The Obama Enigma

by Herbert I. London
December 1, 2008 at 5:30 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/116/the-obama-enigma

President elect Barack Obama is an enigma, despite the fact he has gone through a grueling two year campaign for the presidency.  The sealing of his birth certificate, Columbia and Harvard transcripts and even his baptismal certificate suggest he has something to hide. However, all of that is probably behind us now.

What lies ahead is another enigma.  Is Barack Obama a pragmatist who merely used affiliations with his church, community groups and questionable friendships to advance his career or is he an ideologue who was influenced by Farrakhan, Ayres, Wright, Khalidi and others of that ilk?

If the first, then many (most?) of the promises made during the campaign will have to be postponed or forgotten.  Realists in the Obama camp, even the Keynesians, know that raising taxes in a recession only exacerbates economic conditions.  Also, an attempt to redress the structural dislocation of some workers by redrafting trade agreements such as NAFTA is the equivalent of a 2009 Smoot-Hawley tariff.

The question therefore is will Obama tack to the center or will he by nature, inclination and association continue to advocate a redistributionist psychology.  In most circles, there is the hope that Obama will say whatever is necessary to advance his position, but will not veer to an extremist stance.

There are constituencies in the Democratic party, however, that got Mr. Obama to where he is and expect to be rewarded.  Union leaders want to abandon the secret ballot; ACORN and other community groups expect to receive large government grants; the teachers’ unions expect significant allocations for education; welfare organizations expect tax standards that encourage “spreading the wealth around.”  These groups will have to be taken into account or an internal revolt in the Democratic party might ensue.

Can Obama steer a course between pragmatic policy decisions and ideological commitment? Will he address these claims through some compromise or will they end up undermining his goals?

As both the candidate and his policy perspectives are largely unknown, the resolution of this dilemma remains up in the air.  Moreover, while President elect Obama has displayed the temperament of a patient man during the campaign, it is not at all clear what he will do in the White House when the pressure is far more intense than the campaign trail.

Additionally, will President Obama withdraw from Iraq in fifteen months as he promised or will intelligence estimates suggest that such an accelerated move will trigger renewed violence jeopardizing the success achieved with the “surge”?

He will then still have a dilemma, notwithstanding the media possibly giving him a free ride whatever he decides to do.  But expectations among his adherents run high.  A messiah is supposed to move mountains and divide the sea, not simply offer compromises even if those compromises are shaded by elegant rhetoric.

This will not be an easy adjustment for Obama.  After the first year in the presidency, he will no longer be inoculated from criticism because of his race.  And political correctness, in spite of all our pride in such an important racial breakthrough, might wear thin if his policy prescriptions fail, or if the economy, for reasons not even related to his decisions, tanks even further, and a public entranced by Camelot on Lake Michigan will be searching for answers to tough questions.

Clearly one hopes for the best and I certainly want to see Barack Obama succeed, but the questions looming ahead are tricky and the road to the future is mined with traps.

Herbert London is president of Hudson Institute and professor emeritus of New York University. He is the author of Decade of Denial (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2001) and America's Secular Challenge (Encounter Books).

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