MICHAEL KNOX BERANA hundred days into the new administration, President Obama’s morbid reliance on the teleprompter has become a metaphor for a leader who too often seems to be on intellectual autopilot.
The president campaigned on a theme of change and pledged himself (to quote from
The Audacity of Hope) to a “project of national renewal” that would restore “our communal values.” Our communities
do need reviving, but none of policies the president has so far put forward show evidence of the innovative, post-partisan thinking he promised.
Politics, it is true, is the art of the platitude. But in signing the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act (no kidding, that’s what it’s called) last week, a bill that triples the size of AmeriCorps, President Obama carried his devotion to the commonplace a little far even by presidential standards. AmeriCorps — I wonder which scribe came up with that Orwellian formulation? — is a Clinton-era program designed to promote community by means of federal bureaucracy. The idea that what American communities need is more federal babysitting — babysitting by the same people who brought you the recent Air Force One fly-by in New York — does not precisely arrest with its novelty.
If the president were seriously interested in original thinking about community regeneration, he would take on those on the Left whose cultural iconoclasm continues to undermine the country’s neighborhoods. He would express support for “New Urbanists” like Léon Krier, who seek to revive, at the local level, the cultural tradition of the town square and village green. He would take on the mandarins of the teachers unions, whose progressive policies make it difficult for teachers to hand down to the next generation of Americans the cultural capital that makes a town square possible.
Progressive iconoclasts reject the older culture precisely because it is for them a rival power, an obstacle to their plans to mold a national community under the aegis of the state. A hundred days in, President Obama, though he campaigned on a platform of change, appears committed to the stalest of the old progressive orthodoxies.
— Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made.
CHARLES MURRAY
One of Lyndon Johnson’s press secretaries, George Christian, once said that no one should be allowed to work in the West Wing who has not suffered a major disappointment in life — the atmosphere is too intoxicating and the power too great for callow young things who do not know from personal experience how badly things can go wrong.
Unlike George Christian, we don’t have to worry about just a few special assistants. We have a president who, from the time he entered Honolulu’s Punahou School as a teenager, has lived a magical life. Everything has gone right for decades now. Nor are any of his aides crouching beside him in the chariot whispering, “You too are mortal.” On the contrary, if we are to judge by Larry Summers, even his most astute advisers suppress what they know to be true to accommodate Mr. Obama’s wishes.
Down the road, the president’s economic policy will engender a new crisis that, to be met, will require him to reassess his assumptions and to defy his political base — and we haven’t a shard of evidence that he is able to do either of those things. Down the road, a hostile world will require him to make a foreign-policy decision with no good option, only a choice among bad options, in the face of horrific consequences if he is wrong — and we haven’t a shard of evidence that he is able to do that. Worst of all, he will come to those pivotal moments serenely confident that whatever he decides will work out.
How do I think about the Obama presidency as I look ahead? I’m scared stiff.
— Charles Murray is W. H. Brady scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
