【09.11.29 泰晤士报】Cool cat Barack Obama must count on his nine lives

渔音谦谦

Cool cat Barack Obama must count on his nine livesIs the aloof president at risk of alienating today’s emotional US?




If you were to come up with a very short phrase summing up Barack Obama’s core identity, you could do a lot worse than the rat pack-era term “cool cat”. The coolness is now legendary: the poise during every political earthquake in the campaign, the steady willingness not to take the Clinton bait, the refusal even to raise an eyebrow at the Palin circus and that elegant lope as he walks into a state dinner.
The writer Christopher Hitchens has long seen Obama as essentially feline in his manner: “Does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool? I think it might be rather nice to have a feline for president, even if only after enduring so many dogs. The metaphor also puts us in mind of a useful cliché: that cats have nine lives and an ability to land noiselessly and painlessly on their feet.”
Obama also has the emotional distance of many cats — a self-sufficiency that limits the kind of bond you might feel with him. It’s not the Ronald Reagan alien-like distance from other humans, even his own children — which was just weird. It’s not awkward George Bush Sr Waspiness. It is, rather, a self-possession from which one draws enormous comfort — thank God he’s not so obviously out of his depth like his predecessor — and that provokes sudden spasms of resentment: what makes him so bloody above-it-all anyway?
This is especially notable in a period such as today when America is roiling with emotion. Unemployment continues to rise and unofficially is close to 17%; the anger of rural white America in the face of global change is hard to miss on any cable news channel; the left that helped Obama to gain office is furious that Guantanamo is still open, that gay rights are left on the shelf, that the banking sector has so far been coddled, not clobbered, and that health reform is headed back to the policy centre. With large swathes of the country “going rogue”, can a president with preternatural calm resonate? Can he bring the people with him?
This debate already happened in 2008. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, for example, has always seen Obama as a bit of a cold fish, aloof, too unwilling to punch back, too arrogant to explain himself too much. Dowd worried that in the campaign the Clintons brought more raw human emotion to the trail and Obama often seemed to coast too cockily until he had to rescue himself.
In the campaign Dowd was nearly right (Obama did let the Clintons get back off the mat too many times), but in the end wrong (look who got elected). But in campaign mode, Obama could harness all the emotion behind him for change. In government? He comes off as some kind of high Bismarckian Tory at times — calculating and cold.
You see this in the almost clinical way Obama has played the politics of taking on George Bush Jr’s interrogation, detention and rendition policies. The way in which two key White House appointees, Greg Craig and Phil Carter, have been dispatched in a matter of weeks for insisting that Obama live up to his campaign promises on accountability for past torture is chilling in its raw calculation. Ditto Obama’s disciplined refusal to act on gay rights any time soon — and his rhetorical restraint during Iran’s green revolution. The determination to figure out the best and most detailed way forward in Afghanistan, even during a war in which allies are waiting and enemies are watching, and to take his time ... well, this is also a sign that we are dealing with one very, very cool character.
The paradox is: in today’s populist, emotional climate, coolness can be eclipsed in the political drama and thereby rendered moot. In many ways Sarah Palin is the extreme counter-example. She plays a short game. She deploys no substantive policy content and no interest whatever in actual government. But she channels pure emotion, identity and rage very effectively in a country where unemployment is soaring. As such, she is a political nightmare, someone whom most Americans would never entrust with actual responsibility, but a cultural phenomenon who thereby wields political power.
Will this kind of heat — however irrational, however impulsive — overwhelm the cool emanating from the White House in this period of discontent? Not should it — but will it? That is the question.
In all this, Obama reminds me of Bush Sr in government and of Reagan in campaigning. It’s a dream combo in many ways — in theory. Whether it can work out in practice at this emotional and turbulent moment in American history is another question.
He has stayed aloof most of the time in the health insurance debate, while his opponents unleashed an emotional tsunami. He still hasn’t taken a specific position on several key elements in the bill — which won’t be passed, if at all, until next year. He has refrained from all but the smallest expressions of populism, even as his more partisan supporters want to see investment bankers’ heads placed on spikes above Wall Street’s pillars. He seems to have little human ego at stake as he fails to get headline-dominating concessions in diplomatic summits. What matters to him appears to be long-term gains and structural shifts — not short-term feelings.
Will this sell in troubled America? Do Americans need a more emotive, empathetic figure? Franklin D Roosevelt was aloof, but he let rip some populist rants every now and again and his fireside chats helped to forge an emotional bond with Americans. Is Obama’s coolness responsible for his approval ratings falling back to normal levels?
My own sense is that in many ways the drama and anxieties of the first decade of this century make public anger and fear more politically potent — but also generate a yearning for calm and stability at the centre. Sixteen years of Clinton family melodrama and Bush global brinkmanship have led Americans to appreciate a certain cerebral calculation in the White House. No Drama Obama remains something of a relief. And that’s especially true as America’s news media continue to devolve into more and more populist partisanship.
In other words, he’s got this. His biggest risk is if the economy turns south a second time next year and he has to pick between a second unpopular stimulus and soaring debt, or no second stimulus and soaring debt and unemployment anyway. At that point no president could easily survive — unless the hot-headed populist opposition seems too risky an option. His lowest risk is that his own party will turn on him the way the Republicans turned on the first Bush, another aloof president doing the right, calm, long-term things in too tempestuous and short attention span a time.
I doubt the Democrats will turn on him the way the GOP once did with the first Bush. Obama has a much stronger tie to his own party than Bush Sr had with his. His race makes anger a cultural liability — and is anyway alien to him. His authority in his own party dwarfs Bush Sr’s in his — Obama won an election while Bush inherited his from Reagan. Obama’s best cool-cat model should be John F Kennedy — the Kennedy whose long-term political prospects we never got to test because he was taken from us so soon.
Obama? I pray for his safety daily — and not just because I pray for every president’s safety. But because I remain fascinated by the enormous implications if, in the long run, this cat lands on his feet.


原文地址：http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article6936085.ece