Obama’s Language Doesn’t Match His True Convictions: Le Figaro, France

How has it all seemingly gone wrong for President Barack Obama? Providing a unique, and uniquely French prospective on the question, is historian Alexandre Adler, who suggests that at root of the president’s problem is ironically, a failure to truthfully communicate in a way “more in keeping with some of his deepest intuitions.”

In one meaty section of his analysis, Alexandre Adler writes for Le Figaro in part:

There emerges in the person of the president an image of haughty indifference, which the entire northern hemisphere of the planet has been favored. One finds the same incapacity to boost public opinion at work in domestic politics. Obama was right to make full use of his majority in Congress to pass the most consensual health care legislation possible. And in spite an arduous road, it was almost accomplished with the Senate vote late in December 2009. But at no time did the president solemnly address the nation to lay out the stakes of such a reform which, in effect, would have put a major financial burden on a segment of the middle class already covered by insurance, to the benefit of a precarious group of people who have been left to their own devices and who are mostly unemployed youth and untrained workers. And clearly, the overwhelming majority is Black and Hispanic. His lack of candor has demobilized the potentially generous impulses of the majority of the public and facilitated a right-wing offensive that took advantage of this to deceive the public and flatter its worst prejudices by drowning it in incomprehensible technocratic detail.

Despite all the resources of his great intelligence, it is this timidity that leads him into the complexity of technical processes without giving the country the language it yearns for. This nonetheless very relative failure of Obama, who still enjoys 57 percent favorable public approval, like Reagan one year into his term, consists, then, of having conducted a centrist policy, of which he is a bit ashamed, with language that is a bit too leftist. Yet if the president had with conviction, maintained the same mobilizing language and placed himself at the center, he could have paradoxically conducted a policy much more to the left and more in keeping with some of his deepest intuitions. But here, to recall Pierre Mendès of France, “to govern is first of all to choose.”

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