable waters. If he holds a summit with the Iranians or Russians that goes badly, and he is seen to have been taken for a ride — that might burst the bubble.
Alternatively, warns Luntz, if House Democrats tug him leftwards that could puncture the image of the bipartisan, above-the-fray leader — reducing him in the minds of the electorate to just another politician.
This might also underestimate the appetite for change. The triangulations of Bill Clinton might have been politically necessary 15 years ago. But with the economy plunging, many Americans seem ready for more radical medicine.
Still, none of this should obscure the wonder of what happened in Washington. Two million people woke at dawn and made difficult journeys in the cold to watch a politician become their president.
God knows the US has been difficult to love these past eight years. But on Tuesday it showed its most inspiring face — as a nation that cherishes its unique experiment in self-government and still believes that even the darkest chapters of its past can be transcended.
Good enough is enough
Who would want to carry the weight of expectation that is piled upon Barack Obama’s slim shoulders? But it isn’t just the incoming president who will suffer if he fails to live up to our hopes. By idealising him so much we are engineering our own inevitable disappointment. Instead of enjoying what he achieves, we will end up comparing his time in office not with what went before, or even what might have reasonably been expected, but with our own impossible fantasies.
It’s not just in politics, of course, that we torment ourselves in this way. In relationships and in our careers we often fall into the trap of predicting that things will be perfect rather than just okay. Examine the language we use: we search for our ”soulmate” or ”Mr Right” or our ”dream job”. Subconsciously, I suspect, we are searching for something that we, if we were lucky, once had: the all-attentive parent we felt we could rely upon completely. The perfect employer or romantic partner conjures up that safety and security. So, of course, does the perfect politician.
Renowned psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott came up with a phrase for parenting that represents a more realistic ambition: the ”good enough” mother or father. This implicitly rejects the notion that perfection is possible (or even desirable) and that a mistake or two must mean total failure.
Obama today — and, hard though it is to believe now, Tony Blair in Britain in 1997 — seems to promise so much. It would be better, though, to take on board Winnicott’s notion and judge our leaders not by our unconscious need to be wholly and effortlessly looked after but by what, given the challenges and complexities of our world, might be ”good enough”.
By that criteria there is every reason to believe that Obama will be an outstanding leader and that despite some inevitable wrong calls and bad luck, he will inspire and, sometimes, even delight. But to really enjoy him as the flawed human being he is requires us to let go of our symbolic sense of him as so special that he is flawless. We must, in short, perceive him as just a good father, not a fallen God.
Psychologists have devised a trick for moving to that more realistic place. Instead of getting caught up in the excitement of an election day or inauguration — what psychologists call a ”peak experience” — and then expecting that to continue indefinitely, project yourself forward. Consciously imagine an Obama presidency three months, a year, five years from now. Consider what he might have done that would feel good to you. If we anchor our visions in timescales like this, and detach them from the excitement of today, we adopt a more cautious set of expectations.
Then, as time goes by, instead of Obama betraying our impossible ideal, we might find, if we’re lucky, that he lives up to our more realistic hopes. That would relieve him of his terrible burden, but it would also free us up to enjoy something that might, even stripped of its idealism, be pretty wonderful. — Derek Draper,