A thought-provoking essay by Liam Julian in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review explores the relationship between Obama and Reinhold Niebuhr. The essay unsurprisingly concludes that Obama failed to learn the essential lesson of Niebuhr (unsurprising because it appears in the far-right Policy Review) - namely that: 

[M]an must act forcefully but humbly and free from naïve expectations.

Julian explains the appeal of this Niebuhrianism as a kind of balancing act:

[Obama] is a liberal, as was Niebuhr, and idealism smolders within even the most sensible liberals. The point is not to suffocate the idealism but to control its flames...

The conservative Julian sees Obama flaming idealistically in his first few months in office because any liberalism is too much for him. But E. J. Dionne - like most liberals - sees Obama as constantly balancing opposites, attempting to control the risks associated with progress while not yielding to a reactionary politics:

That's the Obama enigma: boldness wrapped in caution rooted in an ambivalent relationship to the status quo. This is why Obama will, by turns, challenge not only his entrenched adversaries but also his natural allies.

The Obama enigma is about balancing opposites. It is an idealistic pragmatism, a conservative liberalism. This constant balancing is inherent in every aspect of the Obama administration. As James Surowiecki observes in the New Yorker with regards to the banking crisis for example:

[T]he Administration is trying to do two things at once. In solving the current crisis, it’s partnering with Wall Street, using the existing system to try to stabilize the economy. But in thinking about the future it’s trying to use hostility to Wall Street to bring about serious changes in the system. This is quite a balancing act: let’s hope the Administration can pull it off.

Comments

Spiros O'Hanahan · 2009-04-06

Chip, your homoerotic adulation of Obama is blinding you to the agonizing deficiencies of the guy.

In fact, Obama is out of his depth. He is already an embarrassment to the US in ways that Bush was not. I am of course referring to his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia. The United States, embodied in its President, does not bow to the monarch of some other country. The inevitable conclusion is - Obama doesn't realize that he is President. Even that moron Bush knew that he was a president.

Balanced as he is between two erroneous positions on the far left, lets hope he falls into a post-Presidency soon, becoming in history The Black President, who served for one dismal term during which the American economy crashed while he fiddled with 1930s style remedies for 21st century problems.

Tags: E. J. Dionne Jr., Hoover Institution, James Surowiecki, Liam Julian, New Yorker, Policy Review, Reinhold Niebuhr, Washington Post

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 and is filed under Barack Obama, Political Philosophy, Politics, The Opinionsphere. Comments are closed; the conversation is kept as it was.