Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (4 page)

Obama and Romney

B
arack Obama and Mitt Romney shared little in common, save for love of family, degrees from Harvard Law School, and a mutual disrespect for the ideas and policies espoused by the other. They were both strivers but they came from different generations. Romney was part of the early stage of the baby boom and Obama the very end of that demographic bubble, though Obama seemed more a child of the counterculture sixties than did the straitlaced Romney. They grew up in circumstances that were worlds apart—Romney in privilege and comfort in the American heartland, Obama in far more modest circumstances on the island state of Hawaii and for a time in the exotic environs of Indonesia. Romney was raised in a traditional two-parent household, Obama by an often absent single mother and by grandparents who gave him love and shelter but only humble surroundings. In their early adult years, Obama was a searcher, in quest of his identity as the child of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya. Romney was a striver, the devoted son of a self-made man who had run a Detroit automobile company and was elected governor of Michigan three times. The biggest of all differences were the paths each followed into politics—Obama as a community organizer, and Romney through the world of business and private equity. Beyond their far different childhoods, if there was anything that shaped their distinctly different views of the world, it was this. Obama saw the world through the experiences of Chicago’s South Side and the capacity of ordinary people to challenge established power. Romney saw things from the perspective of a venture capitalist and a business owner. When he talked about the economy, it was through the eyes of those who started and ran businesses, rarely through the eyes of the workers. It was no wonder they had such different solutions to the country’s economic and other problems.

David Axelrod said he told Obama not long after the 2008 election that his Republican opponent in 2012 would be Mitt Romney. Yet as Obama was preparing to take the oath of office for the first time, Romney was thinking about everything but a second campaign. He came out of the 2008 experience
disappointed that he had lost the nomination and dispirited over John McCain’s defeat at the hands of Obama. A person who knew them well said of Mitt and Ann Romney, “They were done.” After that campaign, according to the recollections of a friend, Ann had pulled aside a videographer from the staff. She wanted her views recorded for posterity. Get this on tape, she said. I will never let Mitt run again. We’re done with this. It’s too hard. But it was Axelrod who proved correct. Sometimes political strategists do see the road ahead more clearly than the politicians and their families.

The two protagonists met on the political battlefield of 2012 as representatives of the major political parties in the United States. But their campaign was also a clash between two individuals—one brainy, cool, and seemingly aloof, the other also brainy and with the energy and demeanor of a born salesman rather than a natural politician. But who were they really? Were they both just pragmatic technocrats who thrived on rational analysis, or were they actually closet ideologues coming at each other from opposite ends of the political spectrum? At the start of the campaign many Americans wondered whether they truly knew either man. David Maraniss, who authored a brilliant biography of Bill Clinton and another of Barack Obama that was published in the summer of 2012, wrote, “
As Obama approached the fourth year
of his presidency, many people considered him more of a mystery than when he was elected. This seemed especially true for those who supported him and wanted him to succeed but were frustrated at various points by his performance in office.” For Romney, the 2008 campaign cast its own shadow of uncertainty. He was on the national stage for such a short time that most voters hardly took a measure of him. But for those who had, he was, if not exactly an enigmatic figure, then something of an unknown quantity, in large measure because of the contradictions in his own political profile. Was the Romney who had run and lost in 2008 the real Romney or a political poseur hesitant to reveal his true self to the people? Did he have convictions or simply ambitions? Answers to questions about each candidate became part of the calculus of the election.

•   •   •

If Americans wondered exactly who Barack Obama was, it was in part because he seemed to hold himself at bay as president. He almost always spoke, in formal and some informal settings, with the aid of a teleprompter, though he could be an effective extemporaneous speaker. An Obama friend once suggested to me that the teleprompter was a perfect metaphor for the president, a physical symbol of how he kept the world at arm’s length. He was famous for not enjoying schmoozing with other members of Congress. He despised what he once called the “Kabuki dance” of Washington—the political posturing before serious work can begin. He was impatient with the petty niceties of the
capital, as well as the incessant chatter of the cable and Twitter culture. Like all other politicians he took energy from crowds, but he was no Bill Clinton along a rope line. As a politician he seemed dependent on a very small number of people. He was not really the product of the Chicago political machine, though his Republican opponents always like to say he was. During his rise to power, and particularly his run for the White House, he was not identified with any particular constituency or group or faction in the party, whether organized labor or party centrists, though he took advantage of those drawn to him. His ties even to the institution of the Democratic Party were minimal. The enterprise he oversaw politically—whether known as Obama for America or Organizing for America—was first and foremost about the care and feeding and protection of Barack Obama.
The
Washington Post
’s Scott Wilson
, in an article headlined “Obama, the Loner President,” wrote that Obama maintained “a political image unattached to the racial, ethnic and demographic interests that define constituencies and voting blocs.” There is another way to put it, as someone did to one of the most senior officials in the Obama White House during the transition after the 2008 election. This person said of Obama, “This guy travels light.”

Until after he was elected president and real biographies finally appeared, Obama had largely written his own story. What people knew about him pre-politics—particularly his youth—came almost entirely from Obama. Most of that was from the autobiographical book
Dreams from My Father.
An elegantly written memoir published before he was a public figure, it was largely, but not entirely, a work of nonfiction. His unusual upbringing fed right-wing conspiracies that he was Muslim, not Christian, and that he was born in Kenya or somewhere else, not in the United States. When Obama chose to tell the story of America, he invariably put himself in the middle of it. When John Kerry asked Obama to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, his first instinct was that he would use his own story to deliver the message of unity that he wanted to give that night.
Dreams from My Father
is also a reminder that while he owed a debt to trailblazers before him, he was very much a singular character who made his own way. If he kept his distance from almost everyone, it was because he had learned to rely on himself. His mother may have been the single greatest influence on him, but he had found his own path and his own identity. Though he had a few close friends and he listened to a handful of trusted advisers, his greatest confidence was in himself. I once asked him what was the best advice he had received during the last months of 2006 when he was consulting with close friends and advisers about whether he should run for president. “Well,” he replied, “I would have to say it was advice I gave to myself.”

Obama also remained politically opaque to many people. Just how liberal was he? Was he the Barack Obama who as a candidate for the U.S. Senate opposed the Iraq War, or the Obama who in 2008 favored escalating the war in Afghanistan? Was he the president who bragged about ending two wars, or the president who ordered a dramatic increase in the use of unmanned aerial drones to hunt down and kill enemies? Was he the president who pushed for the biggest social program since the Great Society (the Affordable Care Act), or the president who made clear his ambivalence about a public option as part of his health care reform? Did his long period of reluctance to embrace same-sex marriage reflect a person genuinely wrestling with a difficult decision, or a politician afraid to say what he really believed? Was he someone willing to take on the toughest of fights for his agenda, or a president too willing to cave in to pressure from Republicans?

In his first campaign, he presented two faces to the country. The first was the Obama who sounded the call to turn the page on a poisonous chapter in its political history, to move beyond the old quarrels and transcend the politics of polarization. It was that Obama who struck such a chord, starting in 2004 and throughout his presidential campaign. Even Republicans were drawn to him, particularly in those flush days in early 2008. But he was also a candidate whose policy sympathies leaned distinctly toward liberalism, and his Senate voting record was among the most left-leaning in the chamber. He saw a role for government to attack and solve problems, though he managed to shade his proposals enough to leave room for different interpretations as to just where he stood ideologically. He could support a national health care bill but oppose an individual mandate, as he did in his first campaign. This was not an electoral pose. It was a trait evident in Obama much earlier. When the nuclear freeze movement arose while he was a student, he embraced nuclear nonproliferation and negotiations with the Soviets rather than the freeze. His first campaign for president was masterful for never having to square the circle between the aspirations of someone calling for a new politics and the one advocating ideas that might fit comfortably as part of the old liberal politics. In office, the questions persisted: Who was Obama? Was he the transcendent politician who talked about moving beyond red and blue America to find a new consensus, or was he actually a closet liberal with an agenda to extend government’s reach at every opportunity? The most conservative of Republicans believed they knew the answer. They thought he was a socialist. Liberals, however, were far from sure he was even a real liberal.

One of the most thoughtful efforts
to understand Obama’s worldview and intellectual underpinnings as a new president was a work published in 2011 by Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg entitled
Reading Obama: Dreams,
Hope, and the American Political Tradition
. Kloppenberg argued that Obama was difficult to decipher because people were trying to understand him through conventional lenses. “His approach to politics seems new only to those who lack his acquaintance with the venerable traditions of American democracy: respect for one’s opponents and a willingness to compromise with them,” he wrote. “His commitment to conciliation derives from his understanding that in a democracy all victories are incomplete. In his words, ‘no law is ever final, no battle truly finished,’ because any defeat can be redeemed and any triumph lost in the next vote. Building lasting support for policies and substantive changes is not the work of months or even years but decades.” Kloppenberg went on to write that Obama was steeped in the history of America but that he did not draw on the same things many Democrats had drawn on in the past. Obama’s thought process was a reflection of what Kloppenberg called “profound changes in American intellectual life” after Obama was born. “Obama’s ideas and his approach to American politics have thrown political observers off balance,” he wrote. “His books, his speeches and his political record make clear that he represents a hybrid of old and new, which explains why he puzzles so many contemporaries—supporters and critics alike—who see him through conventional and thus distorting lenses.” Kloppenberg’s analysis is based, as the title suggests, mostly on a careful reading of Obama’s writings and on some of the known history of him before he became president. As such, it was insightful but incomplete. Like many other people who watched Obama’s rise to the presidency, Kloppenberg was struck by the new leader’s seeming commitment to negotiation, conciliation, and compromise. He wrote, “Obama’s commitments to philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy—to building support slowly, gradually, through compromise and painstaking consensus building—represent a calculated risk as political strategy. It is a gamble he may lose. But it is not a sign of weakness, as his critics on the right and left allege. It shows instead that he understands not only the contingency of cultural values but also how the nation’s political system was designed to work. Democracy means struggling with differences, then achieving provisional agreements that immediately spark new disagreements. . . . His predilection to conciliate whenever possible is grounded in his understanding of the history of American thought, culture and politics.”

In December 2008, I interviewed President-elect Obama at his transition headquarters in Chicago. I noted that he had announced his candidacy on the grounds of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln had given his famous “House Divided” speech, and would be following some of the same route Lincoln took as he made his way to Washington for his first inaugural. How did Lincoln inform his view of the presidency? I
asked. Lincoln, he said, was his favorite president, though he did not want people to believe he was drawing an equivalency between himself and the sixteenth president. Then he offered a revealing window into his own thinking about leadership and power. “What I admire so deeply about Lincoln,” he said, “number one, I think he’s the quintessential American because he’s self-made. The way Alexander Hamilton was self-made or so many of our great iconic Americans are, that sense that you don’t accept limits, that you can shape your own destiny. That obviously has appeal to me given where I came from. That American spirit is one of the things that is most fundamental to me and I think he embodies that. But the second thing that I admire most in Lincoln is that there is just a deep-rooted honesty and empathy to the man that allowed him to always be able to see the other person’s point of view and always sought to find that truth that is in the gap between you and me. Right? That the truth is out there somewhere and I don’t fully possess it and you don’t fully possess it and our job then is to listen and learn and imagine enough to be able to get to that truth. If you look at his presidency, he never lost that. Most of our other great presidents, there was that sense of working the angles and bending other people to their will—FDR being the classic example. And Lincoln just found a way to shape public opinion and shape people around him and lead them and guide them without tricking them or bullying them, but just through the force of what I just talked about—that way of helping to illuminate the truth. I just find that to be a very compelling style of leadership. It’s not one that I’ve mastered, but I think that’s when leadership is at its best.”