OBAMA'S LONG ACQUAINTANCE

How will the "no-drama" style hold up in the daily swirl of political and internatonal affairs?

After a presidential campaign kicked off two years before the 2008 election day and now into the transition to the presidency on January 20, 2008, the Obama's activity and dialogue have been little more than a drawn-out acquaintance. The columnist Charles Krauthammer remarked on Obama's "brilliant general election campaign [of] tactically perfect minimalism." The minimalism connotes Obama's now much-noted evenness of temperament and self-discipline. Obama has often been described as "cool" with its implications of neat, alluring, and controlled. At this date, more than two years after he assumed a highly visible public role in announcing his run for the presidency and all his thoughts, statements, and actions were directed toward the end of winning the election, thoughts about how Obama will be as president based on how he has been as a candidate and president elect come to mind.

During the campaign not only because as an African-American he was a member of a minority, but also because he was little-known outside of regional and political circles, Obama aimed at reassuring the electorate he was not in any way threatening or foreign. Now into the transition with the big financial crises and potential severe potential economic and social problems facing the country, Obama is again (and rightly) aiming at being reassuring. To achieve this in the transition, Obama has alternately showed himself to be alarmed about the financial, business, and personal hurt many are suffering and, again, showed an even-temperedness, confidence, and optimism which can be summed up as his being a nice guy.

To bolster this nice-guy appearance and continue the principle of nonthreatening normality he maintained in the campaign, Obama with the cooperation of the media and his family has focused on his family life. The family's move to the White House and the choice of a dog for the Obama girls have been central stories. In the political arena, the stories have focused on Obama's choices for key and important positions in his administration. While such choices are substantive political matters, the growing group of appointments is along the lines of Obama's extended family. The focus on political appointments is Obama's timely way of working at reassurance by demonstrating he is at least working on the beginnings of trying to resolve the manifold troubles facing the country.

Basically, however, the show of naming and introducing appointees is elaborated acquaintance. For Obama, it is an extension of the style of acquaintance which he had adhered to since his announcement for the presidency. The "perfect minimalism" of Obama's campaign--a reflection of his low-key demeanor--was a blending strategy and personality that was a type of absence of conventional campaigning. Campaigning in a post-ideological, post-partisan era reeling from the deceptions, looming threats, and near madness of the Bush ideologues, Obama's chief interest in campaigning was not to engage with this madness directly lest the campaign degenerate into customary partisan bickering. This stance also allowed for the seedy ideology and its overt and implicated supporters (McCain sharing something of both kinds) the opportunity to self-destruct. By the time of the campaign, the Bush Administration's duplicities, pathetic rationalizations, and contempt for long-established and widely-admired democratic norms of law and decency were well known. No sense for Obama to harp on these; he would have looked obsessed if he did. And as it happened, McCain and his campaign self-destructed in full view.

Obama gained the presidency mostly by being present as an alternative to the candidate inevitably linked to the Bush administration and by sounding in diverse ways the theme of change (which factor is close to a constant in American political campaigns). This gave some needed coloring to the atypical campaign Obama ran.

Obama's successful, unconventional minimalist campaign offers at best spare clues for how he will govern. It does, however, raise one matter which is likely to be central for at least the early stages of the Obama presidency and perhaps throughout his presidency. Obama campaigned as the candidate of change. Even while he convincingly identified himself as this, he acquired the sobriquet "No Drama Obama." However, change rarely occurs smoothly. Change, almost by its definition, entails and causes some drama. Because of the manifest lawlessness and incompetence of the Bush administration and the plain limitations of John McCain, the drama of the campaign season was confined almost exclusively to the campaigns other than Obama's. Obama's mantra was "Don't make mistakes"; and he didn't make any serious ones. But as president, the focus will be on Obama in ways radically different from the ways it was during the campaign. Obama will not be able to remain distanced from dramas regularly breaking out in the country and internationally and to avoid inevitably playing a part in them. We now look for how the "no drama" candidate will take on his role of a lifetime.