http://www.theweek.com/article/index/97432/Obama_the_TransformerObama the Transformer
This president is breaking the mold—revolutionizing policies and perspectives in Washington and around the world.
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Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Robert Shrum
The pace of change under this president—frequently two or three headline events in a single news cycle—generally crowds out the chance to step back and reflect on the singular nature of Obama's leadership. Yet just look at the past week: Cairo, Germany, then the D-Day commemoration—all banner stories—followed by the front page news that Obama has now decided to take a central role in designing health-care reform instead of leaving the process largely in congressional hands.
The Republican pratfalls make news, too, but not the kind that helps them. (Thus, on Sunday Newt Gingrich reached a synthesis—and what about Newt is not synthetic?—of his one-man dialectic on Judge Sonia Sotomayor. First Newt said she was a "racist," then not. That clash of opposites appears to have yielded Newt's latest smear: that the judge is a "racialist.")
While the Republicans traffic in empty code words and remain mired in old battles, Obama has cast aside the conventional wisdom on a scale not seen since FDR—who often denied he was doing it. For example, Roosevelt never conceded that deficit spending was fueling the New Deal; instead he pledged a formulaic fealty to balanced budgets. (When he actually sought to enact that belief in 1937, a steady recovery was reversed and the country slipped into another steep downturn.)
In contrast, Obama, while accurately blaming the deficit he inherited on his predecessor—all politicians score points when they can—has added hundreds of billions of dollars to the red ink without trying to hide it. He has openly explained that spending is essential to restore demand, with government serving as the economic engine of last resort. He pledges to cut the deficit, but only after economic recovery makes it possible and prudent to do so.
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In taking a different course, the president is already making a profound difference. He reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to Israel in the heart of Arab civilization, while at the same time winning hearts and minds there and across the Islamic world. No wonder Osama bin Laden felt compelled to issue another tape; this president is al Qaida's worst nightmare precisely because he defies stereotypes and, in Lincoln's phrase, "think{s} anew and act{s} anew."
For Obama, that is not an exception but a habit—the most distinctive aspect of his character and his presidency. From economics to foreign policy, reshaping Pentagon priorities in the face of congressional protectionism or promoting a new energy policy in the face of coal state recalcitrance, it's clear that for Barack Obama, the unexamined policy is not worth preserving. In that sense, his lack of experience in the customary cautions of Washington makes him ideally suited to this unprecedented time. Who can imagine Hillary Clinton—or, far more improbably, John McCain—daring so much change in perspective as well as in policy, and on so broad a front?
We're still only at the start. But I suspect that a generation from now Americans will look back on this period as a model of presidential leadership—from a president who consistently broke the mold.
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