The President is a man of reason, which, of course, doesn't mean he's always reasonable, but that he wants to be reasonable--that being reasonable is important to him.
Whatever comes up, he sees it as his role to give careful, reasoned
explanations of his actions or his attitude. He is articulate in the
way of a college professor; questions from students are carefully
answered, each time with a bit of a different twist, in the hope that
the student will understand this time around. And next class, before
there are even questions, the professor will try to anticipate what
they might be and carefully explain, and explain again.
Mr. Obama has his vanities, and he has a touch of arrogance, and he
doesn't quite see himself as others do--for instance, he seems to think
he has a sense of humor--but on the whole he strives to keep his
emotions in check, and who can dispute that this mix of traits has
carried him far, very far indeed? Maybe I should say these traits as
well as a touch of glamour.
Reasonable people have trouble, of course, with unreasonable ones. They
expect their own reasonableness to be persuasive, to talk others out of
their unreason. In that respect you might say that reasonable people
are unreasonable.
More precisely, President Obama doesn't know how
to meet the unreason he gets, and seems unsure of who his enemies are.
His greatest foes, his mortal enemies,his
deadliest opponents, are the right-wing talk show hosts. Their voices
are loud, and they have a responsive audience. There are so many of
them that I'll merge them into one. What an irony that the most potent
propaganda weapon of Germany in the Twenties and Thirties--the
radio--is once again playing a bellowing, destructive role!
The right-wing talk show host accuses the President of being a traitor,
a weakling, an opportunist, a Chicago thug, a Muslim, a socialist, a
fascist, who wants to destroy the private sector and increase his own
power and the power of the state. He is portrayed both as diabolically
clever and very dumb, glib as well as a stutterer who can't speak
without a teleprompter.
In their eyes he can't do anything right. If he
talks to schoolchildren about studying hard, he's "indoctrinating them
into the socialist agenda."
Why these assertions are eagerly taken in by millions of people could
be the subject of another column. Fear, racism, the huge unpopularity
of the government, the economic crisis--all of them play into it.
That these assertions are demonstrably false
doesn't matter. That the speakers who proclaim them believe their own
lies is further alarming. Their sincerity merely makes them more
persuasive. When you hate someone, all arguments supporting that hatred
are valid. The hatred comes first. Demagogues give voice to unspoken
angers and unlabeled wrath.
And that this view is still a minority view is
also not comforting. The Bolsheviks, the Nazis, and the Taliban, all
started as minority views.
The President could do himself a lot of good by saying, "The government
doesn't want to run the banks; the government doesn't enjoy operating
General Motors. . . We'd like to get out of the car business as soon as
we can." Mild enough, but at least it would have some feeling behind it.
It wouldn't help with the talk show hosts, but it
might reach some of the people who listen to them.
But the reasonable person has trouble saying
emotional things. When he does, he sounds unconvincing and even weak.
My fear is this: In the clash between reason and emotion, emotion usually wins. And most dangerous of all is the emotion that doesn't know itself for being the vicious hatred it is.
Manfred Wolf is the author of "Almost a Foreign Country."
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