Disappointed Expectations: A Presidential Psychobiographer’s Reflections

disappointed expectations, Washington gridlock, and the negativism of American national politics have frustrated and worn me down. Fortunately, Ken Fuchsman’s joining me in endeavors to write about Obama on the pages of Clio’s Psyche and elsewhere helped to raise my domestic political psychology spirits. Having a colleague to discuss and debate the issues and publish with brought new energy to the project. Still, it remains frustrating to closely follow American politics because of the enormous gap between the rhetoric and the reality: the hopes engendered and the painful political realities.

The Founding Fathers of America not only swept slavery under the rug while writing our constitution, they created a system based on checks and balances—which has become gridlocked—as a way of protecting the fragile infant republic from one-man rule. Ultimately, their white landowners’ republic grew into a white male democracy in 1829. At the cost of over 600,000 lives in 1861-1865, slavery was abolished and (in theory) freed men were given the vote. Of course, we know that most African-Americans were not effectively allowed to vote until Johnson gave his support to it in the 1960s. That is Lyndon Baines Johnson rather than Andrew Johnson—Lincoln’s successor who had done his best to keep the former slaves economically and politically subservient to Southern whites. Change is slow, but in my lifetime racist laws, customs, and Saturday night lynchings have given way to the election of a biracial President, but not without ambivalence and resistance.

Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was elected President in 2008 amidst dangerous economic realities and totally unrealistic expectations. Much of the American media and public engaged in the fantasy that he had become President and would save the country from its woes even before his inauguration, two-and-a-half months after

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the election (David Beisel, “Presidential Salvation Fantasies and the Election of Barack Obama,” Clio’s Psyche, vol. 15, no. 4, March 2009, 264-270). In Stockholm in late 2009 he was embarrassingly awarded a Nobel Peace Prize before he really had a chance to do much in his presidency. The expectations of most Americans and the world were totally unrealistic and, as is the case with group fantasies, they are ultimately shattered by reality. Disappointed expectations are an incredibly powerful force in politics, as they are elsewhere. Awaiting the collapse of the “Obama as savior” fantasy, and doing whatever they could to destroy his effectiveness, conservative Republicans and “birthers” were and are a significant minority who viewed the first African-American President as someone who would bring dystopia to the land.

While I have many frustrations with Obama’s conduct in his presidency, I think it an error to lose sight of the reality that as an African American, he could only be chosen because he was, despite his progressive beliefs and rhetoric, a biracial compromiser, “with hardly a black bone in his body” according to a former long-term white girlfriend. To reiterate, it is impossible to sufficiently emphasize that his being a “safe black” was a necessary condition for his election. With 20/20 hindsight, like Fuchsman we can look back on the first two years of Obama’s presidency when he had his greatest mandate and a Democratic House and Senate and complain that he wasn’t more effective regarding climate change, the debt limit, economic stimulus, foreclosures, homeownership, and unemployment. However, it was well known that the Junior Senator from Illinois, a former community organizer, would not be trying to bang political heads together but would rather work to reconcile Americans of all colors and political persuasions.

Professor Fuchsman writes that our President squandered valuable opportunities. Yet just a few years ago he focused on Obama’s remarkable accomplishments (though I also wish more could have been accomplished in the first quarter of his administration). Political reality dictated that you can only do so much at a time in the Washington system organized around gridlock.

Fuchsman’s comparison of Obama, whose inclinations are more of an academic than a politician, to Franklin Roosevelt misses the essential facts—that by the time FDR assumed the presidency,

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the nation had suffered through more than three years of depression and most people were ready for drastic solutions, which was clearly not the case when Obama became commander-in-chief. The current president is often compared negatively to LBJ. However, the LBJ comparison is unfair because Johnson was a product of Congress, which he had mastered. The Texan had a mandate to implement the program of the martyred Kennedy, which he skillfully implemented and expanded. Also, it should be noted that after his first three years in office, LBJ’s program began to stall despite the solid majority he maintained in both houses of Congress.

To me it is a reflection of Fuchsman’s disenchantment with the President that he claims “had developed more empathy for the struggles of the barons of Wall Street and Detroit than he did for the common people who had lost their way.” Regrettably, he had to turn to the leaders of Wall Street in a crisis he was magically expected to start solving before he even moved into the White House (Beisel, “Presidential Salvation Fantasies”). Contrary to Fuchsman, Obama had not “acted as if he was unaware that it was the economy that led to his victory, not health care.” He erroneously thought he could bring the universal health care that most presidents have been advocating since Teddy Roosevelt, as well as restoring the economy. His mother’s struggle with health insurance prior to her death from cancer may have been a major psychological influence on this politically costly decision.

Professor Fuchsman should be lauded for working to relate Obama’s childhood and personality to his political actions. However, when he criticizes him as a young man for buying into his mother’s version of the “family romance,” I am reminded of how long and difficult it is in psychoanalysis for individuals to get past the half-truths and fables they learned at the knees of their parents. (I am unaware of Obama having any psychoanalytic or other treatment.) To claim that “he did not research his facts when writing his memoir,” misrepresenting “his own family history” as a way of “avoid[ing] knowledge of the primal scene” is unwarranted and a sign of putting Freudian theory over fact. I am equally unimpressed with his citing the presidential psychopathologizer Justin Frank’s labeling Obama as a victim of “obsessive bipartisan disorder.”

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Fuchsman’s picture of Obama having only one well organized role model, his maternal grandmother, misses the fact that he was loved intensely and treated as special by both his grandparents and mother, even when she did this through letters from another continent since he chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents rather than to continue living with her in Asia. His feeling like an orphan was based on an adolescent living arrangement of his choosing. As a young man, Obama dared to put aside his mother’s mythic version of his African father by going to Kenya and came away determined to be a much more successful and cooperative person than his single-minded and failed namesake. In his political life, one of the consequences of this decision was that he did not try to force through his own agenda as the only right way, contributing to his bipartisanism with all its negative consequences.

I agree with Fuchsman’s conclusion that “it is unlikely that historians will rank Obama among the nation’s greatest presidents.” Like JFK, another young, untried senator without administrative experience who gained the presidency and raised great expectations and opposition precisely because of who he was rather than what he had already accomplished, Obama should not bear full responsibility for his failures. Included in those who do bear responsibility are the majority of voters who do not cast their ballots in the primaries when there are many choices and then do not sufficiently value experience when they enter the voting booth in November.

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