Quote Of The Day: Obama As Ideological Rorschach

Our political Quote of the Day is actually a post of the day — a must read in full post. But we’ll give you the beginning of this thoughtful post by the ever-thoughtful Dick Meyer of NPR (who used to be with CBS):

It’s great, Sean Penn said in accepting his Oscar this week, to have an “elegant man” back in the White House.

The Best Actor is but the latest and glitziest example of a phenomenon I noticed early in 2008 primaries: Barack Obama as Rorschach. The young, new, unknown candidate was often a vessel for the hopes and wishes of voters. This is no insult to Obama; quite the contrary. The capacity to attract the positive emotions of fellow Homo sapiens is a large part of what makes a person, well, attractive.

In this neonatal stage of his administration, there is another form of psychological projection going on with the Obama Rorschach. Instead of voters projecting qualities of greatness, charisma, post-racialism or epic newness onto a candidate, you have professional partisans and intellectuals projecting political theories onto a president.

Normally, it is my irritating proclivity to make a metaphysical mountain out of a matter-of-fact molehill. In this case, the “Name That Ideology” game is a parlor act that mostly serves to obscure.

And here’s the ending:

What may be disorienting about Obama is that his pragmatism is mixed with eloquence and agility with high rhetoric. And he is an historic “first.” We expect pragmatists to be gray and mundane. Wrong.

Indeed, showmanship and inspiration have a very pragmatic role in politics, as Obama well knows. The late philosopher Richard Rorty was the most famous defender of American pragmatism since William James and John Dewey. Rorty wrote, “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition of self-improvement.”

Now go to the link and read it in its entirety…