One Last Post from 2020: My Thoughts on A Promised Land
By: Scalable Analysis
Tags: Governance, Barack Obama, Presidency, Book Review, A Promised Land

Buy the book here (for those based in Singapore)!

Being the President of the United States of America is difficult, but not for what you think. The work is cognitively demanding, but it is also emotionally burdened. The work involves intense political calculations, and the ability to keep abreast of the media coverage — not to respond to it, but to sense the public reaction to it. The whole mind engages with it — cognitively, emotionally, socially. At the same time, Obama’s approach to the work also had a spiritual element to it — it involves thinking through the ideals that he had, and how to go about realising those ideals.

The work is intensely social — it requires thinking through other people — knowing who to take care of what. That in itself is immensely difficult to do already. Picking choices for the Cabinet is in and of itself an immensely difficult thing to do — that what’s the President’s closest advisers are for, sifting through their rolodexes and their social networks to think through who might be best fit not just for the job, but how the individual might fit with the rest of the team and the political leadership.

The work in immensely cognitive for obvious reasons — it is about thinking through issues, and understanding the tradeoffs — what was the least-worst thing that could be done about it, and equally important was how to sell the political messaging to the American public and to get anything through Congress.

The media angle is an extremely difficult one — it is not easy staying on top of things when other political players in the country constantly backstab each other in an attempt to gain political advantage and positive media attention.

The media context in the US makes things difficult. The struggle for attention and advertisers results in a model that rewards politicians for doing outrageous thing. Donald Trump’s birtherism in 2011 turned out to be a precursor for the basis of a political strategy for his own presidential campaign in 2016 — shout loudly, get the media’s attention, and direct it towards a political message that distorts reality and makes people suspicious of the establishment.

The media and public attention context makes policy making immensely difficult. One side of the press — mainly the Republican side, were willing to reduce the effectiveness of public policies to show the current administration as not working, generate frustration in the public and prevent people from being served. In turn, tapping on the frustration with current administration, they hope to win elections, enacting policies that continue to reduce state power — creating deregulatory campaigns that limit how the state can serve people — creating troubles that results in crisis that cause people to vote in the other side. There’s no escape from this loop, as far as I can tell, as long as half of the United States no longer believes in the state power for regulation and for the basic protections of the Americans they serve.

That might sound strange, but that indeed seems to be what is happening. The constant Republican push for deregulation, reduction of the welfare state, lowering revenues and spending of government — that might just be the point of their project, for the naive idea of individuals unconstrained by the state and to unshackle markets and industries wherever they can, usually ending up benefitting larger companies that can then impose predatory practices on the public and the rest of the industry.

Yet because Republicans affiliated-media can broadcast fearmongering messages of a ‘cultural war’ and using wolf-whistles to activate their supporters, elections do become closer than they might have been solely on a economics and social policies perspective.

For Obama, the reality of the situation, and how entrenched the Republican perspectives were, did not appear to have made a big impression on him. Perhaps he was also hoping that Americans might see plainly what the Republicans were doing and to join him and his political movement instead. His signature policy of Universal Healthcare — bringing health insurance to Americans universally for the first time and reducing the number of uninsured — became a partisan issue — a weird thing when it was Mitt Romney, a Republican governor, had in fact implemented a version of in his state of Massachusetts — and was the basis for Obama’s healthcare. I guess Obama’s idealism of a better America out there, that was rational or at least, had good sense — did not come to pass. Seeing how millions of Americans get activated politically on public health issues such as masks and movement restrictions when these measures were accepted with resignation in other countries — only showed how many Americans have a warped worldview that is increasingly detached from reality.

Perhaps Obama’s one major failure was the optimism he had in the American people being unswayed by those reality-distortionary messages. Biden will have a difficult time climbing out from the hole that President Trump dug in his four years with the frequent lying and in undermining the various political institutions. Even in these last two months, Trump’s campaigns at distorting reality in the elections only failed because of the good faith of state and local officials in not playing politics and sticking closely to the rules — rules that are in place for good reasons, and rules that Trump has so violated. Trump and his enablers — the national-level Republicans who are still tied to the fate of Trump — could only do so much for now.

Perhaps in this, Obama’s grounds for optimism might have some basis, and he might have the last laugh as he sees old colleagues doing the repairing work that now has to be done under Biden.

The Biden Administration has a lot of work cut out for it — multiple challenges in so many areas — but one area it will have to put in resources and attention is in how to work with the relevant media players and work out a compromise of sorts and put a line on this state-destroying business. The other area it will have to work with would be to end the reality-distortion industry as well — put a stop to the grifting and the lies and the conspiracy and fear mongering that the Trump Administration generated and amplified.

I wish America well — that American society will become less polarised that American political leaders, Democrat to Republican will wield the immense power of America’s institutions responsibly for the good of the world.