I, politician
Richard Cohen on Obama’s inscrutability
In the Washington Post Richard Cohen laments the obscurity of Obama’s politics and person, as if there were no distinction between the two, arguing that Obama’s guardedness derives from his father’s desertion and his separation from his mother when she twice moved to Indonesia. Surely there’s a necessary connection between one’s personal experience and their politics, but this seems to be taking it too far. Cohen writes:
Pragmatism is fine — as long as it is complicated by regret. But that indispensable wince is precisely what Obama doesn’t show. It is not essential that he get angry or cry. It is essential, though, that he show us who he is. As of now, we haven’t a clue.
There’s clearly something here, but it’s unclear what Cohen means by “show us who he is.” At its core, I think Cohen and others simply want to know Obama’s value priorities. But for a politician, that question is an interpretative one based on reading the tea leaves of his decisions, not on the way he does or does not ”wince” at the sight of an oil-covered bird or destroyed local economy.
Cohen wants “a sign that this [oil] catastrophe meant something to Obama, that it was not merely another problem that had crossed his desk;” and then connects this seeming lack of concern to an argument that Obama’s pragmatic foreign policy is similarly amoral. If there’s no coherent theme to Obama’s policies, as Cohen argues, which probably is not true, then the there’s no coherent them to Obama’s policies. It’s doesn’t mean he’s obscure; it means he doesn’t have a clear, systematic, rigid political theory.
That is the nature of pragmatism, especially one that deals with problems as they come. It provides useful ideological flexibility, but seemingly sacrifices any undying commit to any (cherished) principle. To throw some arm-chair psychoanalysis back at Cohen, he is projecting onto Obama, wanting the President to be something he’s not, asking him to have a holistic set of principles, when that’s not, I think, who he really is.
But even if Obama is just a pragmatist, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about human suffering in the Gulf. Wouldn’t you be guarded, or “well-defended” as Cohen put it, if you were the most famous person in the world? Isn’t Cohen just saying Obama is a bad politician and not “wincing” or crying for the cameras when it would behoove his poll ratings to do so? The fact that he does not wince, cry or whatever it may be in front of camera doesn’t mean he does not wince or cry in private, and is this strange, exotic figure; it means he does not wince or cry in front of cameras.
There’s the deeper question, of course, that Cohen raises about Obama’s political priorities.
-Jake
Related posts:
- Michael Ignatieff: The philosopher politician
- Ideological branding: Is Obama a centrist pragmatist or a communist?
- Nordic self-respect
- Obama’s change: minor or major?
- In memoriam, G.A. Cohen
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[...] a Foreign Policy in Focus article on the subject, and added some relevant thoughts of his own; Jake defended Obama’s pragmatism and presidential image in the face of national catastrophes against the [...]