Worldmaking

by David Milne

  In a manner reminiscent of Kennan at Princeton, Obama recalled in 2011 that during his two years at Columbia he was “deep inside my own head … in a way that in retrospect I don’t think was really healthy.” In a letter to his girlfriend Alexandra McNear in the fall of 1982, Obama confessed “large dollops of envy” for his Pakistani friends heading toward a career in business and his Hawaiian friends who were “moving toward the mainstream.” Obama’s mixed racial heritage, the absence of a stable family home, and financial insecurity placed strains on him. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me,” he wrote to McNear, “in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me … The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”10 Obama read, walked, observed, listened, wrote. His sensibilities were literary; notions of self, identity, and alienation were constants in his tangled thoughts. As he recalls in his memoir Dreams from My Father, “I spent a year walking from one end of Manhattan to the other. Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.”11

  Obama’s reading habits corresponded with this inquisitive, identity-seeking voice. Like all students at Columbia, Obama studied Literature Humanities (or Lit-Hum), a great books course that required students to read up to five hundred pages of philosophy a week—from Plato, Locke, and Hume to Camus, Sartre, and Marcuse. A fellow student recalled that he “was really involved in the discussions … It was a fairly serious discussion about philosophy.” Obama took a course with Edward Said but never warmed to the professor or the literary theory he taught. Boerner recalled that he and Obama would “rather read Shakespeare’s plays than the criticism. Said was more interested in the literary theory, which didn’t appeal to Barack or me.” Obama later described Said as “a flake,” a jibe that placed him in interesting company.12 Allan Bloom, for example, would have enthusiastically agreed.

  But Obama also read texts that would not have figured in Bloom’s literary canon: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Richard Wright’s Native Son, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks, the poetry of Langston Hughes, Malcolm X’s autobiography. In Dreams from My Father, Obama recalls the impact each made on him:

  In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even [Du Bois’s] learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power … Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.13

  After Obama concluded his studies at Columbia—he majored in political science but never warmed to that subject—he spent two unfulfilling years working in the business world. In 1985, he decided to emulate Malcolm X and embarked on a journey of “self-creation.” He relocated to Chicago to take a job as a “community organizer” in its deprived African American neighborhoods for a salary of $10,000 a year.

  Obama’s move to community organizing in the same city that had awoken Charles Beard’s social conscience a century before was inspired by his progressive politics and Harold Washington’s election as that city’s first black mayor, which dealt a death blow to “machine” politics in the highly segregated city. He worked on the city’s poverty-scarred South Side, where he helped establish a job-training program, a tutoring system to help underprivileged children get to college, and an organization dedicated to protecting tenants’ rights in Altgeld Gardens, one of America’s first public-housing projects.

  The work was unrelenting, the challenges overwhelming, the disappointments legion, and the salary a pittance. But through community organizing Obama found a home, a more fully realized identity, and a church that helped with both: Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Washington Heights. In 1988, however, Obama decided to move on to the next stage of his career, focusing on law and politics, the metaforces that created, taunted, and neglected places like Chicago’s South Side. Obama was accepted into Harvard Law School and moved to Cambridge in the fall to commence his studies. But there was little doubt that Chicago had become his city, an anchor for the remarkable journey that followed.

  * * *

  Obama was an outstanding student at Harvard Law School, where he attracted the attention of the faculty’s professoriate. He was a quick study, of course, and his ability to comprehend difficult concepts, and penetrate abstruse legalese, placed him at a distinct competitive advantage across a high-achieving cohort. But what struck his teachers and contemporaries as exceptional was his skill in navigating different legal perspectives—usually deeply felt—and finding a path through the thicket that did not fundamentally alienate the protagonists. With the support of both liberals and conservatives, Obama was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review, becoming the first African American to hold the position. Stilling passions, defusing rancor with humor, finding points of agreement, no matter how faint—all these skills permitted Obama to assume this position of leadership with the journal, and his editorship coincided with the journal publishing articles from multiple legal and philosophical perspectives. It was an era of genuine intellectual pluralism that united conservatives like Richard A. Posner and liberals like Laurence Tribe in admiration. Indeed, Tribe was sufficiently impressed by Obama’s rationality, work ethic, and intelligence to hire him as a research assistant for a project with the forbidding subtitle “What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics.”14 Like Walter Lippmann, Obama was a star turn in Harvard Yard. Great things were expected of him and he would not disappoint.

  After graduating from Harvard, Obama returned home to the Windy City, where he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, whose faculty was nearly as high profile as Harvard’s—Richard A. Posner, Cass Sunstein, and Geoffrey R. Stone all became colleagues. In 1993, he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a small law firm specializing in neighborhood economic development and civil rights, the issues that had consumed him as a community organizer. His legal and academic careers were soon to coexist with one in politics. Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 for the 13th District, which spanned the South Side and included Hyde Park, the vibrant, multicultural neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago that he and his wife, Michelle, also an Ivy League–educated lawyer from a modest background, called home. He was reelected in 1998 but then suffered a significant blow when he ran in the primaries against incumbent Bobby Rush in Illinois’s 1st Congressional District and lost by a margin of nearly two to one. In 2004, Obama drew the appropriate lessons from this humbling and outpaced an open field to win the Democratic nomination for election to the U.S. Senate. In the general election, he crushed his Republican opponent, Paul Wolfowitz’s contemporary at Cornell, Alan Keyes, by a margin of 70 percent to 30 percent.

  * * *

  John Kerry lost the presidential election of 2004 after an ugly campaign in which GOP strategists built an unassailable lead on national security by tarring their opponent, a decorated Vietnam veteran, as unpatriotic. But Barack Obama was one of 2004’s winners. Kerry had campaigned with Obama in April and had been hugely impressed by his skill and potential. Kerry’s national finance chairman, Louis Susman, whispered to Kerry, “This guy is going to be on a national ticket someday.” Kerry agreed but was less patient: “He should be one of the faces of our party now, not years from now.” So Kerry invited Obama to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July. It was a remarkable vote of confidence in a junior senator of just two years’ standing.

  Kerry’s choice turned out to be inspired. The
speech met with acclaim in the hall and across the nation. Obama’s simple recounting of his family tree was riveting enough. But it was his ability to transcend that bitter election—to stake a claim as the grown-up in the room—that was especially impressive. The emotional climax of the speech extolled the merits of unity and decried the corrosive effects of negativity and the false dichotomies of the culture wars:

  Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there is the United States of America … We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq … In the end, that’s what the election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?15

  The convention hall rattled to a crescendo of applause. There were tears, whooping, stomping feet—all achieved without orchestration. Reflecting on Obama’s remarkable performance the following day, Hillary Clinton was bowled over: “I thought that was one of the most electrifying moments that I can remember at any Convention.”16 Four years later, confronting Obama as a political adversary, Clinton would come to rue Obama’s remarkable life story, rhetorical facility, and transcendent appeal. He embodied America’s virtues and promise, its complex composition and the vibrancy it engendered. Running against Obama must have felt like running against fate.

  A few weeks before announcing his presidential candidacy in 2006, Obama delivered an important speech on foreign policy. He announced his intention as commander in chief to follow a “strategy no longer driven by ideology and politics but one that is based on a realistic assessment of the sobering facts on the ground and our interests in the region. This kind of realism has been missing since the very conception of this war, and it is what led me to publicly oppose it in 2002.”17 Hillary Clinton, the overwhelming favorite to secure the Democratic nomination, had one principal line of attack against Obama’s prospective foreign policies: he was inexperienced and hence might imperil national security. Obama had a devastating response: the “experienced” Clinton had voted in the Senate to authorize the Second Iraq War.

  With similar lack of success, Clinton tried different lines of attack, chiding Obama for talking up the threat posed by instability on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and for announcing that the United States should reserve the right to strike there unilaterally against al-Qaeda if the need arose. Obama’s response was cool and robust: “I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me for making sure that we are on the right battlefield and not the wrong battlefield in the war against terrorism.” In the fall of 2007, Obama developed this line of reasoning, assailing “Washington group think,” “the foreign policy elite,” and “conventional thinking in Washington.”18 Obama could present a solid case that his foreign-policy judgment was sounder than Clinton’s, based on the farsightedness displayed in his 2002 speech in Chicago. It rocked Clinton on her heels every time Obama pointed this out.

  Obama eventually beat Clinton to the nomination, assisted in no small part by his early opposition to the Iraq War. In the general election, Obama faced John McCain, a four-term senator from Arizona. With good reason, perhaps, McCain believed that he could succeed with the “inexperience” jab where Clinton had tried and failed. So when Obama declared, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets [in Pakistan] and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” McCain chided him for this naïve bluster: an affront to Pakistani pride and an illegal threat to its sovereignty.19

  White House press secretary Tony Snow made it similarly clear that President Bush had and would continue to respect Pakistan’s borders and that Senator Obama was engaging in reckless politicking. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had once rejected a proposed commando raid into Pakistan for the destabilizing effect it would have on Islamabad and for the damage it would wreak on bilateral relations. Weighing in with a rare admiring editorial, titled “Barack Obama, Neocon,” The Wall Street Journal admitted, “Anyone who wants to run to the right of Rummy on counterterrorism can’t be all bad.”20 John McCain observed on the campaign trail that he would “follow Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell.” Obama might have replied that McCain would not actually pass through those gates, however, because there was a risk that hell might be destabilized—and better the devil you know.21

  * * *

  Obama’s foreign-policy views coalesced throughout election year, although they never hardened into an “ideology.” He read popular books on foreign affairs by Fareed Zakaria and Thomas L. Friedman and met frequently with Democratic Party éminences grises like Tony Lake and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser praised Obama: “I thought he had a really incisive grasp of what the twenty-first century is all about and how America has to relate to it. He was reacting in a way that I very much shared, and we had a meeting of minds—namely, that George Bush put the United States on a suicidal course.” A meeting of minds, maybe, but Obama’s worldview was suppler than the reflexive anti-Soviet one Brzezinski displayed throughout the 1970s. He drew inspiration from a variety of sources that spanned the political and ideological divide. “The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father,” Obama observed at a campaign event in Pennsylvania, “of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan.”22

  But Obama’s self-identification as a realist does not capture the totality of his worldview—as his qualified admiration for Reagan suggests. The Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr exerted a significant influence on his thinking about foreign policy, and there was nothing narrowly realist about the complex architecture of thought expressed in works like The Irony of American History and The Children of Light and Children of Darkness. In a 2007 interview with the New York Times journalist David Brooks, Obama identified Niebuhr as a major inspiration: “[He] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”23

  Niebuhr was sympathetic to the realist tradition, but his devout Christianity tempered the amorality engendered by its purest application. Obama, also a devout Christian, shared these sentiments on religious, moral, and tactical grounds.

  As Andrew Preston observes in Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: “Without religion, Niebuhr argued, realism would invariably lead the nation astray because it would lack a moral compass and thus lack moral purpose, but without realism, religion could also be damaging because of its tendency to veer off into destructive idealistic crusades.”24 This was a thinker who stood on his own terms. Obama read and came to admire Niebuhr while teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. Niebuhr’s critique of John Dewey—for failing to comprehend that self-interest drove humanity more than any other single force, and for being led by his worthy pacific tendencies to ignore the reality that the existence of evil meant some wars had to be fought to complete victory—struck a resonant chord with Obama.25 This amalgam of realism and contingent idealism defies neat categorization, but pragmatism is the category that comes closest. In March 2008, Obama’s national security advisory team recommended that “pragmatism over ideology” serve as his foreign-policy tagline. As Jo Becker and Scott Shane wrote in The New York Times, “It was counsel that only reinforced the president’s instincts.”26

  Throughout
2008, Obama provided details on how “pragmatism over ideology” might translate into practice. After defeating Hillary Clinton in the primaries, Obama traveled to Iraq to meet General David Petraeus. The architect of the “surge” recognized that Obama would withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq promptly if he was elected. So he pressed him for more resources while American forces remained in situ. “Look, if I were in your shoes, General,” Obama replied, “I would be asking for everything you’re asking for and more … But you have to understand that, from where I sit now as a senator, and from where I might sit if I’m elected president, we have ultimately different responsibilities.”27 Petraeus was not blindsided by this response. During the campaign, Obama had clearly stated that “by refusing to end the war in Iraq President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want … a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”28 He proposed to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq within sixteen months of his election. But Petraeus did confide to an associate that he was surprised that Obama had talked more like a centrist than a liberal. Perhaps this was a reference to the fact that Obama had publicly indicated his desire to send more troops to Afghanistan, which he believed the Bush administration had misguidedly neglected in favor of its “ideological” war in Iraq. This reprioritization displayed Obama’s tendency to frame foreign policy on a case-by-case basis. There were more dangerous Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan than in Iraq, and policy should reflect this reality.