It’s easy to understand why Barack Obama’s supporters are so sad to see him leave the White House. Although he wasn’t quite the liberal Reagan he had hoped to become, he was nonetheless an inspiring (for them, anyway) and often successful champion of progressivism—who’s been replaced by Donald Trump. That’s gotta hurt.
Still, some of the responses to his departure and the water-colored memories of his time in office have been ridiculous. Perhaps not as ridiculous as the expectations that greeted him eight years ago, but close.
Consider a New Yorker piece about Obama’s farewell speech in Chicago. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Obama’s speaking style, George Packer suggests that “few lines from Barack Obama’s Presidential speeches stay in mind. For all of his literary and oratorical gifts, he didn’t coin the kinds of phrases that stick with repetition, as if his distaste for politics generally . . . extended to the fashioning of slogans.” The analysis is clear-eyed until Packer explains what the president did instead:
It’s difficult to stuff so much delusion and condescension into such a small space. Obama didn’t “simplify”? That would shock the many strawmen he built. Karl Rove, The Scrapbook, and even the New York Times have pointed out that Obama relied heavily on creating an over-simplified version of his political opponents to knock them down. It’s a familiar “there are some who say that…To them I say” construction that is not inherently dishonest, but which he usually filled in with caricatures.
Simplification isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s good to simplify complex arguments into terms your audience can best understand. But the strawman argument is simplification to the point of misrepresentation.
Packer also seems to believe that Obama sought to persuade without using rhetoric. You can believe, as Packer does, that Obama had no interest in writing memorable lines or using figurative language. But rhetoric encompasses much more than that. Obama has always been celebrated for his oratorical gifts, including turns of phrase and, yes, repetition: “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America”; “If you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor.” And don’t forget that when Hillary Clinton criticized his speeches for their bombast and emptiness during the 2008 Democratic primaries, Senator Obama defended the power of rhetoric in his famous “Just words?” speech.
There is no need to be averse to rhetoric as such. Generally speaking, rhetoric is the art of using language to persuade. If you’re not using rhetoric, you’re not persuading. There is empty or poor rhetoric, of course, but even good and virtuous people deploy some kind of rhetoric, which is why every college composition textbook includes at least one work by Martin Luther King Jr.—not to mention a speech by Barack H. Obama.
And how, exactly, is being aloof from Congress a personal virtue? (Its political shortcomings are clear enough, even to anyone who wasn’t a senator before being elected president.) Does associating with Congress stain one’s moral character? Would maintaining a good relationship with the branch of government to which he had once belonged, and which his own party held for a quarter of his presidency, have threatened Obama’s ability to be a good husband or father? Hurt his golf game? The claim is a weak attempt to salvage respectability from what was only a political and professional failing.
Finally, there is Packer’s suggestion that President Obama’s style was “a form of respect that the citizenry didn’t always deserve.” If only he had seen that we weren’t worthy of such rhetorica—er, persuasive tools as reason and logic. Had he grunted and banged a club against the podium, he wouldn’t have lost both Houses of Congress and Hillary Clinton would be starting her first week in office. This condescension is surprising coming from Packer, who recently wrote an insightful piece about how “Democrats lost the white working class.” Perhaps sentences like this, which elevate the president above the swinish multitude, have something to do with it.
I suppose Packer should get some credit for at least recognizing that Obama had shortcomings. He acknowledges that the president had “difficulty sustaining public support for his program and his party,” and even compares him unfavorably to Lincoln. But Packer sees Obama as President Lear, more sinned against than sinning—or worse, simply too good a man for the nation he tried to lead—so he misidentifies precisely what his failings were, and imagines strengths that did not exist.
Christopher J. Scalia is a writer in Washington.
