David Hoppe

David Hoppe is available
for freelance writing and editing assignments; and consulting with commercial and nonprofit cultural organizations. Resume and references available upon request.

 

© 2006-2023
David Hoppe
[email protected]


Site managed by
Owl's Head Business Services

 

 

 

:: Obama’s biggest project

Are we up to it?

By David Hoppe

Much ado was made of Barack Obama’s first hundred days. Pundits tallied the president’s hits and misses and made the inevitable comparisons with Franklin Roosevelt, whose first three months-plus in office established this hyped-up benchmark.

Obama, we were reminded, has a few things on his plate. The economy is a shambles, healthcare is unaffordable, the nation’s infrastructure is falling apart, we’re at war on two fronts and the planet’s heating up. The motormouths who get paid to fill the air with their opinions rendered their judgments about whether the president was doing too much about these things, or not enough.

For the most part, though, they neglected to talk about what has proven to be the president’s biggest project so far – his insistence on treating us like grown-ups.

It turns out that when Obama, quoting scripture in his inaugural address, said that it was time for us to put aside childish things, he wasn’t just treating us to a rhetorical flourish. He meant it.

Politicians, of course, are always saying that they’re going to talk straight with us. This sounds good. It’s certainly preferable to talking crooked. But teenagers do it all the time. Their emotions – or their hormones – get the better of them and they burst out with the unvarnished truth of what they’re feeling. This can be cathartic. If this feeling needs to be turned into some kind of decision, though, it’s not a bad idea for an adult to be in the room.

What Obama has in mind for us became clear during his first prime-time press conference as president. If memory serves, he answered just seven questions over the course of an hour. He spoke in complete paragraphs, usually constructing his answers with a beginning, in which he framed whatever issue was at hand, a middle section, in which he often included competing views, leading to a conclusion based on the logic of the situation as he saw it.

This was an authoritative performance, unlike anything we’d seen from a president in living memory. The members of the press, accustomed as they were to indulging themselves with a certain amount of condescension toward the figure behind the podium, were blown back on their heels. Rather than defensive, this president seemed eager to be challenged and appeared disappointed when the quality of the questions didn’t seem serious enough.
Seriousness is an adult characteristic. It has to do with being able to pay attention long enough to take in the whole of a situation, including those parts that may not necessarily fit with the limitations of your own experience. It means understanding that life is more than a series of self-serving punchlines. In politics, seriousness has to do with recognizing that peoples’ lives can be at stake.

Seriousness has been largely absent from American political discourse for a long time. In its place we’ve substituted ways of talking and thinking that have more to do with the sports arena and the locker room. Who’s up, who’s down and how well or how poorly they’re playing the game.

We’re crazy about sports, so this has been a handy way for us to learn to think about our politics. The trouble is that, while we spend our time obsessing about our favorite teams, we ourselves have grown more and more obese. Our love of games is not participatory but vicarious. Childish, really.

Obama followed that press conference with a series of town hall meetings in which he took questions from fellow citizens. This seemingly simple gesture was in itself a departure from politics-as-usual. Other politicians – the previous president most notably – did their best to control such events, limiting the audience to campaign supporters and canned questions.

Obama not only allowed himself to be challenged, he took the time – and lots of it – to explain himself, refusing to reduce complicated issues to sound-bites.

This effort, given our unserious political culture, is a gamble. Obama refuses to treat us like kids. He assumes that we want to know what he’s thinking and why he’s making decisions. He thinks we can handle being treated like grown-ups.

That amounts to a leap of faith in a country where most journalists pitch their stories at an audience they believe has a middle school literacy rate and where politicians talk to us as if we were teenagers. It’s not a sure thing.

As any kid knows, being a dependent has its advantages. There’s no responsibility and, if worse comes to worst, a well-timed tantrum can make the parents ready to go along with anything just to make it stop. This can seem like freedom.

But it’s a lousy way to run a government that’s supposedly by and for the people. Obama isn’t our principal. He’s our president. He is trying to make governing this country an adult proposition. This is a challenge to us all – and, so far, it’s the biggest project of his presidency.