Barack Obama, during the 2008 presidential campaign, was presented to the people of the United States—and, more broadly, to the people of the world—as the candidate best suited to play the role of unifier. President George W. Bush had been the Great Divider but now the time had come for everyone to put those discordant days behind us and embrace the one we had been waiting for, and so begin an era of repair and restoration. A sizeable proportion of Americans continue to approve of President Obama—close to 50 per cent in some polls—and yet the blistering populist campaigns pursued by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (and, in a sense, Ted Cruz) throughout the current presidential campaign season suggest that his time in office has increased discord in the country.
Barack Obama positioning himself as the Healer-in-Chief was always a problematic notion. Edward Klein’s The Amateur (2012) is vitriolic in tone and underestimates Obama’s political savvy, and yet his rationalisation of Obama’s original popular appeal—masterminded by political consultant David Axelrod—remains relevant:
[Axelrod] performed a brilliant piece of political legerdemain … He devised a narrative for Obama in which the candidate was presented as a black man who would heal America, not divide it, a moderate non-partisan who would rescue America, not threaten it.
Candidate Obama, the politician with the most radical voting record in the US Senate, could be trusted by mainstream America to bring the nation together.
President Obama has failed as national peacemaker because he is not a “centrist” or mediator. The provenance of his systematic worldview can be found in the thinkers of the New Left, from Frank Marshall Davis and Edward Said to Jeremiah Wright. The Reverend Wright’s “God damn America!” outburst encapsulates the New Left’s aversion to the fundamentals of America’s capitalist democracy. America is not to be healed so much as reconfigured. The great ideological fissure in the United States, then, is between their so-called libertarian-socialism—the “spirit of 1968” as Dinesh D’Souza has tagged it—and a revolution with far deeper roots: the “spirit of 1776”.
Edward Klein’s insight is only one explanation for why so many Americans failed to grasp the sharp nature of Barack Obama’s ideology. Not the least of these is that the forty-fourth president long ago took a leaf out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971). President Obama, in short, eschews the pitfalls of the “rhetorical radical”. He avoids the undisguised anger and belligerence common to many activists and, in its place, adopts the public persona of what Alinsky called the “radical realist”. This could be summed up in four words: Don’t frighten the horses. Thus, Barack Obama typically expresses himself with the poise and equanimity of a venerable conciliator, and yet a more contentious outlook is invariably at work.
