Ev Ehrlich's Everyday Economics

He’s Like Ike

When President Obama was elected, there was a booming business in finding some historical model for him and his imminent Presidency.  His detractors saw him as a Jimmy Carter, a good model for someone who appeared overwhelmed, but there’s none of the micromanagement and moral rigidity that Carter came to personify while in office.

To his supporters, and I fervently counted myself one and still do, the model was John Kennedy.  There were multiple bases for this comparison, from the urbanity and intelligence both possessed and that – implicitly, at least -- was so long absent in the Presidency, to the sense that the country was going to “get moving again,” whether through “vigor” or “hope.”

This comparison had some merit on both these scores – gosh, you look at films of Kennedy, now in back our short-term memory after a week of news clips after  Senator Kennedy’s death, and it’s astonishing how quick on his feet he is, how urbane, how suave, how downright charming – he’s President Cary Grant!  Small wonder he’s having threesomes with nubile interns – and good-looking interns, no fleshy thong-flashers – while he’s hopped up on amphetamines and steroids.

But this Obama-Kennedy comparison was unfair if not demeaning to one particular person – Dwight Eisenhower.  Sure, Eisenhower was no Cary Grant and his peccadilloes, if any, were limited to a few rumors about his wartime driver, Kay Summersby, that wouldn’t have upset Mrs. Miniver.  And Ike did not turn an elegant phrase – in fact, there was much smirking among the literati and their step-child, Mort Sahl, about his sometimes-mangled syntax, a legacy of his military background and a testimony to the importance of West Point English department.

But when Eisenhower chose to speak, he unleashed, most conspicuously in his Farewell Address, in which he warned of, and coined the term, “military-industrial complex,” a moment that American Republicans ignored as readily as they would the prattling of a crazy old aunt.  He could talk, when he had something to say.

And then there was the business about “getting the country moving again.”  To some extent this was a generational message, although it was a message Nixon abandoned to Kennedy – after all, Nixon was all of 47 to Kennedy’s 42 in 1960.  Nixon mistakenly chose to run as a young man posing as an older one – his campaign slogan was “Experience Counts” – and so Kennedy was left to the quasiquixotic exhortations about “vigor” and “New Frontiers.”  But Eisenhower certainly hadn’t run the country into a ditch.  In fact, many of Kennedy’s assertions about a “missile gap” between the U.S. and Soviet Union were fictional.  As for Eisenhower’s vigor, his position could best be summed up by another 1960 job-leaver, New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel, who upon departing only a few weeks before Eisenhower did, remarked,. “I’ll never make the mistake of being seventy again.”

But the third way in which the Obama-Kennedy comparison misses the boat is the most paradoxical one – to my thinking, Eisenhower himself is the best model for the Obama Presidency to date, and I emphasize to date, as the best model for the Reagan presidency at a similar juncture  (late 1981) was Herbert Hoover, so it’s early yet.

The essence of the Eisenhower Presidency was this (and like any essence, it misses various nuances).  Eisenhower was a manager – it was why he was tabbed to run the European Theater during the war.  So his agenda was a managerial one.  He stipulated what he wanted to accomplish and let the Congress work it out.  In that regard, Obama is eerily familiar.  In both the stimulus and now health care, he has allowed the Congress to flail, rather than imposing limits or boundaries.  The difference is that, in Eisenhower’s day, bipartisanship was an ongoing practice, not a long-lost ideal or a slogan to be wielded in a partisan fashion.

Eisenhower’s delegation extended to his Cabinet; John Foster Dulles was given a free hand to fashion U.S. foreign policy and used the hand in Iran, Guatemala and elsewhere.  Obama hasn’t gone that far, but Attorney General Holder’s decision to open up the detainee abuses of the previous Administration has some of that character.

Above all, Eisenhower’s presidency was about agenda, instead of vision.  This is the hard part of the comparison to discuss, but so far, the same could be said of Obama’s.  For all the talk of “hope,” Obama’s Presidency is still a list.  It’s a daring and important list – health care, climate, financial reform,  and rescuing the country from an economic collapse the President inherited from a sleepwalking predecessor.  But there’s nothing that links them all in either the heart or mind.  There’s no overriding theme of “the bullshit must stop” or “imagine standing in front of your grandchild and explaining how this happened” or “pay now instead of bleeding later” or “a tomorrow that works.”  Hell, I don’t know how to express the unifying concept, but those are a few off the top of my head, and all of them bring more thematic unity to the agenda than anything I’ve heard.

The good news is that Eisenhower had another characteristic that Obama shows the potential to show – extraordinarily good judgment.  He let the French take their lumps in Indo-China and stayed out of it.  He told the Israelis to get out of Suez and made clear to the British and French his decision would stand.  He recognized there was nothing he could do when the Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and set a standard for recognizing limits that made the posturing about the Russian incursion into Georgia during the 2008 campaign look amateurish.  And when push came to shove, he sent the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock in 1957 when Governor Orval Faubus tried to block the desegregation of Little Rock Central High school.  (Which also led to one of Charles Mingus’ greatest musical moments.)

There are plenty of smart people around President Obama, and he is to be forgiven if he inherited the greatest threat to our standard of living in 75 years.  But with the threat dissipating, it’s time to move on to something larger than agenda.  Or an Eisenhower’s generational cohort, Casey Stengel, said, “There comes a time in every man’s life, and I’ve had plenty of them.”  President Obama’s about to have one of those.