Obama 2.0, ready to try politics

Jodi Kantor is unrepentant: Michelle Obama knew what she was letting herself in for. At a lunch held in Kantor’s honour at St. Stephen’s Club in London this afternoon, the New York Times political correspondent said that she had been given access to the First Lady’s staff in the East Wing, and had rendered a fair and accurate portrait of Michelle Obama, who has begun ‘pushing back’ against ‘an independent journalistic project’.
 
According to Kantor, the First Lady is a strong personality, quick to rebuke others but loath to take criticism herself. Obama’s reaction to the publication of ‘The Obamas: A mission, a marriage has inadvertently substantiated Kantor’s claim, with Michelle Obama demanding of a hapless CBS interviewer last week, ‘Who can write about what I feel? Who? What third person can tell me how I feel, or anybody for that matter’. Kantor simply shrugs and says that Michelle Obama will doubtless set the record straight with a ‘definitive memoir’.
 
Kantor’s book itself is an oddity. It’s neither biography, nor political history. Rather, it’s an extended profile of the enigmatic First Couple. Enough has already been written of Kantor and Michelle Obama, particularly of the First Lady’s apparent discomfort with political life and many of her husband’s rougher allies, such as Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs, with whom she has had her differences.
 
The President is more intriguing, or at least more elusive. Some of those who have met Barack Obama say that he’s a cold fish. He is attentive to virtual strangers, they say, but there is, in the words of one former Washington correspondent, ‘no connection, no empathy’.
 
That is surprising when one considers the almost Messianic impact he made on a large swathe of America (and the World) in 2008. Kantor describes this as ‘Obama’s contradiction’: the popular leader who is awkward and introverted by nature. She relates some telling instances of his gaucheness, of which the most memorable is his attempt to woo Wall Street bank chiefs by telephoning them unannounced and saying, ‘This is Barack Obama; I’m just calling to see how you are doing.’
 
It’s a miracle that the bankers didn’t think it a prank. That sort of bizarre interjection would have earned Gordon Brown instant ridicule had he committed it; so Obama should thank the gods that his stars remain in the ascendant — and that so many centrists are willing him to scupper the increasingly reactionary American right.
 
Kantor said today that Obama’s strategists are ‘absolutely thrilled’ by what the Republican Party is doing to itself. Obama will stand for re-election, not as the bipartisan candidate of 2008, but as the opponent of obstructive Congressional Republicans in 2012. Her book charts that progression — and in that sense it’s a testament to the relative failure of his first term and the naivety of his once thrilling mantra: ‘There is no liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.’
 
The paradox of Obama’s electoral success is that he was the politician who rose by disdaining politics. The promise of transformation and unity was a devastating strategy, but the ballot box proved to be its farthest limit. Kantor surveys the Obama Administration’s gruelling struggles against Republicans (and plenty of Democrats) over healthcare reform, energy security, Guantanamo and the fiscal stimulus, and concludes that effective government requires mastery of politics’ darker arts, as does re-election.
 
Obama is not above politicking — as proved by the dubious prizes his aides floated to secure healthcare reform, such as the ‘Cornhusker Kickback’ — and he is apparently determined to wade deeper into the mire on Capitol Hill to win in November. This will disappoint those who trusted that he would rid Washington of intrigue, and Michelle Obama may be foremost among them. The Obamas appeared on Oprah in the early summer of 2011, and Michelle Obama restated her faith:
 
‘I always told the voters: the question isn’t whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we’re ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves. Are we ready for change? Are we ready for sacrifice and compromise, are we ready to make the hard push? Because he’s ready.’
 
Michelle Obama may have been right, but things have changed. On reaching the end of Kantor’s book, you get the impression that the President is ready for something else: he’s ready to try politics. Perhaps tomorrow’s State of the Union address will see the first semblance of Obama 2.0.