Please, Mr. President, Don't Feel My Pain

I've been reading Cassandras all week bemoaning the Obama administration's early stumbles. And I completely agree. The Obama administration is stumbling early. Sure, Maureen Dowd, he is using a teleprompter. Sure, Michael Wolff, he is looking like he is a novice at this stuff. Sure, Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, Obama is playing defense a day late and a dollar short on the news. And sure, Tim Shipman, if it turns out campaigning is all Obama can do well he will go down as a second Carter. I agree with all that. So the source of my frustration is not with these authors list of the ills, it is with the proposed cure.

Maureen Dowd would like Obama is extemporize rage (bad teleprompter). Michael Wolff wants him to connect his rhetoric to people's current emotions. Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei say he needs to get out in front of public anger rather than chasing it. Tim Shipman sums all these guys up before counseling the president to "get angry." Obama's big deficit, according to Shipman, is the "advanced emotional intelligence" that made Clinton and Blair so capable of feeling people's pain.

Please no. One of the most welcome aspects of Obama's rise was that he explicitly rejected the emotional demagoguery of modern politics. Don't you ever wonder if any of the political philosophers of our founding generation could get elected in this day in age? Somebody like a Madison say? I realize politicians today have to actually campaign and cannot be emotionally tone deaf. But the modern politician as personal nanny has never been appealing to me. It was encouraging to think that someone with a professorial manner, a former constitutional law professor, could get elected. He never treated the public like a bunch of peasants to be incited to grab their pitchforks. So when this A.I.G. bonus business broke, the ironic laughter at his own "rage" (after coughing, "Excuse me, I'm choked up with anger here") was if anything refreshing. Sure, his "rage" sounds phony. That's what happens when you ironically joke about your rage before reading it off a teleprompter. But the solution to the disconnect, the solution to the weak attempt to get out in front of the pitchforks, is not to indulge it in the first place. Don't try to find more rage, a more authentic range of emotional demagoguery, instead be the adult in the room. Go with what I presume was your first (and correct) instinct to treat the A.I.G. bonuses for what they are: a slightly irresponsible and optically terrible move by A.I.G., but ultimately very small potatoes and a lot less damaging to the economy (not to mention the ship of state) than the irresponsible and probably illegal attempt by congress to claw it all back. Congress knows how politics works. That's why they are climbing over each other to be the guy with the biggest torch in the peasant's revolt. Obama decried this tendency in politics when he was writing about politics and running for office. So put your rhetoric were you can also put the full weight of your emotion behind it with sincerity: tell the bloodthirsty crowd to calm down. We don't need more anger Mr. President. We don't need someone to feel our pain. We need someone to tell us to calm down, buck up, and then get about the business of a applying a bandage, not lighting a bonfire.