Putting Aside Childish Things

Last week, Andrew Sullivan and Ta Nehisi Coates both expressed admiration and appreciation for Obama’s coolness under fire throughout the health care debate, particularly in the month of August.

Ta Nehisi started off by saying,

I don’t want to be led by people who think that “getting angry” is a actual political strategy. I want to be led by a killer. A cold, unemotional, professional killer.

I keep meeting lefties who tell me Obama’s “too soft” with these guys, and I keep looking at them like they’re crazy. I am going to go out on a limb and say that there is something deeper at work here, something beyond the policy fights. I think a lot of us don’t just want Obama to be effective, we want him to exact some measure of revenge. It’s smart to understand the difference between the two, and moreover, how the desire for one can undermine the other.

Then Andrew followed up, noting,

I repeat my belief in the core attraction of Obama’s candidacy and presidency: that he is not engaging in Rove-Morris daily politicking, or descending into the cable news muck. The whole point of the Obama candidacy, in my view, was to help us get past that to a substantive discussion of practical policy decisions which America simply has to face.

And, you know, I get where both are coming from. Certainly part of the promise of Obama’s presidency was to get away from the vicious partisanship of Rovian politics as Andrew points out. But I can’t help wondering whether Obama isn’t overplaying this card a bit to the point that it is hurting him on multiple fronts.

I mean, there is a difference between rising above the fray and refusing to participate in mudslinging and remaining so aloof as to not really appear to be engaged at all to a relatively broad cross-section of the polity (read: not just anxious liberals), which is, frankly, a lesson I’ve learned somewhat recently.

One of the more interesting comments that kept coming up for me around Ted Kennedy’s death was how he was known to duke it out with political opponents in one moment and then be hugging and joshing around with them the next. The lesson here is both one of political ability and Buberian I-and-Thou-ness: Kennedy disagreed with his opponents (sometimes his allies, too), sometimes vehemently, but he also respected and appreciated them, which made his political skirmishes things of honour, not cowardly braying.

Which should not be read as me suggesting that Obama needs to be more like Kenney, per se. Kennedy was a hyper-partisan figure, a Liberal’s liberal, and that just isn’t who Obama is. But there does seem to be a tendency on Obama’s part to act and come across so aloof and so above it all that, despite his best intentions, he doesn’t really seem to view the process as something important, or something in which he is obligated to be involved.

One can be engaged in the political process without stumbling into the pitfalls of its lowest common denominators and that, more than anything, is what the discourse of American politics needs from its participants right now. The quagmire of the health care debate and Obama’s hands-ff approach, his relatively late entry into its fray, and his continued perception of distance from helping to shape setting the parameters is, in many senses, a good example of this strength turned weakness against which Obama and the White House now have to swim upstream.

It also occurs to me that this tendency sort of unintentionally plays into the “fascist”, “socialist”, “communist” monikers that are intensifying in Obama’s direction.

Certainly one doesn’t want to say that this sloganeering is particularly accurate or deserving in terms of Obama’s actions to date. But one can perhaps see how Obama’s approach takes on a feeling of from-up-on-highness that mimics the monolithic historical figures and political apparatus being used in parallel, which certainly wouldn’t aid Obama’s cause in knocking down those arrows.

Democracy is a dirty game, players that come off the field unscathed are generally regarded with a degree of suspicion.

Now, admittedly, it might all seem childish and ridiculous, but this is the political process that Obama has inherited — it is the process of which he ran to be at the pinnacle. And so in many senses, it is Obama’s obligation to demonstrate the means and provide the example of setting aside “childish things”, which, one senses, does not involve ignoring the existence of those childish things altogether.

Tagged as: Andrew Sullivan, obama, Ta Nehisi Coates