You, Sir, Are No Jay Gatsby

Bestriding the world like a colossus?

Everyone has something to say about Barack Obama, who has been the subject of non-stop scrutiny since last year’s Democratic primaries.  It therefore is not surprising that some would turn to literature to understand what he means.  Including, in recent weeks,  two New York Times columnists.

Stanley Fish, the subject of three posts this week, notes how, whether one loves or hates the president, he is dwarfing every other political figure around.  The observation takes on additional heft when Fish quotes Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

But there is a surprising upside to all [the unceasing attacks on the president]: because he is the object of unceasing criticism, Obama is also the object of unceasing attention. Day after day and night after night his is the face we see and the voice we hear. (On Sunday, we could have seen and heard him on five networks.) Like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he bestrides the political landscape like a colossus.

Every administration takes its name from the president, but in this administration the president seems to be the only one performing. Cabinet members and party leaders barely rise to the status of supporting players. Even when they’re in the room, as Arne Duncan was when the schoolchildren were exhorted to study hard, they fade into the background.

 Fish sees this as ultimately being to Obama’s advantage.   If universal health care passes, then he will get the credit.  If it doesn’t, then it will be because of all the little obstructionists around him.  For a contrast, recall Bill Clinton having to insist that he was still relevant following the 1994 Republican electoral sweep.

Roger Cohen is more pessimistic as he quotes The Great Gatsby. Cohen notes that, despite his lofty rhetoric, Obama may be more comfortable as a realist (think of his nose-to-the-grindstone inaugural address).  To a certain extent, Cohen welcomes this.  After all, the Bush administration’s inflated sense of America’s power and influence got us into a lot of trouble:

The cabin in the woods is looking good after the era of the starter mansion. America hates scaling back. Its nature, hard-wired to the new frontier, is alien to retraction. But that’s the zeitgeist President Barack Obama has inherited. The challenge he faces is how to manage reduced expectations.

 The problem is that America has always been a nation of gamblers and dreamers.  Maybe this is why Ronald Reagan so thoroughly trounced the cautious Jimmy Carter and then proceeded to tear down those things that were “holding America back,” like regulations, balanced budgets, careful negotiation, and energy conservation.  From his vacation spot in Colorado, Cohen finds himself wondering whether Obama’s realism won’t run counter to American dreaming, which has never been more eloquently expressed than in the final paragraph of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s  masterpiece.  Cohen writes:

In the vastness of southern Colorado, where mountain and mesa and meadow summon archetypal images of American possibility — and wasn’t Obama’s election precisely about restoring the mythology of that possibility? — I found myself pondering this tension between the idealism projected onto the president and the realism that is his obligation: the tension between America’s exalted self-image and its current quandary.

The beautiful wild put me in mind of Gatsby: “For a transitory enchanted moment man [the early Dutch settlers upon first seeing New York] must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

But Obama is talking down wonderment. In so doing, I suspect, he’s setting the tone for coming decades that — whatever else they bring — will see America’s relative economic power decline.

Cohen’s concerns are not small.  National mythologies run deep, and leaders who run afoul of them can be crucified, regardless of the facts.  Jimmy Carter was not credited with his foresight on energy use but faulted for depressing the voters with his worries about spiritual malaise.  Will Obama be caught by that dynamic as well, Cohen wonders:

America, forced by circumstance, is cashing out. It’s changing perspective, adjusting to a 21st-century world of new power centers. Obama’s new discourse was needed. But unless he can embody possibility in retrenchment — “everything money can’t buy” — I doubt he can carry the country with him.

Cohen’s question about whether Obama can “manage reduced expectations” recalls for me the concluding passage of Robert Frost’s haunting poem “The Oven Bird”  : “The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing.”  I will write more on the poem next week because I think it gets at a sense of Eden Lost that Americans don’t so much disagree with as deny.  (And then we punish those who don’t allow us to remain in denial.)  It may well be that Obama has the sensitivity, intelligence, vision, and self-awareness to articulate “possibility in retrenchment.” But Cohen is right that he is bucking the odds.