As President Bush was pardoning a pair of fat turkeys on Wednesday, I tried to imagine Barack Obama doing the same thing.
I have never seen a politician more dignified than Obama, and I imagine it would pain him greatly to be trotted out to the front yard to make cornball jokes about the prize hen and tom that have been brought before him.
Bush seems to genuinely enjoy the folksier aspects of the office, which Obama may abjure. They may not be beneath the dignity of the office, but I suspect it would be beneath his own dignity.
In an Obama Administration perhaps a panel will meet on Thanksgiving week and talk about turkey farming issues, followed by brief remarks from the president on our shared agricultural heritage.
Since based on his cabinet selections so far we can only guess at what path the president-elect will take once in office (Bush’s foreign policy with Bill Clinton’s domestic agenda?), we are left to mostly examine Obama’s considerable style.
It’s what got him elected and it’s what he will continue to rely on once in power.
And it is Obama’s dignity that always comes through – in the slightly uptilt jaw and in the love of the trappings of officialdom. Whether it’s a podium emblazoned with the heretofore-unknown “Office of the President -Elect” or the Doric columns of his acceptance speech stage, Obama’s style runs straight to dignity, perhaps bordering on excessive self-regard.
But it has been Obama’s dignity that allowed him to endure and succeed. He thought enough of himself to refuse to be drawn into the fray with Hillary Clinton or John McCain and won the presidency as a result. Obama behaved as if the campaign itself was an indignity, and looking at it, voters agreed that he was pretty much right.
Turkey pardons and photo-ops aside, how would such a dignified person govern?
We’ve had some pretty august-acting presidents before. George Washington, after all, wouldn’t shake hands.
But in more recent times, our most dignified president was probably Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson disdained the hackery of politics, preferring the intellectual cocoon of Princeton and the company of academics to the greasy ward heelers who he found in New Jersey politics.
But after eight years running Princeton Wilson deigned to serve as the Garden State’s governor in 1910. And when the Republican Party split apart at the seams in 1912 thanks to Teddy Roosevelt and his fellow Bull Moose, Wilson was vaulted forward to the Democratic nomination and the presidency.
The son of a Presbyterian minister and the first native southerner to be elected president since 1848, Wilson was at great pains to preserve his dignity. Aside from the obviously great pleasure he took in baseball, there was little that could break Wilson’s aloof public visage.
Like Obama, Wilson came to office amid a worsening economic crisis and immediately threw himself into finding ways to calm the turmoil. Banking had become unpredictable and reliable credit was in peril.
Wilson changed the way the government dealt with the economy and taxpayers quite thoroughly. He appointed a series of other well-educated sons of the emerging New South to run his treasury department. Under their leadership, America saw established the modern personal income tax and the Federal Reserve System. Wilson tinkered with tariffs, changed anti-trust rules, and re-jiggered the currency in an effort to prime the economic pump. Wilson and Treasury Secretary William McAdoo even shut down the New York Stock Exchange for four months to keep overseas investors from dumping shares.
Wilson called it the “New Freedom” plan and it may have had some success.
But we can’t know exactly how it all would have worked out because the Germans started sinking cruise liners full of Americans as the world went to war.
Wilson had largely left foreign policy to others. He had named two-time Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan as his secretary of state in order to reward him for his electoral support and isolate him politically.
By the time Wilson turned his attention to foreign affairs, the world was already on fire and Europe plunged headlong into the most awful war ever fought.
Wilson spent much of his first term keeping the United States out of World War I, but in his second term he became an ardent internationalist who tried to re-draw the world map and put an end to war forever.
Wilson’s presidency was dominated by events that he could not foresee waiting to take office in the winter of 1912, just as we can’t know what winds will blow through the Obama Administration.
But by looking at the dignified, academic Wilson, we may see how Obama will respond.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected]
