Barack Obama may be overly fond of apologizing for past mistakes, but he does seem sincere in his expressions of love for America. He evinces a strong sense of our history and understands the special role the nation plays in the world.
After all, how could Obama not love the country that produced him?
The question now isn’t whether Obama loves America, but whether he likes it.
The president established the motif for the current awkward adolescence of his administration when he told Diane Sawyer that he would rather be a “really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”
Many have noticed that the president left out a third possibility – that he would be neither really good nor re-elected.
Obama means to show that he cares more about fixing the nation than pursuing his personal ambitions. But the message that comes through is that he is going to fix your problems whether you like it or not.
The president has talked time and again about the need to bring change even when people resist it. He describes anxious, fearful Americans misled by Republicans and cable news anchors. He expresses sympathy for those who aren’t able to taste the clear, cool wisdom pouring from the presidential font.
Obama is dabbling with populism, but that’s really not his scene. He doesn’t want to be an instrument of the public’s anger with Washington; he wants to re-direct, dissipate and eventually quash that anger.
But the nation is crying out for a new Andrew Jackson – a giant who rises up among the common people and uses their outrage to thrash the establishment in Washington.
Obama is more like Jackson’s archrival, Henry Clay.
Old Hickory didn’t care what congressional insiders and Philadelphia bankers thought about his plans. Obama, by contrast, cares deeply about the opinions of smart people in Washington and on Wall Street. It’s the voters and their backward ideas about health care, taxes and energy who he’s ready to take on.
Like Clay, Obama would rather be right than president.
Clay is not an obvious analogue for Obama.
Clay spent 24 years in Congress and produced some of America’s most consequential legislation. Obama served a half term in the Senate and marks as his greatest accomplishment a modest reworking of lobbying rules.
But where they align is on their attitudes about the electorate.
In Clay’s speech in defense of the Compromise of 1850, which established the limits for expanding slavery in the west and staved off the Civil War for another decade, he acknowledged that what appeals in Washington sometimes repels voters.
He took self-pitying comfort in the knowledge that he was right, even if he had been denied the presidency five times before.
Clay mostly blamed his ills on the populist political movement led by his nemesis, Jackson. And while Clay may have represented Kentucky, his real constituency was his fellow members of Congress.
First elected to the House at age 38, Clay is the only person to be chosen speaker on his first day. He was the first person to lie in state at the Capitol.
But Clay, son a wealthy Virginia preacher, could not make the connection with voters that undergirded the political careers of war hero Jackson, Old Hickory’s acolyte James Polk or even fellow Whig William Henry Harrison.
When he learned he lost the Whig nomination for the 1840 election to Harrison, Clay is said to have cursed his friends for putting his name forward and called himself “the most unfortunate man in the history of parties.”
He died two years after the Compromise of 1850 thinking himself a martyr for the Union, his own ambitions done in by a fickle electorate that could not comprehend a statesman’s service.
Clay’s great admirer, Abraham Lincoln, understood the power of public sentiment in a way Clay did not, which allowed Lincoln to finish the work of preserving the Union.
Lincoln’s understanding grew out of affection. Like Jackson, he had come from the same hardscrabble life as most voters and had an appreciation for the wisdom of common people.
Obama has sympathy for Americans, but not much appreciation for their wisdom.
The president may wear his sinking approval ratings as a badge of courage, but as Lincoln and Jackson proved, real change comes from Americans, not to them.
