Obama 2.0: Hold the Hope But Keep The Audacity Coming

President Obama’s speech accepting the Democratic nomination for re-election was a chastened version of his soaring 2008 rhetoric, now stripped of its more triumphal notes of seismic change and unbounded hope. Then, he promised to conquer America’s stultifying political partisanship, to unite the country in shared purpose, to restore its former prosperity out of crisis, to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. Belying his posture of centrist moderation, he couldn’t help but reveal his ambition: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America”. Last night, after issuing more modest promises, Obama sheepishly asked for more time.

Even the request for more time to let his policies run their course is a mixture of concession and dishonesty. He often spoke in timelines during his campaign, bolstering voter confidence with unambiguous projections regarding a government administered economic resurgence, especially when it came to reigning in ballooning unemployment rolls. Instead of reexamining both the political and macroeconomic theory that generated his predictions, the worldview that drives his policy creation, he has doubled down on his ideological commitments. They have not been repudiated, just stalled. He is not wrong; America is impatient. Even his solicitations of the people are laced with condescension.

Most of the speech suffered from a lack of grandness: it was a typical stump speech, even though speckled with self-aggrandizing comparisons to FDR and Lincoln. He read a laundry list of familiar goals: new regulation, increased government “investment”, the subsidization of “green” energy, reducing hyper-inflationary college tuition, etc. None of these projects seemed to stimulate the economy in their original iterations but they now have a proven track record of deficit creation.

His criticisms of Republicans were wobbly straw men and contentless abstractions-he mocked their ideas (which apparently only amount to tax cuts and incessant deregulation), demonstrating either extraordinary dishonesty in their depiction or a willfully obtuse resistance to understanding them, to taking them seriously. Other times, he pretended they had no new ideas to offer at all, glossing over the fact that they proposed several he has vilified at great length from his bully pulpit. He did not have the heart to call his own ideas new-every one has limits, it would seem.

It is not a finely drawn line but a gaping chasm that distinguishes the courage of principled conviction and sheer ideological exhaustion. This was a man announcing, one tedious bullet point at a time, that he was simply out of ideas, that he had drained his quiver of every arrow. This was a wearisome recapitulation of his original platform, shorn of its once celebratory delivery.

The entire address was oddly, even surreally wrenched from the context of the moment; if heard without any knowledge of the historical circumstances, one would never guess that this was a politician in dire straits, presiding over a wheezing economy and an increasingly disillusioned electorate. He entreated his audience to “choose leadership that has been tested and proven”. He spoke as if his track record spoke for itself, as if the daily financial news cycle wasn’t perpetually churning out gloomy report stacked on top of grim prognostication. This was a speech for the already converted, for unshakable disciples.

Haunting Obama’s every word was the specter of the new jobs report, released only hours after he had finished speaking. As most predicted, the message was deflating: a mere 96,000 jobs added to the payrolls, with both July and June’s numbers significantly revised down. The unemployment rate dipped slightly (8.3-8.1%) but only because so many gave up looking for jobs, the measure of hopelessness apparently rising inversely. Obama’s confidence was reminiscent of the Athenian General Pericles, who after the first hard winter of the Peloponnesian War, spoke of the greatness of Athens, despite its massive losses and degradation. Obama seems oblivious to our country’s mounting crisis, and tone deaf to the citizens’ anxiety about what the future holds, but unlike Pericles, who spoke of the glory of the city, Obama still clings to the sense of his own greatness, his hubris the abiding theme of his speech.

Category: Election 2012