Fingers-in-the-Dikes Presidency

Nobody seems to be blinking as the world economy bursts another seam, in Dubai this time, accentuating again how much Barack Obama's tenure in the White House has been like a montage of the little Dutch boy racing from dike to dike trying to hold off disasters--on Wall Street and Main Street, in Detroit, Afghanistan, the ozone layer, wherever.

Watery images are on Peggy Noonan's mind as she observes that the President is now "leaking support" in "two core constituencies, Washington's Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment."

But Noonan may be missing the point. Obama I is looking more and more like the Year of the Flood, with a President trying to hold back rising tides on all fronts in the kind of world not ideally suited to his political style as a transformational leader on big issues rather than a first responder to one emergency after another.

But the President has been scrambling for quick fixes, and some observers are declaring partial successes, as Jacob Weisberg does in Slate, crediting him with the best first year since FDR and citing "mounting evidence that the $787 billion economic stimulus he signed in February—-combined with the bank bailout package—-prevented an economic depression."

Be that as it may, next month Obama's acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize will remind us that the fabled boy with his finger in the dike was Hans Brinker, who also competed for the Silver Skates and, through his good works, went on to become a successful healer.

Then again, for skeptics, there is another way to go, by joining the editor of Newsweek in urging Dick Cheney to run against Obama in 2012. As the waters keep rising, the former Veep could go back to doing what he did so well for eight years, shrugging and denying it all.

Obama Is No LBJ

As Afghanistan starts to resemble Vietnam, Barack Obama is being compared to Lyndon Johnson, "a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war abroad."

Such parallels must be irresistible to historians and journalistic Big Thinkers, but they overlook the reality that Obama and LBJ are as dissimilar as two presidents could be in every way that counts--temperament, personality and approach to power.

Even the comparison has its roots in the current president's reflective nature as opposed to Johnson's self-assertion and certainty, going back to a recent off-the-record dinner with historians in which Obama "expressed concern that Afghanistan could yet hijack his presidency."

Self-awareness and modesty are traits that could serve him well as Afghanistan threatens to become the kind of quagmire that resulted from LBJ's often-asserted refusal to become "the first American president to lose a war."

If hubris was Johnson's Achille's heel, however, caution is Obama's counterpart.

“We must never forget,” he said in a speech last week. “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.”

Maybe so, but in LBJ's time, the domino theory about the spread of Communism seemed just as compelling and proved to be flawed. The question now is will Obama reconsider that "necessity," as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and others have been urging.

Depressed and defeated in retirement, Johnson was still trying to understand what went wrong, and I heard him give an assessment of his successor Richard Nixon.

"Not much here," LBJ said, pointing to his head and then his heart, "even less here," before lowering his hand below the belt. "But enough down there."

Unlike Johnson, Obama is not so obsessed with such distinctions that they will cloud his ultimate decisions about changing direction in a war that Americans no longer want.

If he stays true to his own nature, he can avoid LBJ's foreign policy disaster and keep trying to match his achievements in working toward a Great Society.

"Give 'Em Hell, Barry"

If the campaign was meant to toughen him up, it is both succeeding and failing. After being bushwhacked in the ABC debate, Barack Obama is riding the Pennsylvania rails doing a 1948 Harry Truman impersonation at whistle stops.

Instead of giving hell to a do-nothing Congress, as Truman did, Obama is targeting Hillary Clinton and the media.

"On his train tour Saturday," John Dickerson reports in Slate, "Senator Obama continued to condemn the petty distractions that keep Americans from focusing on real issues. He decried Clinton's 'tactics of Washington,' in which she attacks him with every possible weapon. 'She's got the kitchen sink flying, the china flying. The buffet is coming at me…when we get involved in the constant distractions, the petty tit-for-tat politics…that may be good for the television ratings, but that's not good for you.'"

At the same time, Obama is paying a price for such outraged high-mindedness as his campaign, in Dickerson's words, "hosted a conference call to engage in the practice the candidate was busy denouncing." Hypocrisy, as necessary as it may appear to be, is sapping the strength of a candidacy that has come this far by attacking it.

All along, the central question in voters' minds has been, not about Obama's inexperience, but his core toughness to be president in a time that calls for it as well as for idealism, intelligence and good judgement.

Maureen Dowd, who has been coaching him not to be bullied, says today, "Obama is cool in a good way. He continues to look to the stars as the Clintons drag him down to the gutter, even when Hillary suggests he should scamper out of the kitchen since he’s so obviously sensitive to heat" but also warns:

"He can create an uplifting new kind of politics if he becomes president, but first he’s going to have to get past the shallow and vicious old politics he says he disdains (even if his campaign knows how to dip into the Clinton toolbox)."

True enough, up to a point, but in doing his Harry Truman impression, he should keep in mind what another Democratic predecessor, Adlai Stevenson, said: “The hardest thing about any campaign is how to win without proving you’re unworthy of winning.”

The looming irony about the toughness issue is that, after winning the nomination, Obama will have to confront John McCain in what will be a two-front war. McCain, not needing to show cojones as Clinton has been doing, will take the high road on personal issues, even as 527 ads swiftboat Obama's past associations. Obama will have to stand up to McCain, while continuing to express personal admiration, but make the case that a new kind of leadership is required in a world that has made McCain's stubborn strength obsolete.

It won't be a dull campaign.

Back to the Political Future

There are undeniable echoes of the 1960s in how the elections of 2008 are shaping up.

Both parties are in crises that could define them for decades to come and, although the parallels are inexact, the issues are similar: What kind of America are we living in and what do we want it to be?

For Democrats in 1968, the question was not unlike what Republicans are facing now--how to recover from presiding over a disastrous war and domestic discord and, until a bullet stopped him, Robert Kennedy was the Barack Obama then and Hubert Humphrey the Hillary Clinton, promising change vs. philosophical continuity.

Republicans had to face their directional question four years earlier when Barry Goldwater ran. Traditional conservatives feared he might wreck their party in 1964, as many of them feel about Mike Huckabee now. They tried to rally around Gov. William Scranton just as Robert Bork is now backing Mitt Romney with other National Review icons to come.

In that struggle, Dwight Eisenhower clearly favored Scranton but could not bring himself to do it publicly. Today we have the elder George Bush sending a signal by hosting Romney's speech about religion.

Lyndon Johnson left his party in shambles as George W. Bush will in 2009. If we're lucky, we won't have to live through a Richard Nixon and a Jimmy Carter before the country recovers from its ideological headaches.

For the aging, everything that happens is a reminder of something that happened before, so younger eyes may
see better alternatives now. Let's hope so.