Ha! Of course not. But Matt Bai’s interview with John Podesta in the New York Times today offered an interesting argument (bordering on the politically scientific variety) about President Obama’s declining popularity. Essentially, he argues, Obama has chosen to be primarily a “legislative President,” which has led to him looking ineffective. I want to discuss this, but not yet. Instead I want to highlight another aspect of his argument, which is that although Presidents must engage with legislative initiatives (if they have any policy profiles whatsoever), there is usually a more rhetorical goal (e.g., Reagan’s “It’s Morning in America”). This is rather along the lines of the George Lakoff inspired “framing” argument, but it is noticeable that Obama has been largely a technocratic president, belying (right wing) campaign fears that he would be (left wing) ideological.
I’m less interested in the “framing” debate, not because I don’t think communication is important, but because it is either rendered in implausible psychological categories (Lakoff’s father figure), or reduced to an echo chamber relationship between the president, the media, and the public. While there is value in the latter as a sociological description, it is too “agnostic,” and seems to suggest that framing devices are only as good as they are effective — in other words, Presidential communication has nothing to do with helping the public realize its own interests and collective ambitions, but is a mere fiction allowing lawmakers to pass laws according to their own judgement of the public good (or whatever). However: President Obama’s unwillingness to articulate a “loftier” goal has been frustrating, not because I want him to adopt the cynical “framing” strategy, but because by ignoring it he seems to confirm the cynicism of “framing”: the communication of political ideals must, by its very impossibility, be a cynical act.
If I had to take a stab at what the Obama presidency is “about,” in some larger thematic, I would say it is a logical extension of the Presidency of Bush the Younger. Analogous to Clinton’s deregulation or Reagan’s optimism is Bush’s security — particularly national security, but also against any threat which could be identified so as to bolster the administration’s domestic and foreign agendas. Obama has essentially expanded this approach to energy, the economy, and health care: his most important agenda items have emphasized staving off imminent threats to the collective well-being. He has not emphasized the same foreign-policy security issues that George W. Bush did (though he has been as alarmist as every Republican can and every Democrat must), but the climate of emergency has hardly dissipated: environmental degradation, the economy, and nuclear proliferation have assumed the eschatological proportions that Al Qaeda and Iraqi WMD did in the Bush administration. This is the security presidency part II.
