“Walk on through the wind,
Walk on through the rain,
Tho’ your dreams be tossed and blown.Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone,
You’ll never walk alone.”
—Rogers and Hammerstein, 1945
I confess to be a diehard Liverpool FC fan. The mantra of the football club is “you’ll never walk alone.” One year after Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, it’s time to deconstruct the presidential analogy and its usefulness in understanding the Obama administration. Does this president walk alone?
Even if the world’s not watching Liverpool (which is a pity), the world is indeed watching, waiting with baited breath, to know what Obama’s next step will be—whether it’s with respect to boosting the global economy, health care reform, gays in the military, negotiations with Iran over its nuclear facilities, escalation of American troops in Afghanistan, or U.S. commitments to Israel—or Iraq. The list is long. And while we wait, it seems that we cannot help ourselves from drawing comparisons, however ill-guided, between previous presidential administrations and that of our first African American (and I would argue cosmopolitan) president, who looks to redefine the role of the United States in an increasingly globalized and complicated world.
In the earliest days of the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama was compared to JFK. David Greenberg, professor of history at Rutgers University, argued in “Playing the Tolerance Card: How Obama is Like JFK” that Obama’s race could work in the same fashion for presidential victory as JFK’s Catholicism had. First acknowledging that Obama, like JFK, “manages to inspire people with sex appeal, cerebral cool, and a message of generational change,” Greenberg asserted that the most important aspect of Kennedy’s campaign was the way in which JFK parlayed his “Catholic card”; Obama seemed to be doing the same with respect to race.[1] Links between the two presidents has continued, with the media stopping at nothing, even comparing Obama’s limousine to that which in JFK was riding the day he was assassinated.[2]
As the election approached, comparisons abounded with respect to Obama and Abraham Lincoln. Obama-Lincoln parallels were prevalent following Obama’s speech on race at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia in March 2008. In an article titled “Obama’s Lincoln,” Newsweek correspondents Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe asserted, “It is the season to compare Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln. Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis. Both are superb rhetoricians, both geniuses at stagecraft and timing…” The Newsweek team went on to describe Obama’s Lincolnesque vision to unite the country, his eagerness to manage his own “team of rivals,” and his tendency not to shy away from a cabinet brimming with expertise. They concluded that the most important quality shared by both leaders is a sense of humility.
Of course, the inauguration, including the inaugural speech itself, had deliberate references to Lincoln’s presidency. The theme of the Obama inauguration, “A New Birth of Freedom,” was taken from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863. Obama took his oath of office on the same Bible that Lincoln used in 1861; he followed part of the route that Lincoln had taken to arrive to the capital.
Once Obama entered the White House, however, the challenges facing his administration (and presumably the answers to those challenges as well), were quickly compared to FDR’s First Hundred Days, and historic efforts to enact emergency legislation to salvage the economy in an earlier banking crisis.[3] Time Magazine issued a controversial (and some would say grotesque) cover portraying Obama as FDR with the lead story, “The New New Deal: What Barack Obama Can Learn from FDR and What the Democrats Need to Do.” And the Obama-FDR comparisons keep coming. Three days ago, Jonathan Alter, author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, underscored the similarities between the two presidencies on National Public Radio.[4]
Additional presidential analogies have only continued to run the gamut, as Obama’s first year in office comes to a close. Last month, the president gave his “Big Gay Speech” at a fund-raising dinner for the Human Rights Campaign in which he pledged to end the Clinton policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”[5] Since that time, numerous comparisons have been drawn between Harry Truman’s historical decision to desegregate the armed forces through executive order in 1948, and the hope that Obama will follow through in a similar manner on his stated intention to allow gay men and women to serve openly in the military.
Only last week, Victor Davis Hanson, fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, compared Obama to Harry Truman, asking “Will an inexperienced Barack Obama, in the fashion of Harry Truman, learn quickly that the world is chaotic and unstable—best dealt with through strength and unabashed confidence in America’s historic role galvanizing democratic allies to confront illiberal aggressors?” If not, he warned, Obama will follow the “aberrant Democratic path of the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter.”[6]
And then, of course, there is the ubiquitous comparison to LBJ. In Obama’s push to reform the health care system, the president is frequently being held up against Lyndon B. Johnson and his masterful legislative lobbying to push through Medicare in 1965. Obama’s closest advisors see it too: “There are two qualities these presidents have in common,” according to White House senior adviser David Axelrod. Like Obama, Johnson “had a big vision and drove the country toward it, and second, he had a great appreciation for the legislative process.”[7]
Afghanistan, everyone seems to be warning, is Obama’s Vietnam.[8] The Obama-Johnson analogy is very powerful, indeed. In a New York Times piece this summer, “Could Afghanistan Be Obama’s Vietnam?” Historian David M. Kennedy is quoted as saying, “The analogy of Lyndon Johnson suggests itself very profoundly.” According to Kennedy, Obama must prevent Afghanistan’s shadowing his presidency as Vietnam did Johnson’s. “He needs to worry about the outcome of that intervention and policy and how it could spill over into everything else he wants to accomplish.”[9]
The fact is, even while we historians fully recognize the pitfalls of making them, we find such historical presidential analogies too tempting to resist. Matt Bai effectively cautioned against the practice in his article “Don’t Look Back: Why Obama is not FDR. Or Kennedy. Or Lincoln. Or History.” “The danger,” he warns, “in so relentlessly referencing historical markers … is that they can trick us into looking backward over our shoulders when we ought to be focused on the unpredictable path ahead.”[10] I could not agree more.
Although circumstances surrounding twenty-first century policy decisions can appear quite similar to that of the past, they are, of course, decidedly different. Indeed, perhaps the single factor that is remarkably unique to our era, thus making the litany of presidential analogies so elusive, is embodied in Barack Hussein Obama. Obama is unlike any previous president, and he leads in an era unlike any previous time. He has seven half-brothers and half-sisters spread across more than 10,000 miles; he has ancestors who were born in Kenya, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany and the Netherlands. He readily acknowledges his unique American identity, expressing gratitude for “the diversity of [his] heritage.” He insists that his story is “part of the larger American story.” But Obama’s presidency is, in fact, a new kind of American story—one that is sure to reflect the changing identity of Americans as we move into the twenty-first century. Obama is our first cosmopolitan president in a highly globalized world.
So, Obama may indeed continue to take lessons from previous presidents. But he cannot possibly hope to follow in their footsteps—and he ought not to try. From where he sits, his is a brave new world, unexplored territory. In this respect, then, President Obama stands apart, necessarily focused on the “unpredictable path ahead.” And yet, precisely because of the complex, globalized world in which we live (and he leads), Obama can never walk alone.
This is not because the presidency, or even the presidents themselves, have changed the office. Rather it is that we—the sometimes admiring, but ever-critical and now world-wide YouTube watching international public—have changed what it means to be president. At the height of the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama stopped to tour Harry Truman’s home. As he left the house, he glanced to see Truman’s coat and hat on a hook just inside the foyer. The hopeful candidate lamented, “The thing that I envy most about Truman was that when he was in the White House, he could go out and take a walk. He could put on that fedora and take a stroll, without someone following him.”[11] Unlike Truman, and the many other presidents to whom he is compared, Obama never walks alone. We are all following him, one way or another, every step of the way, watching every move he makes.
[1] See also Frank Rich, “Ask Not What JFK Can Do for Obama,” New York Times, February 3, 2008.
[2] “How Obama’s Limo Stacks Up Against JFK’s” CNN.com March 18, 2009.
[3] “Measuring Obama by FDR’s Yardstick,” Los Angeles Times April 2009; “Comparing Barack Obama and FDR,” The Economist, November 20, 2008; to cite only a few.
[4] Ten years ago, Alter asserted, “Historical analogies are essential to charting the wisest course. The challenge is to strike an imaginative balance, like a postmodern artist picking and choosing from the styles of the past.” Jonathan Alter, “The Trouble with History,” Newsweek, April 12, 1999.
[5] “Obama Pledges Again to End ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” New York Times, October 10, 2009.
[6] Victor Davis Hanson, “Truman and the Principles of U.S. Foreign Policy,” Wall Street Journal October 28, 2009.
[7] “On Health Care Reform, Obama Looks to the LBJ Model,” Washington Post July 14, 2009.
[8] There are too many references to cite here, but a representative argument is found in Juan Cole, “Obama’s Vietnam?” Salon.com January 26, 2009
[9] “Could Afghanistan Become Obama’s Vietnam” New York Times, August 22, 2009
[10] Matt Bai, “Don’t Look Back: Why Obama is not FDR. Or Kennedy. Or Lincoln. Or History.” New York Times Magazine, February 1, 2009.
[11] Lynn Sweet, “Obama Visits Harry Truman Home,” Chicago Sun-Times June 30, 2008.
Kimber Quinney
Kimber Quinney is a full-time Lecturer in the History Department at the California State University, San Marcos. She holds an MA in international relations from the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., and a PhD in history from UC Santa Barbara. Her reseach is focused on U.S. policy toward postwar Italy and the transition from fascism to democracy. Her current research explores the impact of ethnic indentity on American foreign relations, including especially the role played by Italian Americans in the making of U.S. foreign policy toward Italy in the early Cold War.