The First Multiracial U.S. President: Leadership as Personified Symbol over Political Advantage

Barak Obama had a tendency to modify his manner of speaking, and even his dialect, to fit with his audience. Listening to his speech to the National Urban League, I was stunned; early on, he pivoted off from his ordinary manner of speaking to speak in what was surely a more familiar way to much of his audience. The crowd loved it. The audience must have been looking at him as the first black US President. It occurred to me while listening to him and observing his strategy to connect to his audience that although there would be less political advantage in it, he could have run for president by presenting himself as multi-racial (technically, mulatto). To be sure, there were fewer multi-racial Americans who would have identified with him, but is that even the point? The multi-racial segment of the US population was small, but growing.  It already pointed to what most states would likely look like in fifty or a hundred years from 2010, when I heard the first multi-racial US President speak. Were he to have made explicit his multi-racial identity, he would have personified the leading edge of what America would become, and thus have served innately as a leader in his very person.  That is to say, he would have led through his person—as a symbol personified—as the a sign of things to come, transcending “black vs. white.”  Nature’s integration was already beginning make a dent in the artificial problem of racism far more than any government program or even a US President could, yet had Obama making the meaning of his symbol explicit would have helped Americans to know the transition already occurring in  their midst. Instead, he used his "Black identity" to solidify his base for political advantage.

Perhaps it is the tacit duplicity in a multiracial man permitting himself to be labeled as black for political expediency that lies at the core of why some people did not trust him (e.g., the “birthers”).  Such duplicity is like a subterranean fault-line undergirding the tension between campaigning for real change and then stocking people of the old guard, such as Larry Summers, in his administration.  The duplicity of promising systemic change then dropping his insistence on a public option and no mandate for health coverage—essentially guaranteeing a new mass market to the same health insurance companies that actively purged people with pre-existing conditions—resonated in the multi-racial man using the term “black” to identify himself publicly.  Barak Obama is as much white as he is black.  Were he to “run with this,” he would have instantiated a leader on the forefront, the  cutting edge of society, even though there was little political capital to be made on it.  

As an explicit multi-racial symbol, President Obama could have shown the world where America was headed, and that Americans were facing that future with heads held high, or at least with awareness. While perhaps not helpful in elections, such a function, which can only be done by the US President, was at the time sorely needed, given America’s image abroad. America was finally becoming the melting pot that had been proclaimed for so long—finally getting past the need for duplicity.  President Obama could have symbolized this in his person, and thus have done America a service far more valuable than any partisan legislation.

Presidential Leadership

In the wake of the failure of the joint congressional committee that was tasked with coming up with a proposal to reduce federal deficits over a decade by $1.2 trillion, Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, said at a news conference, “It’s the chief executive’s job to bring people together and to provide leadership. I don’t see that happening.” The mayor may have been wrong. Take the word executive: literally it is to execute, or implement, which implies management rather than leadership. Put another way, implementation depends on a goal already established, presumably by a leader. To lead is to formulate a vision of social reality that is an ideal, and thus consisting of goals rather than actualities, and then to persuade others to accept that social reality. Once the directionality is established, the means, or strategies, can be executed by managers (i.e., those who manage the implementation).

Even Dan Pfeiffer the White House communications director at the time, may have conflated management with leadership in remarking, “A president’s job is to lay out a plan and then rally the country to that plan.” The word plan is key. A plan is a means to get from here to there. It is therefore not the same as a goal, which is only an end-point. So once again leadership, which is oriented to formulating and selling a vision, is being conflated with strategy, which belongs with management, which implements goals by making and executing plans. Pfeiffer went on to refer to the president’s $3 trillion deficit reduction plan, whose specificity renders it clearly within the executive purview of the chief executive, rather than the leadership function of the president. Whereas to preside is literally to sit before (from the Latin), which is consistent with formulating and selling a vision, to execute is to draw up (or have drawn up) specific plans and negotiate on the basis of them.

The U.S. Presidency is a strange bird in that it contains, among other roles, the leadership of presiding and the management of executing. It is no doubt a tricky business balancing these two hats (among others, such as commander in chief). If the chief executive gets too caught up in negotiating particular plans that require legislation, his leadership function can suffer, as can the separation of powers that is vital to the proper functioning of the U.S. Government. That is to say, if the chief executive becomes the chief legislator through his minute legislative-committee involvement, he has gone far beyond the minority role represented by his veto pen. That veto is a check on congressional legislative power rather than an encroachment on Congress’s main function. Therefore, the chief executive should not have been an active part of the “super-committee” on the deficits.

The plans that the chief executive draws up should be oriented to the post-legislative implementation, or enforcement, of legislation, with only advice given to congressional committees as per the minority role of the presidential veto. In a sense, the American President is both before and after the Congress; the leader’s vision is as though the tip of an arrow pointing where the country is to go, whereas the executive’s plans are means of implementing legislation, which is ideally in line with the leadership vision’s goals and principles. Admittedly, in a governmental system of separated powers, the broad directions and principles, strategies as laws, and executive plans are not necessarily in sync. Perhaps this is reason enough for the U.S. President to keep straight the distinctive functions of leading and managing.

Source:

Jackie Calmes, “Obama Weighed Risks of Engagement, and Decided to Give Voters the Final Say,” The New York Times, November 22, 2011.