Obama And America – Simon Schama

Professor Simon Schama, award winning author, historian and documentary maker, delivered The Sydney Institute’s Annual Dinner Lecture for 2010. Speaking to a capacity crowd of over 870 guests at the Star City Harbourside Ballroom, Professor Schama offered his reflections on leadership and President Barack Obama, as well as making some colourful detours through the lives of other political leaders. Professor Schama was introduced by Sydney Institute board member Carol Schwartz and the vote of thanks was given by the Managing Director and CEO of Australia Post, Ahmed Fahour. The MC for the evening was Sydney Institute Chairman, Nicholas Johnson, CEO of Barclays Capital Australia. The 2010 Annual Dinner was sponsored by Australia Post. What follows is an edited transcript of Professor Schama’s oration.

OBAMA AND AMERICA

SIMON SCHAMA

Thank you so much for having me, Sydneysiders, Sydney Institute, Australia Post. It’s wonderful to be here. Last time Ginny and I were here, with our good friends, was in 1996. It was a sure thing we’d have perfect weather for Christmas, the kind of Christmas I like, the kind that comes with sunburn and dangerous exposure to unhealthy rays. But, as we stood in front of the Opera House, it was raining. Instead, we were shivering and reaching for our raincoats. I thought of how I’d grown up in Britain in the 1950s, when it wasn’t enough that Australian cricketers always smashed us in the Ashes, but they always came with monstrously self-satisfied suntans as well. So, as we stood in Sydney’s summer downpour, I thought this all a myth! Basically what we might call an Adobe Workshopping the picture. So, it rains in Sydney, I thought, just like Manchester. Today, I know it doesn’t. This time, it’s quite beautiful.

Gerard Henderson said to me a while ago, “Why don’t you come to a cosy gathering…” I have a widely ramified family, my father was one of thirteen children. So this sort of ballroom gathering tonight approximates the usual Schama family barmitzva. I’m expecting dancing and bad singing by clones of Louis Prima.

My subject tonight, moving on to the more professorial aspect of this evening, is leadership. Gerard and Nicholas did tell you – I’m sure they did – that there will be an exam following this talk and we don’t let you out unless you pass. I’ve exhibited staggeringly steely leadership over the past nine and a half hours by drinking almost nothing – in Sydney, and on an occasion like this! But it came to mind that one had to do this because leadership is, after all, also a demonstration of the toughness necessary, something very important in the case of my hero and subject, Barack Obama. The toughness needed to deal with whatever manifold, multiple crises come your way.

The best account of the necessity of toughness I know about an American politician, came from the lips of someone who had a rather unlikely style in leadership, namely the conservative prime minister I grew up with in the 1950s – Harold Macmillan. Long into retirement, Macmillan, he of the gloriously droopy moustaches and slightly faded patrician air, was asked what he thought of a particular politician who was running as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1972 – against the then incumbent Richard Nixon. This politician’s name, of course, was Edmund Muskie.

Edmund Muskie came to grief on one famous occasion. His wife Janie had been seriously attacked by the attack-dog owner of the Manchester Union-Leader, a very tough, right wing paper. The story turned out to be untrue. However, it was claimed that both Muskie and his wife had referred to Canadians by the opprobrious title of canards. The more important matter was that it was whispered that Janie had a drinking problem. Senator Muskie was approached about this at an outdoor meeting and he became very tired and emotional, to the point where the tear glands started to flow, which is not a good thing in a political campaign. He later made it worse, because snowflakes were falling upon his elegantly domed head and, in denying he was crying, he said it was snowflakes not tears.

Harold Macmillan expressed derision that anyone presuming to run for higher office could be this soft. He said Muskie should never have been in the business if he was so thin-skinned. To which someone commented, “But Mr Macmillan, supposing someone had said Lady Dorothy has a bit of a drinking problem? What would you have said?” Macmillan replied, “What would I have said, dear boy? I would have said ‘By God, you should see her mother.'” Now, that’s leadership.

I ran into Macmillan once. Unfortunately, literally. It was a long, yawning, summer vacation term in Cambridge. I was a young don before I turned into an old don, and there were those screen oak doors that lie in wait for the uncoordinated. I tripped and fell headlong, spreadeagled, on the fabulous, Christ College Cambridge, eighteenth century Turkish rug. Then I found myself staring at some amazingly highly polished black shoes with crisply pressed trousers. They belonged to the ex-prime minister with the wonderful, epically majestic, overhanging brows and whiskers. And before I’d managed to steady myself, he said, without missing a beat, “Now, now young man. Gratitude, one thing – prostration, completely unnecessary.” I love that, and I’m not a Tory. That’s leadership.

One last Macmillan story. Oxford and Cambridge colleges are famous for the almost epic contempt shown by the serving staff, especially when they call you “Sir“. When I was an undergraduate at Christ’s, Cambridge, I presumed to criticise the pottage, amusingly called minestrone. The young waiter, who was a sort of complexionally-challenged version of the Artful Dodger, tipped it on my head and said, “Oops. Sorry about that, Sir.” It took me months to pick those nasty little pieces of carrot out from my hair.

A good friend of mine who is a sort of gangly, intense person, although full of living enthusiasm, was seated opposite Harold Macmillan at an All Souls feast, one of those tremendous occasions with crisp white linen on tables. Macmillan was old by then and Chancellor of the University of Oxford. By then he wasn’t saying very much, let alone the kind of witticisms of which I was once the beneficiary. As they were dining on their first course, something like teal egg in aspic, my friend was chattering on as one does about Wittgenstein or Manchester United, or what Wittgenstein would have done if he had managed Manchester United, and so on. My friend looked at Harold Macmillan and noticed a tiny bead of red appearing in the right nostril. No one was paying attention. The bead of red started to gather and descend, rather like the average contemporary art installation. Then, suddenly, it turned into a Quentin Tarantino, a tremendous outpouring. My friend thought Macmillan was going to die and leant over gently to the former prime minister, mopping with his napkin what might be left of Harold Macmillan’s face. And then everyone said, “Oh goodness, Chancellor, Chancellor,” and he was borne out. As the Chancellor was being removed to a place of greater safety, one of the head waiters turned round with an affection of majestic contempt and said to my friend, “Good job, Sir“.

Obama and America

So on to my subject – Barack Obama. The hard bit. Is it over? That’s what you all want to hear. Is it over with Barack Obama? The answer is no. But, is he on the skids? Possibly. Does the fate of the Obama Administration and the fate of this experiment in resurrecting the credibility in American governance hang in the balance? By God, it certainly does. This week it hangs in the balance. We shall see what the outcome is to going be of the vote that Barack Obama has demanded be called. And if not demanded then certainly required to be voted up or down by the end of the week.

Does it matter to you, here? You bet your life it does. And, for the following reasons, I think. Barack Obama, for all his various vices or virtues, is the one US president who has had the view of America being in the world rather than merely exceptionally, or accidentally, a part of it. The United States, unlike Australia which was founded against the will of those on the First Fleet, was founded in a political act of turning its back on the slaughters and chaos and hypocrisies of the old world. There’s always been a sense that America is somehow the embodiment of an ideal. It’s an immigrant republic which purports, without any particular sense of bad faith, not to care about which tribe, which religion, which country, which patch of land you’ve come from, but only that you should subscribe to the set of democratic ideals embodied in the Constitution. That fact makes America, in its own eyes and famously in the words of the truism, an exceptional case.

American exceptionalism has been a source of great hope to millions of the persecuted and the destitute over the world for centuries. It is also a source of trouble in that it presupposes an American kind of manifest destiny, not just within the continent of America but around the world. It could be said that what anyone feels about the 43^rd president, George W. Bush was almost an apogee expression. An epitome of the hard view of American power, the sense in which America could deliver, for example, Iraq out of the shackles of despotism and somehow a democracy would construct itself in its place. In the minds of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, the Neocons and many others, if it didn’t that was too bad for the rest of the world.

Barack Obama is not like that; it’s simply not in his wiring. He is not to be thought of as a man who only believes in soft American power. He never said he was going to play nicey, nicey in Afghanistan. On the contrary, he said the opposite – that because the Iraq experiment was so idly and irresponsibly entertained, the Afghan war ought and must be fought. In Barack Obama’s blood, and in his head, runs the experience of Kenya and Kansas and Hawaii and Indonesia. He is a Pacific Ocean president. He has the automatic instinct that American’s historical destiny is to be part of the world rather than set itself apart from it. That matters.

It matters in another respect. None of us in this room, or in the world, and none of us who live in the United States, could think it a good idea if all the hopes that were placed in the possibility of the restoration of the legitimacy of American governance come crashing down in a thunderstorm of anger, frustration and bitterness. We do not want a United States thrashing around in an infantile regress and turmoil. That United States could conceivably be a danger in the world.

One of the extraordinary things about Barack Obama is that there has not been a president since Lincoln, whom he relentlessly evokes, who is so conscious of seeing the fate of the United States in the great arc of time. He used a beautiful phrase on the day after his election, 5 November 2008, where he said, “Let us put our hands on the steel arc of time.” That American history was not the steel arc of a cutting wheel against which it was impossible to offer any kind of resistance. Instead we would put our hands on the arc of time.

Obama is very conscious of his own moment. At a time when Hilary Clinton’s nomination was all but a matter of routine benediction, Obama decided to throw his hat in the ring. People say to me, “Is it the worst irony in all of American history that one of the most gifted, polished and interesting intellectuals among those who’ve held office in the White House had to deal with this intensely poisoned chalice?” Maybe there are moments when Obama felt it might have been better if he had been president during the 1950s but I don’t believe it. Obama has a very strong sense, one so strong it moves into a realm of ambition with its own weird innocence, a belief that he and the American catastrophe were meant to meet. This is the rendezvous with destiny Walter Lippmann spoke about in the case of FDR.

So here is what Barack Obama is like.

I was in San Antonio during the presidential campaign. We were filming during the spring of 2008, and we engaged both Hilary Clinton, who ran a fantastic campaign at the end but was much too late, and Barack Obama. They were extraordinary case studies in difference and mood. Barack Obama was already a kind of rock-star, and presented himself in an outside auditorium. There was a big warm up act and tremendous music. He came on and was obviously accustomed to the adulation. The body language was very cool cat, and he was just a little bit too much pleased with the state of being Barack Obama. We then went to hear Hilary Clinton. And this said it all as regards the outcome of campaign. She had chosen the Alamo as the site for her speech. While she was giving her speech, dense with grey matter on healthcare reform and so on, the lights went out. She was plunged into total darkness. The wonderful thing about Hilary is, she didn’t stop. Then the lights gradually went on, at first only on the enormous gallery of political hacks she’d assembled to give credibility to her case, throwing her into even deeper chiaroscuro.

And I thought to myself, I know what happened with these two. It was when they were four. It was all set. Barack’s ex-hippy mum in Jakarta said, “Barack, do you know you are the most beautiful, cleverest boy that has ever existed in the history of the world?” He would have replied, “Am I mummy?” “Yes you are,” she would have confirmed. And off he had gone. Indestructible with self-belief. Whatever you throw at me, I’m going to deal with it. Hilary’s father, a kind of monster father, had said on the other hand, “Hilary! Never, ever give up!” So now, they’re in a kind of tough love marriage together in the same administration.

What Barack wanted to do, and what has been in jeopardy and is almost lost, are two projects, both absolutely linked to the other. It was Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum that “government is not the answer, government is the problem”. Of course government isn’t the answer, but it’s also not necessarily the problem either. But there was a sense that it would be morning in America by virtue of the perfectly, orthodontically correct, septuagenarian Reagan smile; everything would be great in America. That smiley face, bumper sticker political philosophy, what it means to be America.

Barack Obama, in an extraordinary speech on that freezing inauguration day, said, “Let us put away childish things.” It was an oration for American realism. By God did we get realism; we did not get happy clappy at any point at all. What we got were scenes from American adversity, the destitute on the prairie, those living in filth in steerage so they could make it to America, those living under the lash on the slave plantation. All those, Obama said, are American experiences which are, in a weird way, to be celebrated because Americans came through them. And they can come through new crises too, without being Pollyanna, without thinking it’s morning in America. We need, as a nation, to grow up, and realism is the index of how grown up Americans can be without losing their resilience, their inventiveness, their ebullience or sense of energy that makes them all American. And it’s a tough thing to turn the L-word, as in “limits”, into a true piece of American vocabulary. That’s part of what Obama is up to. And it’s very difficult to do it in the circumstances he has been given.

Secondly, apart from integrating America back into the world, has been Obama’s sense of rediscovering the possibility of American governance as stewardship. Obama, a true believer in Christianity, has expressed it in Christian terms. The first black church was the only institution of freedom for African Americans, for people like Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. The Tea Party movement has become an extraordinary demographic and demagogic phenomenon on the right. Tea Party followers hate Obama and some believe he’s not American at all. Some wave little copies of the Constitution around as though American government at its inception was indeed an oxymoron. But the preamble to the Constitution states that in order to form a more perfect Union requires government to perform for the insurance of domestic tranquillity and to promote the general welfare. In the eighteenth century mind, and eighteenth century language, what was general welfare? For a long time, until Obama came along, the general welfare was thought to be, and allowed to become seen by the extreme right in America, as a stalking horse for a form of Leninist conspiracy to turn the United States into a socialist republic.

Barack Obama has committed to saying, from the beginning, that there is an American principle aside from aggressive individualism, although it has served America very well. It’s been a source of great entrepreneurial energy and economic miracle. But it has not been an authentic, legitimate, credible American voice. Historically, what’s been most important is interdependence, neighbourliness – found in the original Puritan experience but also the local PTA and church or synagogue bake sale. Anyone who has lived any length of time in America knows about neighbourliness, almost as an American political principle.

Community is not any sort of conspiracy. It’s a fundamental part of the American DNA. There’s a whole history of its role in presidential power. How about Theodore Roosevelt creating the national park system, and deciding it was entirely legitimate for a Republican president to arbitrate in matters of the trusts? How about Abraham Lincoln emancipating the slaves? How about Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal? One could go on and on. There was Lyndon Johnson – what an operator – coming to the television in 1965 for the voting right portion of the Civil Rights Act and saying, in sincerity, with all the force of the history of his extreme thuggery as a political manipulator, “I come to speak for the rights of humanity.” And Americans believed him. The Act was passed. That too is an American history which Barack Obama honours and knows about.

What then has happened since the inauguration?

The answer is something that has surprised those who follow it. The charge against Barack Obama was that he was a terrific politician; so disciplined, so cool, so elegant, so borne aloft by the power of his own elocution. That was not in doubt. But would he be an effective figure in government? He plunged into government. The reason he was not giving people applause lines on that freezing morning of his inauguration day was that he felt he’d had enough of the talk already. He had seen his in-tray. We’re in trouble here, he was saying, you’re lucky I showed up.

Barack Obama has plunged into policies to a degree no one could have imagined. He’s left behind the politics he wanted to use and the politics he had used until recently. And, we are now in Act Three. Act One was heal your wounds America, it’s a new age. Act Two was where the hell did he go? As a politician, he conceived of his charge as educational and announced a sweeping overhaul as if he essentially would be the great headmaster. It’s very Jeffersonian, but Jefferson had teeth of steel when needed in terms of politics. All the great presidents did. Franklin Roosevelt was a Wall Street lawyer with no compunction about taking it to Wall Street. Barack Obama came to power by getting everybody to have a huge great cuddle.

There was something lofty and noble and moving about that wish to end instability and partisan politics. But if Barack Obama had looked at the first few months of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, he would have known that to use power and you have to be politically tough when it’s necessary. It would be lovely if all politics was about the resolution of high minded, philosophical issues on some notional middle ground, that you could reach out to a dazzlingly enlightened Mahmoud Ahmadinejador the leaders of the Republican Party on Capital Hill. I’m not saying they’re indistinguishable, they are distinguishable.

If you ask Americans, and there are some of you in this room, if we want our politics to be consensual, we all say of course we do. What we really want is mud wrestling.

American politics, as Alexis de Tocqueville knew, is the fierce combat of partisan conflict. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what American democracy has all been about. A battle of opposed ideas. Obama has been ill-served by his fastidiousness in this respect. He needs to fire people in the worst way. All of you business executives know that. But he still sees that as a sign of disloyalty and panic. But it can be a sign of strength as well.

And now, it’s Act Three. Barack Obama, it seems to me, has finally taken the gloves off, although it might be too late. It started with the State of the Union speech in which he took a much sharper, more caustic, funnier, direct, street corner way to talking about politics. It’s proceeded at pell-mell pace with the so-called reconciliation process by which you don’t need a super majority. This was thought to be the nuclear option, a suicidal tactic for the Democrats and the President to prosecute, but Republicans used it all the time. Obama has decided to use it for healthcare reform, rather belatedly, and indeed will use it again for financial regulatory reform if that manages to come about over the next weeks and possibly months or so.

So we’re seeing a tougher, sharper, smarter Obama, even though it may be too late. From spring to Christmas 2009, he lost what we never thought he would lose. That was his grip on the American story. Apropos of the stimulus package, for example, without which the American economy would not just have been teetering on the brink of a depression but fallen straight into it, there was no choice but to do this. But to those poachers, executives of the investment banks, who suddenly found themselves part of Timothy Geithner’s financial administration, the Council of Economic Advisers, it was important for the President to say, “I’m not doing this”. He’s now said it. Whether Barack Obama can corral, bang heads together, call in, do the sort of thing that Lyndon Johnson used to do – take a skinning knife out of his trouser belt – and persuade the reluctant to the true religion, we shall find out at the end of the week when the vote in Congress is taken.

And because, my dear friends, we actually won’t know the result of how this is going to turn out till next week Gerard Henderson has asked me to tell you that we’re going to do this all over again next Wednesday. And you’re going to put me up at an even ritzier hotel than we are in now. That’s right Gerard, isn’t it? Oh no it doesn’t seem as though it is. Shucks. Well, I hope you’ll have me back as a waiter sometime soon. Thank you all very much.