Overthinking Obama: Forget Kenya. The president's secret political p hilosophy is apparently rooted in seventeenth-century Rotterdam.

• Author: Schmitt, Mark
• Position: Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition by Ruth O'Brien - Book review

Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition

by Ruth O'Brien

University of Chicago Press, 432 pp.

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Few presidents since the founding generation and Lincoln have been treated as significant political thinkers in their own right. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan are all considered to have been representatives of powerful ideologies at their moments of ascent, but we know they were not the authors of those ideas. Bill Clinton may have been the smartest political strategist since FDR to occupy the White House, but I know of no books on the political theory of Bill Clinton--which would, in any event, be an elusive subject. The exception is probably Woodrow Wilson, who would be regarded as a significant figure in the development of political science even if he had never run for office.

But there's something about Barack Obama that makes people want to interpret him not just as a product of his time and political circumstances but also as a powerful theorist creating a politics of his own. This is common on the right, of course, where Newt Gingrich once asked, "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich was reflecting the work of Dinesh D'Souza, whose book (Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream) and movie (2016) depict Obama as an acolyte of quasi-Marxist postcolonial theory. Numerous books have looked at Obama's theory of race, and in Reading Obama, the intellectual historian James T. Kloppenberg contributed an elegant account of the ideas that were in the air in Obama's schooling and in Chicago, and of their debt to American pragmatism.

Ruth O'Brien, a political scientist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, makes a more expansive claim: Obama marks a third American political tradition, one that falls outside both the "Lockean' tradition of unfettered liberties that Louis Hartz celebrated in The Liberal Tradition in America in 1954 and also the civic-republican thread that more recent thinkers, among them E. J. Dionne and Michael Lind, have seen in the line running from Alexander Hamilton through the Progressives and FDR. (Essentially, this the tradition of an active government with a strong role in the economy.) Obama's third way, according to O'Brien, is not the hyper-cautious centrism associated with the Washington...