It’s Who He Is

I found this piece by Micah L. Siffry at The American Prospect, “Why Did Obama Forget Who Brought Him to the Dance?” interesting and informative but, sadly, uninsightful:

I’ve recently spent a good chunk of time engrossed in reading A Promised Land, the first volume of President Barack Obama’s memoirs. After four years of the most impulsive and unstable president of my lifetime, hearing Obama’s calm and judicious voice in my head was like having a long, comforting talk with an old friend. His retelling of the challenges of his first two and a half years, from the global financial crisis and the passage of Obamacare to the Democrats’ midterm collapse in 2010 and the successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden in May 2011, is full of revealing details and discerning insight.

But there’s a strange lacuna in A Promised Land, a missing thread that I kept looking for but never found. That thread is his popular base. To win his improbable bid for the presidency in 2008, Obama built his own powerful political army to beat Hillary Clinton, who had been building political support with her husband, President Bill Clinton, for decades. At its height, at the end of the 2008 election, Obama’s campaign had 13 million email addresses (20 percent of his vote total). Almost four million people had donated to him. Two million Obama supporters had created an account on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign’s social networking platform, which they used to organize 200,000 local events. Seventy thousand people used MyBO to create their own fundraising pages, which raised $30 million for his campaign.

But as is by now well known, once Obama entered office, he abandoned this army and staked his presidency on the inside-the-Beltway strategies of his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. It’s never been clear to me that Obama had to drop this ball.

He concludes:

But after his election as president, the grassroots disappears from Obama’s story. The amnesia starts the night of his inauguration, when he attended ten formal balls with first lady Michelle Obama, but only the first one, where he was serenaded by Beyoncé, and later one for members of the armed forces, make it into his memoir. The Obama for America staff ball, which was attended by 10,000 staff and where Obama reportedly spoke for 17 minutes, is gone from his memory. White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who managed the White House’s relationships with Democratic advocacy organizations, gets barely a mention for his role in the health care reform fight. The organizers who took him to victory in the Iowa caucus, who he says he “would still do anything for,” are nowhere in the rest of the book, even as one of them, Mitch Stewart, would come to run Organizing for America at the DNC.

I don’t know why Obama forgot his base, though here are some theories. First, he was a captive of the White House bubble, and no one in his intimate circle or among his top advisers spoke for the base.

What, other than a confirmation that Rahm Emanuel has no political future, does he mean?

IMO there’s a simple explanation that seems to elude him but was obvious to me from the start. Obama is, was, and has been about Obama.

To some degree that’s an occupational hazard of being president. As Alice Roosevelt said about her father, Teddy:

He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.

Has it escaped anyone that is true of the incumbent to the n^th degree? But I believe that Barack Obama’s self-created (and published) legend is that, despite the enormous handicap of a sub-Saharan African and absentee father, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become a best-selling author, elected official, and, ultimately, president of the United States. There isn’t much room in that narrative to dance with who brung you.