Hail to the Chief?

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.
• Position: 'Obama's Time: A History' by Morton Keller - Political Landscape - Book review

SPECTOR Professor of History emeritus at Brandeis University and a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, Morton Keller believes it is better to write history during the subject's lifetime. Although we find ourselves in a culture in which most political writing appears tediously one-sided, historians ideally document without pressures of prejudices and predilections. Keller has authored America's Three Regimes: A New Political History, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America; and, most recently, Obama's Time: A History, which aims to document Barack Obama's presidency and the political world in which it functions.

Keller considers the current White House resident an "intellectual's president," whose approach to the presidency often has a profoundly academic cast. Obama presents a message and pursues a mission to lead the "national student body." His fresh persona and post-partisan message won the election in 2008. The media and educated citizens believed in his unique talents and foresaw the "prospect of an epochal presidency."

Although Obama projected an unusual presidential persona of intelligence, eloquence, and confidence, he had the ability to "play the game of politics as intensely and as well as anyone," capably utilizing mass culture talk shows and social networks "much as FDR did on radio and JFK on TV." Media, professionals, and academics gave him support not seen since the Kennedy era.

Throughout Obama's tenure, the "weight of the past and contingencies of the present" have restricted his influence. The tension between economic and social policies he wanted to pursue and conditions reality imposed on him defined the course of his first term. The 2008 Hope and Change campaign promised health care, immigration, and education reform, carbon emission reduction, more renewable energy, an exit from Iraq, and the closing of the Guantanamo Bay military prison. However, the Great Recession took precedence.

New concerns--banking and finance, government spending, and the need for debt reduction, housing and mortgages, and, above all, unemployment, defined the crisis agenda. Obama's response to the recession included Dodd-Frank, the biggest financial reform bill since the 1930s. Wall Street, however, continues to be financially flush and politically unpopular. Complex and detailed, Dodd-Frank constitutes a "bureaucratic blueprint as much as a legislative program."...