With a little more than a year left in his presidency, Barack Obama has lately been in an elegiac mood, projecting a certain nervous confidence—″I’ve got 12 months left to squeeze every ounce of change I can while I’m still in office”—as well as reflecting on the lessons of experience. Most of his remarks have been boilerplate Obama, but one recent interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep struck The Scrapbook as revealing.
Mr. Inskeep, of course, was appropriately deferential to the president—this is National Public Radio, after all—and the questions (and answers) were largely anodyne. But when asked what advice he would offer his would-be successors in the Oval Office, Obama had this to say: “If you are interested just because you like the title or you like the trappings or you like the power or the fame or the celebrity, that side of it wears off pretty quick [sic]. At least it has for me.”
From The Scrapbook’s perspective, this is all too obvious. In a democracy, anybody who pursues public office for the sake of celebrity, or mere self-satisfaction, is bound to encounter resistance and frustration. The thrill of victory, as it were, is soon followed by the agony of defeat; you cannot summon success or popularity with the snap of a finger.
But what, exactly, is Obama saying? Is there a candidate at the moment who seems to be in the contest because he or she likes “the title or . . . the trappings or . . . the fame or the celebrity” of the presidency? More to the point, have we ever had a president who pursued the office for such puerile reasons?
To be sure, all politicians, including our greatest presidents, are creatures of ambition; and it is naïve to suggest that the office seeks the man or that aspirants aren’t motivated by the pursuit of power. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan—all sought power, in their way, and all judged themselves uniquely equipped to lead the country. But their goals were political, not personal, power; even their severest critics would never suggest that their ambition was prompted by a hunger for “celebrity” or because they liked “the title or . . . trappings” of the presidency. And yet, as Obama told Steve Inskeep, all that “[wore] off pretty quick, at least . . . for me.”
In The Scrapbook’s view, this is an especially ironic observation from a president propelled to the White House from his first term in the Senate, whose “hope and change” platform was historically devoid of content, whose churlishness is chronic, who won the Nobel Peace Prize after nine months in office, who is questioned more often by entertainers than by journalists, who accepted his party’s nomination on a neoclassical stage set, and who has raised the standards of presidential narcissism to impressive heights.
Which is to say: For once, Barack Obama’s condescension might well have been aimed, inadvertently, at Barack Obama.
