Do you agree with this take on Obama's presidency? What are the chances we pull out of this recession/depression during his first term? Is it necessary to have more goodwill among the world community or are we holding our nation back by looking for the approval of foreigners?
So the next new thing is “smart power.” The phrase was sprinkled through Senator Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It means using all the levers of influence — diplomatic, economic, military, legal, political and cultural — to get what you want.
I’ve nothing against smart power, a blend of soft and hard. It’s better than dumb power, of which we’ve had a dose.
Dumb power estranges friends, privileges force, undermines United States credibility and proclaims war without end.
But what I want from the Obama administration is something more than Harvard-to-the-Beltway smarts. I want magical realism.
Seldom has so much hope confronted so much anxiety as in these five days before Barack Obama becomes the 44th president and the first African-American one.
From the West Front of the Capitol, where he will be sworn in with Lincoln’s Bible beneath his hand, Obama will face Abraham Lincoln, who saved the Union in a war over slavery, and the spot where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. A fuller expression of American possibility at a time of American penury is hard to imagine.
Obama will then move into the White House, which slaves helped build, facing the worst economic downturn since the 1930s.
Reconciliation and transcendence and a reaffirmation of the mythology of American possibility vie with debt, doubt and depression. If they are poised in equal measure, which will prevail?
One thing seems certain: The meltdown is going to hang over at least the first 18 months of the Obama presidency. The Treasury is bare. Americans are deluged in debt. Confidence has been Madoffed.
That’s the realism. But this 47-year-old man of mixed race, whose very name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of a child’s lullaby, has always had something of the providential about him, a global figure who looks more like the guy at the local bodega than the guys on dollar bills. That’s the magic.
He needs this magic, which resonates in a voice with the solemn clarity of a bell. Smart power will not be enough. If it were, Americans would have elected Hillary Clinton president.
But in their abiding good sense, Americans intuited the imperative to reach beyond smartness for some ineffable quality, capable of unifying and inspiring at a time of national and global division.
Inevitably, the nation is looking back to 1932. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his first inaugural, with the economy devastated by the Depression. He also said: “This nation asks for action and action now.”
Action followed — a torrent of legislation and speeches in the first 100 days designed to kick-start the country.
Obama has been vowing a similar flurry, but has also been talking down expectations, saying things are going to get worse. That may be true, but he has to be careful. An excess of realism will undo him.
Two of the greatest weapons he has are language, which he wields better than any recent president, and the bond he has established with the American people. Therein lies the magic. Like fireside-chatting F.D.R., he has to preserve this bond in a direct way or he will fail, because the facts are going to be hard.
That task begins with his inaugural speech. After eight arid years under a leader, President George W. Bush, who could not find within himself a solitary phrase to touch the soul, Americans’ thirst to be uplifted is great.
Obama has to lay out a vision that goes beyond the war on terror and draws the partners of a re-imagined United States, less powerful but still indispensable, into a shared push for greater prosperity and security.
When you’re down, you need friends. Clinton was right to say, “We must build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries.” She might have added, especially in the Muslim world.
A good starting point would be the realization that the very barrier-breaking technology that helped America to the zenith of its post-cold-war power has now democratized knowledge in ways the United States cannot control. The world view shaped in the Middle East by Al Jazeera is not amenable to Western logic. It has its own.
Wealth has also migrated to an archipelago of new powers, including Brazil, Russia, China, India and the Gulf states.
This scattering of power demands a new U.S. humility, but there is still no idea as compelling as the American embodied in Obama’s rise. Only if he can harness the magic of that to new realism can he summon the energy to overcome America’s crisis. Smart power alone cannot usher in the postponed promise of the 21st century.
Gandhi, asked what he thought of Western civilization, replied, “I think it would be a good idea.” Obama could do worse than place on his new desk the words of another Indian-born man, a novelist of magical realist power, Salman Rushdie: “This may be the curse of the human race. Not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.”
