In yesterday’s thread about Joe Biden, the name of Barack Obama came up. There was a dispute in the comments about just how in charge Obama is right now, and also about how much in charge Obama was during his own administration. The latter question was one that was discussed and argued about quite often on this blog during Obama’s two terms, and I always took the position: very much in change.
So since the question is – alas – newly relevant, I thought I’d republish one of those old threads. Here it is.
Commenter “FOAF” writes:
Neo, I have always known how intensely you dislike Obama. If anything you despise him even more than I do and that’s saying a *lot*. But you seem to be according some kind of regard for his abilities that some of us do not feel is warranted.
One thing that has always maddened me about Obama apart from the obvious points of his ideology and personality/character is that he had almost no substantive accomplishments in his life prior to his election as POTUS. Yes he was a “community organizer” but what did he actually do as such? Nearly everyone here equally loathes the real community organizer Saul Alinsky. But regardless of that, the things Alinsky did entailed some degree of planning and organization ”“ activities that are notably lacking in Obama’s pre-POTUS resume. And I suspect that even now his attempts at these are pretty desultory.
First of all, I think it is very dangerous to underestimate your opposition. It does no good whatsoever, and is one of the many reasons Obama has succeeded: his opponents have continually underestimated him in terms of what he can accomplish and how far he is willing to go to accomplish it.
I don’t think I overestimate him, either; I think he has many accomplishments, they’re just not the ones people usually look for in a president. I certainly don’t admire most of these things, nor do I think him an intellectual genius or even a giant. I think he’s smart, cunning, and determined, and charming when he wants to be, as well as unprincipled, which can be a pretty powerful combination under the right circumstances.
I don’t mean to say he’s done this alone; not by a longshot. He’s had help, advice, mentors, and supporters, as well as a public primed by the media (both MSM and entertainment), the press, and academia. But he is also an expert at three things in particular: presenting himself as whatever people want him to be, campaigning, and getting and keeping power and pushing for more of it. Those may not be laudable things, but they are important things in the world, and he is excellent at all three. What’s more, his planning and acumen do go back a long way.
No, he doesn’t have many of the conventional accomplishments that historically have qualified a person for the presidency prior to running. He had some credentials in the world, though: Harvard Law, guest lecturer at a prestigious university, community organizer, state legislator, US senator, and had his name on two books as their author. But he has not been a governor, or a US senator for very long, nor has he executive experience of any magnitude. And he certainly wasn’t a general, like Eisenhower or Grant. Obama had other “qualifications,” however.
Obama has long reminded me of the Godfather figure in the eponymous movie, especially in his rise. No, I don’t mean Obama is a murderer or even particularly crooked compared to the general run of politicians. But way back before Obama was elected, when I was first learning about him, I read up on his past and got a cold, cold chill. I’ve written about these things before, of course: remember the Alice Palmer incident, which occurred right at the very start of Obama’s political career? Or Blair Hull and Jack Ryan? (If you don’t recall, please read the links to refresh your memory).
These were not accidents. Although Obama probably did not work alone—he always had help—he was cunning, ruthless, smart, manipulative, charming when he needed to be and nasty when that was required. He amassed power and status, and mowed anyone down who was in a position to stop him.
Except for Bobby Rush. Taking him on was Obama’s one mistake. But he learned from it and never made a similar mistake again, or really any mistake of any consequence (and if you think things like mispronouncing “corpsman” are of consequence to anyone inclined to vote for him, I think you’re wrong).
During the 2008 presidential campaign, many people on the right were paying so much attention to Obama’s leftist confederates and acquaintances—Ayers, Reverend Wright, Frank Marshall Davis—that they had less energy for what Obama himself had actually done—his astounding rise, and who he had crushed along the way, and how.
Take the matter of Emil Jones. If you want to learn a lot about the sort of operator Obama was back in his early political days in Chicago, you’d do well to read this, which also goes into the way that Emil Jones greased the skids for Obama by handing him legislation on a silver platter, and how angry Obama got when anyone suggested he hadn’t accomplished this on his own. And that article I just linked was written by an Obama admirer; I can only imagine what detractors would have written. This information was in the public domain prior to the 2008 election; wonder why so few people have heard of this stuff?
Or how about this, which was also written before the 2008 election and, although something of a puff piece, still contains some clues to Obama’s rise and how he engineered it with Jones’ help and his own cold-blooded ambition. After the Democrats finally won control of the Illinois state legislature after years in the wilderness of Republican domination, Obama went to the newly-minted Majority Leader Emil Jones (whom he had carefully cultivated even before he was elevated to that position) with a proposition:
…[Obama] went to see Jones with a big idea. By that point the two men had known each other for the better part of 20 years, but theirs had not always been an easy relationship. They had first met in the mid-1980s, when Obama, as a community organizer on the far South Side, had seen Jones as an “old ward heeler”…
Jones, a chain-smoking, gravelly voiced, unvarnished throwback to the era of the old Daley machine, was wary of Obama, a freshly minted agitator from Columbia University. Obama and other community activists “were in-your-face types [said Jones to the reporter]. I happened to see them out there one day. And I told them, I said, “˜You don’t gotta be outside. Come on in the office.”
A friendship was born. A decade later, after returning to Chicago with a law degree and the mantle of first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama won his own state-senate seat, taking the place of an incumbent [Alice Palmer] who had decided to run for Congress, placed a distant third in the Democratic primary, changed her mind, and – with Jones’s help – tried to run for her old seat after all. Obama’s team, in a move as bold as it was adroit, challenged her nominating petitions and managed to keep her name off the ballot.
Let’s pause for a minute to understand what was happening. Obama had met Jones before he even went to Harvard Law, and at first Jones and Obama were mutually distrustful but then struck up a friendship. But during Obama’s first run for office years later, Obama pulled a really nasty but very effective power move on Jones’ favored candidate, Alice Palmer, and won. This (as I read in more detail in another article that unfortunately I can’t seem to locate right now) really impressed Jones and made him realize that Obama was no soft law school prof but one of the more hardened and ruthless pols around, even though he was just beginning in the trade. The Alice Palmer gambit was what I call Obama’s Godfather move, and Jones understood that he was in the presence of a man with certain gifts: the ability to look like a nice guy and yet who had no reluctance to mow people down, even former friends and mentors, when he needed to do so to get ahead.
To continue:
Obama arrived in Springfield and told Jones, then the minority leader, that he wanted to “work hard.” He promptly became Jones’s point person on a number of tricky issues, including ethics reform. Now, with Jones elevated to the senate presidency, Obama was approaching him with a cold-eyed proposal.
“After I was elected president, in 2003, he came to see me, a couple months later,” Jones recalled, relishing the tale. “And he said to me, he said, ”˜You’re the senate president now, and with that, you have a lot of pow-er.” Jones stretched out the word, as if savoring the pleasure of it, and his voice became very quiet as he continued: “And I told Barack, ‘You think I got a lot of pow-er now?,’ and he said, ‘˜Yeah, you got a lot of pow-er.’ And I said, ‘˜What kind of pow-er do I have?’ He said, ‘You have the pow-er to make a United States sen-a-tor!’ Jones let out a soft, smoky laugh. “I said to Barack, I said, ‘˜That sounds good!’ I said, ‘˜I haven’t even thought of that.’ I said, ”’Do you have someone in mind you think I could make?,’ and he said, ”˜Yeah. Me.’”
Jones let the words hang for a moment, and then went on. “The most interesting conversation. And so I said to him, ”’Let me think about this.’” Obama knew that Jones’s support could single-handedly freeze the discretion of other powerful politicians in the state, and put endorsements of possible rivals on ice. “We met a little later that day, and I said, ”’That sounds good. Let’s go for it.’”
Jones gave legislation to Obama that other people had worked on for years, and that (as this article I linked previously made clear) frustrated and angered a lot of legislators who had done the actual work on the bills and had to watch as Obama got the glory instead of them. Obama, the freshman, knew exactly how to work Jones, who’d been doing this for years, and Jones knew a fellow master manipulator of power when he saw one.
Todd Purdum, author of the Vanity Fair piece, is an admirer of Obama. But he noticed something important about how Obama got to the top, and how his ability to hide his ruthless nature (Purdum calls it Obama’s “toughness”) behind a mild facade helped him get there and get there fast:
The rare talent is to wear ambition lightly, and to allow toughness to be taken for granted. Obama’s life and career suggest he has that talent – or at least that gift. He long ago decided that he had a chance to make something extraordinary of himself. With a calculating consistency that may not always have been apparent to others, or even sometimes to himself, he set out to do just that. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, a schoolteacher in Hawaii, says simply, “He’s a very cool customer.”
A man like that can do without the usual “accomplishments” ordinarily deemed necessary to reach the presidency.
[NOTE: By the way, according to Purdum, Emil Jones has the Godfather theme as his cell phone ring. And the introduction to this interview with Emil Jones mentions that Obama calls Jones his “political godfather.” Funny how that comparison keeps popping up.]
[Note II: In a related matter, Here is Obama’s description of the method by which Harvard Law Review editors were chosen at the time he attended.]