Obama the Margarine Moderate

Like margarine, Obama has been pretending to be something he's not: a moderate. If the president hopes to be reelected in 2012, he will need to start delivering on his promise to lead from the centre.

The American voters gave President Barack Obama a good, old-fashioned political whooping last week. In a stunning political reversal, Mr. Yes We Can became Mr. Why Don’t They Appreciate Me? Obama now has an important lesson to learn from this political drubbing. To redeem his presidency, he must do what he originally promised to do: lead from the centre, with substance and humility.

The rise of the Tea Party, the loss of many moderate Democrats in swing districts, and the re-elections of many leading liberals has led some politicos to conclude that Americans do not want centrist leadership. This conclusion reinforces the Fox News/MSNBC view of the world as divided between good people – those who agree with them – and bad partisans – everybody else. What the results really reflect is American structural anomalies, whereby moderates come from divided districts and extremists come from strongly partisan districts. During electoral tidal waves, the crucial swing voters veer left or right, wiping out moderates as extremists triumph.

With the end of the 2010 midterms marking the start of the 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama should be worried that independent voters have abandoned him en masse. It is now clear that the president erred in fighting for health-care reform before lowering the unemployment rate. It is also clear that having the health care reform pass by such a partisan, polarizing vote undermined Obama’s entire presidential leadership project. The 20th century’s two greatest pieces of social legislation – the 1935 Social Security Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act – passed after struggles for bipartisan agreement. That the 21st century’s first great piece of social legislation passed without Republican support reflects Obama’s broader leadership failure.

Obama 2.0 must resurrect one of the most powerful messages – and successful tactics – that propelled his meteoric rise to the presidency: his lyrical centrism. Obama did not just promise “hope and change,” he promised a new kind of politics. In his book Audacity of Hope, Obama positioned himself as a post-partisan centrist who would resist Washington’s divisive and dysfunctional ways. Central to his appeal was his poetic rhetoric and his multicultural nationalism, exemplified by his eloquent denunciation of the red-state-blue-state paradigm in his extraordinary keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention.

Americans did not just hire Obama to be president – they hired him to be that kind of a president, one who would reach out across the aisle, who would sing a song of national unity and purpose that was substantive, pragmatic, and results-oriented, not just lofty and idealistic.

Unfortunately, as president, Obama has changed his rhetoric and failed to reconcile with Republicans. True, Republicans share responsibility for being truculent and obstructionist. But true centrism requires finding that golden path, that middle ground. Instead of delegating the highly partisan Congress to craft the health-care reform, instead of negotiating so desperately to forge his Democratic coalition, Obama needed to secure bipartisan support for such a monumental shift in America’s status quo. The Social Security and civil rights bills were quickly accepted by the public at large, thanks in large part to the consensus-building presidential leadership that ensured bipartisan passage. By contrast, the issue of abortion has festered for decades because the Supreme Court legalized women’s right to choose, circumventing any kind of populist, consensus-building, democratic process.

In the 1950s, Josef Stalin dismissed Mao Zedong as a “margarine Communist.” It was a delicious phrase, capturing the gruff former farm-boy’s disgust for something that imitated something it wasn’t. So far, Obama has been a margarine moderate, making superficial gestures toward dialogue and compromise, then sticking to one side of the aisle.

But Obama still has the time and the national good will to recover. Most Republican campaign commercials targeted Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid, or Big Government, not the president. This is a reflection of Obama’s personal popularity, despite his 55-per-cent negative job-approval rating. Moreover, the economy could still bounce back, unemployment could fall, and the Republicans could self-destruct by misreading this election as an invitation to showcase their extremists.

Political greatness – in fact personal greatness – does not come from winning all the time, but from knowing how to turn devastating defeats into incredible opportunities. The true test of Barack Obama, the president and the man, has begun.

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