I'm back, if anyone cares. I have been distracted preparing for our move from the middle to the east coast. I persist in trying to present my vision of the way the world is and ought to be.
There has been a lot of complaining and whining about how disappointing Obama has been for his followers. He has not been the leader they expected him to be, leading them out of the wilderness of conservatism to the light of liberal solutions. I share some of these feelings. I was disappointed with his handling of health care legislation, and he seems too timid about engaging the opposition. Nevertheless, there is another way of looking at what Obama has been doing that is more positive, at least for the longer term. I realize that this view may be a total fantasy for most people, but I think it is worth thinking about.
Obama cannot be considered an imperial president, like FDR or Andrew Jackson. He has not been leading Congress, getting Congress to follow his priorities and policies. If this is what people want in a president, he has indeed been very disappointing. For most of our history Congress and the people have looked up to the president for leadership in determining policy, and it is natural to expect the same of Obama.
Obama is in fact the opposite of an imperial president. His approach, for better or worse, has been to act as a mediator or facilitator of the process of forming policy. To act in this way encourages the followers to start to lead. It empowers them to take charge of the process. In Congress the leaders of the majority parties are encouraged to develop policies for the country on their own. In Obama's first two years Pelosi was an effective leader of the House, with the encouragement of Obama, and now Boehner is recognized as a major leader.
My fantasy is that Obama's behavior has not just been a result of his character and experience that is unsuited for his role as president. What if his behavior were conscious and deliberate, a determined attempt to change the way people, and Congress, look at the president? If Obama truly believed that the leadership of the country rightly resides in Congress, not the president, then for him it would be a matter of resisting pressures from his followers, and the temptations to assert his own leadership. For him, promoting the leadership of those in Congress would be the priority. His role would be like that of a benevolent parent, trying to teach his children to become adults.
Continuing this fantasy, if Obama were to continue this behavior for the rest of his tenure, and assuming that he was reelected in 2012, his encouragement of leadership by Congress might just gain enough traction that the House would begin to assert its power, the power of the purse, to shift the US government towards a more parliamentary form. In this fantasy, the president would retreat to being no more than the chief executive of the bureaucracy, executing the laws of the land (as the founders may have originally conceived of the president), and the majority leader of the House would become more like the Prime Minister.
Of course many other changes would have to take place for this to become a reality, especially the diminishment of the Senate, but if the process starts, it may be irresistible. Or at least that is my fantasy.
The reality is that Obama probably does not have any conscious intent to make these changes. In several ways he is doing the same things that Bush did. If nothing else, though, it provides a different way of looking at what he is doing, one that, if it were true, would make him perhaps the most prescient, farseeing president in our history.