It’s no secret that the Obama campaign and its surrogates will
continue to portray Mitt Romney at too detached from the lives of
ordinary Americans to be elected president.
“Governor Romney’s a little out of touch,” Vice President Joe
Biden
told Face the Nation’s Bob Schieffer in early
April.
Or as actress and Obama supporter Jane Lynch
put it recently about the nominee-to-be, “the guy does not know
how to relate to people.”
But it’s a theme the Obama campaign ought to think twice about
before advancing. That’s because President Obama himself exhibits a
striking inability to connect with an electorate he seems
uninterested in getting to know.
Obama rarely spends time with average Americans, and can seem
smug and downright clueless about their lives when he talks about
them.
We got a glimpse of this ignorance in the 2008 campaign, when
Obama told a room full of San Francisco donors that Midwesterners
cling to guns, religion and xenophobia. It surfaced again last year
when he
told a woman at a town hall event that he found it
“interesting” that her unemployed engineer husband couldn’t find
work.
Obama’s staff privately concede that their boss has a hard time
understanding people. “Surprisingly for someone who led such an
inspirational campaign,” a longtime executive branch employee
told the Atlantic’s James Fallows, “[Obama] does not
seem to have the ability to connect with people.”
Obama’s inability to connect shouldn’t be all that surprising,
however. Obama has spent most of his adult life living, working,
and socializing in upper middle class suburbs, college towns, and
seats of government. Hyde Park in Chicago, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. are fine cities. But they don’t
necessarily give residents a clear picture of the way most
Americans live.
Granted, the bar for presidential connectedness was set high by
Obama’s immediate predecessors. Bill Clinton was in his element
around other people, be they powerful D.C. insiders or average
voters. Clinton had a natural ability to convince people he could
feel their pain.
And it was often said that George W. Bush was the politician
voters would most want to sit down and have a beer with. Though a
child of privilege, Bush seemed to enjoy hobnobbing with average
Americans.
Obama wasn’t always the aloof politician he has become. As Jodi
Kantor relates in her book, The
Obamas, Obama went out of his way to spend time with
people as he worked his way up the political ranks. “Earlier in his
career, he had shown up to tiny events, shaken every hand,” she
writes.
But Obama’s approachability changed quickly as his political
trajectory spiked. “Now fame and demand drew him deeper within
himself,” Kantor writes about Obama during his time in the U.S.
Senate. “His time and patience were shrinking, his desire for
self-protection and privacy increasing. Some staffers had a word to
describe the moments when he seemed unable or unwilling to connect:
Barackward, a combination of ‘Barack’ and ‘awkward.’”
It wasn’t long before even spending time with American troops
became a burden for him. In
The Operators, Michael Hastings depicts candidate Obama as
impatient when asked to pose for photos with American troops in
Iraq. “He didn’t want to take pictures with any more soldiers,” a
State Department official told Hastings. “He was complaining about
it.”
Any president is isolated by definition. And anyone can
understand Obama’s preference not to have to be “on” at every
waking moment, as well as his desire to spend as much of his free
time as possible with his young family.
And let’s give Obama credit for continuing the presidential
tradition of reading, and responding to, letters from the public.
Obama reportedly reads 10 letters a day from his constituents,
which Eli Saslow, author of the book
Ten Letters, told Politico, offers Obama “a small
window that he has to real people and real issues. He has such
trouble creating authentic interaction with people. … These
letters, what they really give him is the unfiltered chance to read
people’s diary entries.”
But Obama could make a greater effort to get to know the people
he serves. Instead, he spends an inordinate amount of time raising
money for himself. Obama has
held more than 100 re-election fundraisers in the less than a
year since he officially filed his candidacy for a second term with
the Federal Election Commission on April 4, 2011.
And his free time is often spent relaxing on luxurious
vacations, hosting elaborate state dinners, appearing on comedy
talk shows or mingling with A-list celebrities at posh White House
events, such as the recent concert there for Black History Month
featuring Mick Jagger and B.B. King.
Obama has a well-known affinity for golf, a game that would seem
to offer ample opportunity for socializing. Obama has golfed more
than 100 times during his first term. But, according to the New
York Times, his foursomes usually consist of the same small
group of mid- to low-level West Wing staffers. Otherwise, as the
Times
reported in December, Obama is increasingly isolated, spending
“his down time with a small-and shrinking-inner circle of aides and
old friends.”
Obama’s inability to connect may seem trivial. But it surely
hampers his capacity to tap into the empathy he insists informs so
much of his agenda. Obama’s lack of connectedness may help explain
his distant and then dysfunctional response to the Gulf Coast oil
spill, and the deep unpopularity of some of his signature
initiatives, such as Obamacare and the contraceptive mandate.
Obama once wrote that empathy “is at the heart of my moral
code.” But, by insulating himself from most Americans, Obama can’t
possibly develop or employ the empathy necessary to govern as a
president for all Americans.
