Barack Obama and the Revival of American Democracy

The inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States was an extraordinary moment of pomp and circumstance televised around the world as a symbol of the workings of American democracy.   Despite the festive atmosphere and the distinct sense that Obama's inauguration was a watershed in American and world history, and given its promise of an American renewal, Obama's inauguration address was a sombre recognition of  the challenges that his administration and the country were facing:

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.

Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many, and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable, but no less profound, is a sapping of confidence across our land; a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real, they are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: They will be met.

In these spare brush strokes Obama was able to convey to his audience both his intellectual depth and the clarity of his vision that the most important challenge that the US would face in the immediate future is the recognition of its responsibility to redeem itself from the political, diplomatic, and military blunders and the economic tsunami that were the legacies of the Bush-Cheney administration.

In an address that underplayed the stirring rhetoric which has defined much of Obama's political career, one of the most significant statements was undoubtedly: "We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things." It was a brilliant use of Biblical wisdom to repudiate the Christian theological sophistry that had informed his predecessor's style and substance of governance. However, he was also signalling his recognition that his own inauguration as the first African American President was a sign of American political maturity and the transiton to new era in American political, economic, and cultural life. Just as important, Obama was serving a reminder that his presidential campaign rhetoric calling for a politics of inclusion and change was going to be translated into reality.

This was a speech by a political leader who had been witness to the political paralysis that had overtaken the Clinton presidency during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the consequences of the political polarization that the Bush-Cheney administration pursued after the destruction of the World Trade center on September 11, 2001.

Obama's presidential campaign in 2008 had consciously sought to project the idea of a "new politics" that would overcome the intellectual sterility in Washington and restore effective government through a search for consensus across the political spectrum. His inaugural address provided further testimony to his recognition that the national crisis of economic and diplomatic bankruptcy would require a willingness to engage all stakeholders.

By offering a politics of inclusion, Obama was daring his opponents to exclude themselves from the search for a new social contract - and those opponents would pay the price of irrelevance should they prove unable to rise above the preference for paralysis.

It has become increasingly evident that Obama's charisma and his unflappable demeanour masks a very shrewd political strategist who has shown a willingness to both reshape the political terrain and the rules of the game in contemporary American politics. That sense of strategy was evident throughout the campaign as he invoked Martin Luther King Jr.-"the fierce urgency of now"-to persuade audiences that a time for change had arrived.

That strategic sense is paired with a tactical shrewdness that allowed him to finesse the politics of confrontation in both the Democratic primaries and the general election - thus enhancing his image as a leader open to views from all sides. In effect, by evading conflict he has projected an image of inclusiveness and conciliation as keys to effective governance.

This electoral strategy of finessing political conflict has continued after his inauguration. His willingness to consult with the Republican leadership on the stimulus package, his appointment of Republicans as members of his Cabinet - including the retention of the Bush administration's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates - and his very systematic and public courtship of the Evangelical Christians who have been largely identified with the Republican party,  have burnished his appeal to the wider population even as these initiatives have painted his opponents as petulant and excessively partisan.

The opportunity costs for political paralysis have thus risen in Washington at a time of profound crisis. For the Republican party that had effectively harnessed that paralysis as the basis for their search for control over the federal government from 1994 onward, the Obama election and Democratic control over both the House of Representatives and the Senate has left them marooned - unless its leadership can demonstrate a level of political pragmatism that opens space to work with the Democrats in the national interest. For some Republicans, the idea of co-operation and seeking consensus within a context of Democratic ascendancy constitutes a politics of compromise from a position of weakness.

However, even as some Republicans remain trapped by their ideological paralysis and viscerally opposed to the symbol of transformation that Obama represents, the larger Republican party's recognition of the need for a new politics of its own led to the election in late January 2009 of the first African American chairman of the party in its history.

For the party that had been led by Abraham Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves during the American Civil War, change has been a long time coming and it promises to be a painful gestation process for the current generation of Republican leaders. Since Obama has co-opted the legacies of Lincoln as both an inclusive leader and one committed to national reconciliation, the contemporary Republican party finds itself in a quandary when it seeks a confrontation with him - in whose name and historical legacy can "the party of Lincoln" offer a challenge to Obama?

The reinvention of the Republican party will also require the party to rethink its commitment to the privilege of capital at the expense of the working and middle classes in American life. It is obvious that the Bush tax cuts that benefited the wealthiest Americans helped to fuel the speculative activity that has led to the crisis within the American banking sector.

The recklessness of Wall Street, and the failure of the Bush administration to exercise oversight and enforce accountability in Wall Street's operations, have resulted in the catastrophe which has led the government's increasing role in stabilizing and recapitalizing the banking sector.

For the wags, the Republican party has managed the fastest "transition to socialism" in history using the high priests of finance capital and state intervention in the economy. At a more serious level, just as the Soviet model failed in the 1980s leading to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, the US model of the market economy championed by the Republican party over the last thirty years has been exposed as fundamentally flawed and increasingly unworkable.

The Republican party today faces the re-emergence of the reputation that had haunted it for much of the twentieth century. It was the party which was driven into the political wilderness by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the subsequent onset of the Great Depression which revealed the bankruptcy of the bankers and the party's political leaders. Seven decades later the revelation of Wall Street's folly and penury during the closing months of the Bush-Cheney era has again highlighted the intellectual irrelevance of the Republican party in both national and global politics.

If the Bush-Cheney administration and its grandiose claims to "full-spectrum dominance" over the international order helped to provoke the international alienation from America that emerged after 2001, Wall Street has become in the eyes of the wider world the symbol of an overweening American arrogance that must now sip from the poisoned chalice that its high priests of finance used to serve communion to the faithful.

The Republican party has rendered hollow American claims to political and economic leadership of the international order and it will be left to the Obama administration to re-establish for the United States a constructive role in the international system.  A constructive role for the Obama administration would be based upon a rhetorical appeal to partnership with the other major economic and miltary powers and a strategy of engagment in restoring an effective multilateral system of management of the international order. "Partnership" and "engagement" may be more effective than claims to leadership that would serve as a constant reminder of the Bush-Cheney failures that have defined America in recent years.

If the overwhelming evidence of ideological bankruptcy, incompetence in economic policy, and failed international leadership has not been sufficiently damning to the Republican party, the efforts by the Bush-Cheney administration to expand the power of the Presidency has stained the party's image as a champion of democratic government and as defenders of the Constitution.

The obvious irrelevance of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney during the transition between Obama's election and his inauguration spoke volumes about the disrepute into which the Republicans had stumbled. The stunning public silence that greeted the claims of the departing President and Vice President  to positive legacies in American life was testimony that, as in economic matters, the Republican party will have to offer a new vision of the party's role in shaping American constitutional doctrine and practice. In effect, the party will have to develop a new political agenda and reconstitute its political base in order to escape the nostalgia for pre-1929 America that has informed its national strategy since the Reagan era. Change of this scope and significance inevitably will require a new generation of leaders and the task has just begun.

It is within this context that Obama's strategy of inclusive governance and his search for consensus across the political divide must be seen. By embracing Abraham Lincoln's legacy, Obama is offering an olive branch to the Republican party. It is a strategy that will offer moderate Republican leaders who have no desire to repudiate Lincoln to find common ground with Democrats. It also offers those moderate Republicans an opportunity to demonstrate that by putting country before party, they are serious leaders who recognize that the national crisis has not rendered the Republican party intellectually destitute. In sum, Obama's vision of governance as articulated in his inaugural address recognizes the need to sustain  a functioning democracy in which the Republican party is offered an opportunity to shape decisions in the national interest and to create the space for a new generation of leaders.  Obama shows a remarkable generosity of spirit in his strategy for governance. It is a testament to his inclusive vision and to his commitment to the revitalization and revival of American democracy after its recent travails under the Bush-Cheney era Republican party.

In a little noticed nod of deference to his spiritual mentor and predecessor, Martin Luther King  Jr., Obama's Inaugural address echoed the call to religious inclusiveness that King articulated in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial. King had closed his speech that day by recognizing that invoking a time of freedom “when all of God's children - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants - will be able to join hands .... Obama went beyond King in hiss acknowledgment of religious diversity in saying: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth."  As King had recognized in his 1961 speech at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania:

All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutality; tied in a single garment of destiny. ... This is the way the world is made. I didn't make it that way, but this is the interrelated structure of reality.  John Donne caught it a few centuries ago and could cry out, No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. If we are to realize the American dream we must cultivate this world perspective."

Obama's inauguration address was a remarkable example of the redemptive power of African American rhetoric in its offering of a vision of democracy and inclusiveness to America and the wider world. It was a measure of the man and of his rootedness in an America shaped by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

First published in the Trinidad and Tobago Review March 2, 2009