Hoping for Audacity

JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images
US President Barack Obama speaks during a Democratic National Congress (DNC) event ahead of November 2 midterm elections in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 30, 2010.

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The President's decision to let the liberal barons of Capitol Hill write much of his initial economic-stimulus program will be debated for decades. Beyond dispute is the difference between teachable moments and sustained instruction of the sort that caused Harry Truman to define the chief power of the modern presidency as the power to persuade. Many Obama supporters remain baffled by a seeming passivity that has enabled the President's harshest critics to seize the initiative and frame the debates over health care, climate change and the economy. At his professorial best, Obama could explain better than anyone else why the current economic situation differs from past recessions. In the process, he might also refute popular fears that the U.S. is a nation in decline.

The President's disdain for a media culture with little patience for complexity is both understandable and perilous. In sharp contrast with Kennedy and his twice-a-month press conferences, Obama seems less vivid a presence than he did on his Inauguration Day. A perfunctory pair of Oval Office addresses did little to advance his agenda or reassure restive allies. At times Obama conveys the impression of one who is above the grubby, not always rational demands of presidential salesmanship. Perhaps, like JFK gleefully anticipating a 1964 re-election campaign against Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, he is counting on his opponents to render themselves unelectable.

That history hasn't repeated itself in other ways merely demonstrates how distorting is the lens of nostalgia. As a rule, Presidents work within the political consensus they inherit. (They get to Mount Rushmore by shattering that consensus and replacing it with one of their own, but that's another matter.) JFK took office 28 years after FDR began to transform the relationship between average Americans and their government. Starting in 1933, power and wealth flowed inexorably to a federal government expanding to meet the challenges of global depression and global war. A sense of collective purpose, a solidarity born of adversity faced and overcome, bonded members of the Greatest Generation. Their shared values included trust in government and a reflexive rallying to the President in times of crisis. When Kennedy's brainy team of advisers bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, the President's approval numbers actually rose, to 83%. "Jesus, it's just like Ike," JFK quipped. "The worse you do, the better they like you."

Obama, by contrast, entered the presidency exactly 28 years after Ronald Reagan declared government more problem than problem solver. By 2009, confidence in Washington had been dulled by decades of deception, media scorn and a popular questioning of authority at all levels. FDR promised his countrymen freedom through government. Reagan offered them freedom from government. If Obama's health reforms have failed to catch fire with much of the public, it is because millions of Americans harbor a Reaganesque skepticism about government's ability to deliver on its best intentions.

Ultimately, Kennedy's claim to historical significance rests less with his legislative scorecard than with the way he grew into his responsibilities. Elected as a conventional Cold Warrior, exploiting a nonexistent missile gap, he had an obsession with Fidel Castro's Cuba that culminated in the white-knuckle days of October 1962, when the human race contemplated its own annihilation. Out of this near death experience came Kennedy's famed June 10, 1963, Peace Speech at American University. One day after he opened the door to a nuclear-test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union, the President watched a televised replay of Alabama Governor George Wallace symbolically trying to block entrance to Negro students enrolling at the University of Alabama.

"I want to go on television tonight," Kennedy told advisers. So hasty were the arrangements that at the time he went on the air, neither his speech nor the civil rights bill it was meant to promote was fully written. Much of the President's appeal was improvised, with a passion wholly missing from his earlier comments on the subject. In the last summer of Kennedy's life, his approval rating dropped to 59%, albeit for the best of reasons. In accepting both the moral obligations of leadership and its political consequences, the author of Profiles in Courage demonstrated the courage to change.

Afghanistan, a bloated federal budget and the increasingly discredited policy of "Don't ask, don't tell" offer President Obama obvious opportunities to emulate Kennedy's example. How he responds will go far toward determining, 50 years hence, whether the Obama presidency is remembered for "Yes, we can" or "Maybe we could have."

Smith, who has headed five presidential libraries, is a scholar-in-residence at George Mason University

Time.com

Hoping for Audacity

How John F. Kennedy grew into the presidency, and what it means for Obama