Larvatus Prodeo

Writing in the always fabulous London Review of Books, David Bromwich has a very interesting argument on why Barack Obama has been something of a disappointment. Though Bromwich’s political commitments are fairly well known – at least to readers of HuffPo – his critique isn’t particularly ideological. Rather, Bromwich, a Professor of Literature at Yale, encapsulates Obama’s political failings rather more astutely than a lot of professional observers of political strategy. The whole argument is worth reading, but the kernel of it is the observation that Obama consistently underestimates the forces ranged against him, and that he becomes mired again and again in role confusion – inspirer-in-chief tends to trump politician in a predictable pattern.

It may be that this is actually inherent in the American system of government – it’s a very difficult balancing act for one figure to be simultaneously symbolic head of the nation and executive of the political state. It’s pretty clear, too, how the particularity of Obama’s identity can be mobilised by the Fox News noise machine to disrupt the first identification, leading the President to spend far too much time rising above politics rather than practising it. It’s always going to be more difficult for a president of the centre-left to straddle this divide, but as Bromwich suggests, it’s rather puzzling that a man as intelligent as Obama goes on making the same mistake again and again.

Update: In the New York review of Books, Michael Tomasky writes on the right wing street protests and the noise machine, and Elizabeth Drew examines Obama’s performance in office through the prism of the healthcare debate:

In fact, the question has arisen of whether Barack Obama’s particular—one might say idiosyncratic—governing style is right for these times.