Two days ago I wrote a post on why Obama should be taken seriously in which I said, among other things, that Obama is an “excellent, ruthless, and very smart politician.”
Many commenters disagreed, which has happened every time I’ve made such an assertion, and I’ve made it quite a few times.
Now, I can take disagreement; if I couldn’t, I’d better get out of the blogging biz. And of course I respect your right to disagree, yada yada yada. But I’m going to make another effort to convince those who disagree, or at least make an attempt to clarify a bit more about the reasons behind my assertions.
First, let’s look at one of the comments on that earlier thread (from commenter “Ann”):
I noted in that article you linked to that Emil Jones Jr., a Democratic mover and shaker in Illinois and one of the two people Palmer came in behind in that Congressional primary, became Obama’s mentor after Obama was elected to fill Palmer’s Illinois Senate seat. Which leads me to wonder if he had a hand in how Obama dealt with Palmer and how much of Obama’s subsequent political moves were influenced by Jones. Wikipedia says that he played a large part in Obama’s 2004 election as U.S. senator, for instance.
I do believe Obama is totally without scruples, but I’m loath to give him credit for anything more than average smarts, so I hope I’m not just grasping at straws here!
Ann presents a plausible theory, one of many variations on the “Obama’s nothing special; he’s more or less a puppet” theme.
I’ve read a great deal about Obama—not just his national political career or his early life, or even his schooling, but his early- and mid-adult career trajectory. A lot of this reading is a bit rusty, since I did it mostly in 2008, and some of the articles have (interestingly enough) disappeared, most particularly a long April 3, 2007 Chicago Tribune piece called “Obama knows his way around a ballot,” about Obama’s very first political primary, the one in which he showed his stuff by disqualifying Alice Palmer and three other candidates and ran unopposed. [UPDATE: The article appears in a PDF file here.]
The impression I get—and it’s a very strong one—is of a smart and ruthless guy who knows exactly what he wants to do, and who it is who will be able to best help him along the way. And yes, Democratic “operatives” assisted and advised him (although Emil Jones didn’t get into the act till later), but Obama was in charge.
Again, to clarify: when I say “smart,” I’m not talking about book-smart, although I think Obama has quite a fair amount of that sort of intelligence as well, nothing extraordinary but certainly enough to get through college and Harvard Law on his own steam (although his election as Law Review President was more of a popularity contest). And yes, as he himself has acknowledged, affirmative action was operating to give him a significant amount of help. But a person still has to meet some sort of minimal standard, and I believe Obama had no trouble doing that.
But that is not the same as saying he is especially gifted academically. Where I think Obama is extremely gifted is about politics, in particular propaganda and the use of his own persona to appeal to the public and to further his goals and those of his helpers and supporters. And yes, let me reiterate that he certainly did not do it alone; he has had helpers and supporters along the way, and almost certainly was long ago recognized by the left as their perfect instrument—and a not-unwilling one at that, being a leftist himself.
Many many people who met him way back then recognized his enormous political potential, almost on a visceral level—you either feel it or you don’t. One of the most interesting things about Obama’s early resume is how many people who met him would be struck almost immediately by the thought “this man could be the first black president!” Much of the time they mention (I don’t have a lot of cites, because I read most of this a long time ago) that they don’t even know why; something about his demeanor plus of course his race. The thought just seems to hit them like a bolt out of the blue.
David Brooks famously talked about his own version of it when he spoke as though he were enamored of the crease in Obama’s pants on first meeting him:
I remember distinctly an image of””we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”
This is bizarre, but it is also no accident; Obama knows that a little tailoring goes a long way. But I don’t think Brooks is that stupid, either; it wasn’t really the pants leg, although it helped. In the same piece, the fact that Brooks and Obama were talking about Edmund Burke is mentioned, and Brooks is quoted as later saying, “Obama sees himself as a Burkean,”
Why is that significant? Not because Obama is a Burkean, which I highly doubt, but because Brooks is. In a book I happen to own called Why I Turned Right, Brooks chronicles his own political journey from left to right (or semi-right, or middling, or pretend-right, or whatever Brooks is these days) and makes it clear that Burke was instrumental in Brooks’ own political change, and that he considers himself to be an “inner Burkean.”
So it wasn’t just about the pants crease, although that’s a particularly silly part of the Brooks infatuation with Obama. That vision was embedded in a larger conversation about Burke, one of the ways to Brooks’ heart.
How did Obama know this would be so? Perhaps he studied up on Brooks before the interview. Perhaps it was Brooks who brought up Burke. Whatever it was, Obama demonstrated enough knowledge or surface-knowledge on the subject of Burke to not only convince Brooks (who, whatever you think about him, has studied Burke in some depth) that Obama knew a lot about Burke but that he was himself a Burkean and therefore a kindred spirit with Brooks.
Why am I going into this in such exhaustive detail? It’s not because I think Brooks is so important. It’s because I think Brooks’ experience is probably typical, and it demonstrates several things. One is that Obama has enough intelligence to do this and do it well—whether it’s at the behest of others or his own idea. He has to be able to perform this way and impress his listener, and whether he studies up on each subject or not, and whether it’s his own idea to do so or not, he has to have the intelligence to pull it off and the ability to maintain his calm while doing so. The other is that the Brooks incident is highly unlikely to be unique; it’s a clue to how Obama works his magic. He has probably done a version of this thousands of times to thousands of people—or, rather, to many millions of people, if you count the general public. When he says he’s a “blank screen” on which people project what they want to see, he’s being misleading—he actually cleverly fills in that blank screen with what people want to see, an ever-shifting picture that fits what he perceives to be their desires and interests of the moment.
The late Tony Blankely saw this clearly quite early in the game. On the occasion of Obama’s first inauguration he wrote (and please do yourself a favor and read the entire essay):
President Obama is a beguiling but confounding figure. As he has said of himself: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” (”The Audacity of Hope.”) It is indeed audacious that he should proclaim this consciously disingenuous attribute. And, as one reads his inaugural address, it is hard not to conclude that it was shrewdly crafted to perpetuate such confusion.
Run-of-the-mill politicians try to hide their duplicity. Only the most gifted of that profession brag that they intend to confound and confuse the public. Such an effort is beyond ingenious – it is brazenly ingenuous.
These abilities are not ordinary, and they take intelligence, although it’s not necessarily the type of intelligence we want to see in our politicians.
But back to “Ann’s” comment and Emil Jones. Years ago I remember reading a lengthy article that described Obama’s early political career, and it mentioned that Jones was very impressed with what Obama had done during the Alice Palmer episode at the very beginning of that career—impressed, that is, with Obama’s boldness and ruthlessness and aggression. It reminded me of nothing so much as The Godfather stories (without the murders), in which the young Don Corleone wows and intimidates others in the mob early on by showing the extreme coldbloodedness of which he’s capable. And there’s never been any suggestion that Jones was behind that part of Obama’s life prior to that election, although he did become his mentor once Obama reached the legislature, and facilitated his political climb after that by directing legislation his way.
I don’t think this is the exact article, but it’s the closest I can find, and I recommend you read it if you haven’t already. A lot of it is about Obama’s early political career in Chicago, and shows what a strong and ruthless character he was from the start, and how many people he alienated along the way. There’s nothing in there that indicates to me that by the time he was running for president (and much earlier) he was not completely his own man. Yes, others saw in Obama an instrument to accomplish their own goals, too. But why do you think that was? It was because he brought his own very formidable political skills, ruthlessness, and savvy to the table. He made a single prominent political mistake, which was to run against Bobby Rush in 2000. But he learned from it, and has made very few since.
We do ourselves no favors underestimating Obama or the left. They are players in the game, and he is a player in the game rather than a puppet.
And let’s not get bogged down by words like “genius” and whether they’re appropriate. You might note that I don’t tend to use that word about Obama except when quoting others, or sometimes with scare quotes. But I don’t minimize Obama’s own capabilities, either. He’s a very gifted guy in a certain direction, one that has paid off for him, big time.
