View from Australia: Barack Obama and the ghosts of presidents past

By Jonathan Bradley

Just 43 men have held the office of President of the United States, and everyone from the press, to the public, to the presidents themselves seeks to understand the current Commander in Chief through the lens of his predecessors. Barack Obama is no different; ever since he first hit the national stage in 2004, the former senator from Illinois has been compared to any number of previous presidents, some by choice, and some not.

Early on, the first black president’s charisma, his inspiring rhetoric, and his historic victory have drawn comparisons to the nation’s only Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. Other observers looked further back to explain the optimism Obama stirred in his supporters; before his promise to unite a divided nation faltered, many saw Obama as an Abraham Lincoln-like figure. It was a line of thought Obama himself encouraged, particularly as a candidate. When he announced his candidacy for the presidency on February 10, 2007, he did so in Springfield, Illinois, at the same spot Lincoln had made his famed House Divided speech 150 years prior. Obama quoted Lincoln in his speech that day, and dropped Abe's name in the same sentence with which he confirmed that he was running.

Perhaps less intuitively, Obama also had a habit of conjuring the image of the father of modern conservatism, Ronald Reagan. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory,” Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008, “in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and Bill Clinton did not.” The implication was that Obama too could prove to be a transformative president, ushering in an era of liberalism in the same way Reagan did conservatism.

Particularly when he first took office, Obama often drew comparisons to another transformative president, and in this case, the comparisons were intuitive. Could Obama be the spiritual reincarnation of another Democrat who took office in the midst of a deep recession, after years of Republican rule, and with an ambitious policy agenda of financial reforms and social services? Was BHO the new FDR?

Perhaps Democrats’ expectations were too high or Obama’s competence was too low, but few people compare Obama to Franklin Delano Roosevelt these days, except to point out how meanly the former resembles the latter. But as the 2012 election draws ever nearer, and Obama’s approval rating stays stubbornly low, pundits and poll-watchers have been drawing less glowing comparison’s to the president’s antecedents, in attempt to bring clarity to a future that’s proved frustratingly resistant to prognostication.

But which of lesser light is the best match for the Obama heading in to 2012? The economy remains lousy, and so does the president’s polling, but the public doesn’t seem to have turned on him the way it did President George W. Bush in 2008 or Jimmy Carter in 1976. And in what should be a banner year for Republicans, their party has offered up a lacklustre field in which mere sanity is enough to make a contender look like a serious possibility for the nomination.

So is this going to be a repeat of 1980, when the once admired Jimmy Carter was run out of Washington by a resurgent GOP? If so, Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich had better start looking more Reaganesque than they are now. Perhaps, others suggest, next year will be more like 1948, when an unpopular Harry Truman railed against a “do-nothing Congress” and pulled out an upset victory over Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey? It’s a nice daydream for Democrats, but Truman was no doubt helped along by an economy growing at a spritely 6.8 per cent during the first half of 1948. The unemployment rate was 3.7 per cent. Obama would expect help from a team of election-winning elves before he’d countenance such extraordinary figures assisting him next year.

Perhaps, however, 2012 will be a mirror-image version of 2004, when a deeply divided electorate decided to give re-elect President George W. Bush. Then, many voters didn’t like the incumbent, but they preferred to give him a second term rather than take a risk on the uncertainties posed by aloof Massachusetts challenger John Kerry.

There have been more than a few hints that the last scenario is the one the Obama team likes best. It has long expected — the recent resurgence of Newt Gingrich notwithstanding — that his challenger would be the aloof Massachusetts native Mitt Romney, and is prepping its campaign with a firm eye on the White House race eight years prior. This much-discussed Politico story from September fills in the details:

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s relection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background ... The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job, and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. ... In a move that will make some Democrats shudder, Obama’s high command has even studied former President George W. Bush’s 2004 takedown of Sen. John Kerry, a senior campaign adviser told POLITICO, for clues on how a president with middling approval ratings can defeat a challenger.

Obama, Politico said, would portray Romney as “weird” — inauthentic and unprincipled — and would use the former Massachusetts governor’s experience as CEO of Bain Capital to frame him as a heartless, job-destroying plutocrat. The idea is to transform the race from a referendum on the incumbent into a distinct choice between the current president and his challenger.

But that kind of cynicism alone cannot sustain a political campaign, and of late, Barack Obama has begun to invoke comparisons to a different president, one whose name has rarely been brought up in relation to him.  Tomorrow, we'll look at the brighter, sunnier side of the campaign Obama plans to run, and the president he hopes will be its inspiration.

14 December 2011