David Leonhardt's NY Times
interview with Pres. Obama on the topic of economics has
attracted plenty of notice. While speaking unusually candidly,
without any of his advisors at hand, Obama demonstrates a fairly
nuanced grasp of both the issues of the day and the complaints
that many of his detractors have aimed at his Robert
Rubin-inflected centrist economic team. Leonhardt also includes a
random factoid that stuck with me more than anything else. Obama
tells him "he had become sick enough of briefing books to begin
reading a novel in the evenings — 'Netherland,' by Joseph
O’Neill."
Sure enough, a week or two later and 'Netherland' has shot up the
charts.
A cursory look at the books that Obama has previously mentioned
as his favorites yields some seeming contradictions. During the
campaign, Laura Miller of Salon
claimed that Obama would make one of the "most literary
presidents in recent memory," citing his professed love for
Melville, Toni Morrison, Shakespeare, and others. Furthermore,
she noted of his early Chicago years, "Obama lived so much like a
retiring writer -- spending many hours holed up in a spartan
apartment with volumes of 'philosophy and literature' -- that
some of his colleagues assumed he was gathering material for a
novel." But then she makes the case that the most important book
in Obama's literary formation was Saul Alinsky's Rules for
Radicals -- not exactly the pinnacle of storytelling. In the
NY Times, Michiko Kakutani
reported that Obama "immersed himself" with philosophers like
Nietzsche and St. Augustine during college. How does someone so
enthralled with serious literature and philosophy wind up
identifying with Alinsky's soulless political manipulation? How
do you hole up in a spartan apartment with masterpieces and
emerge enamored with Rules for Radicals?
To me, some of the economic policies that Obama advocates --
socialized health care, cap-and-trade, etc. -- reflect the same
kind of lack of
moral imagination that you would expect from someone whose
reading was limited to policy briefings with the occasional
Alinsky tract thrown in. But at times in the interview, as when
he mentions the visceral appeal of jobs performed by hand and
when he claims that his grandmother wrote better than his U.
Chicago law students, his approach seems less technocratic than
literary in a down-to-earth way.
If you delve into Obama's reading habits, as Miller and Kakutani
did, the theme that emerges is Obama's literature-steeped search
for his own role in the world. Naturally, this search steered him
toward the writings of others trying to understand the role of
black men in society, like Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. DuBois, and Toni
Morrison. There isn't such a clear explanation for why, out of
all of the authors he read, Alinsky would be the one that Miller
would associate with his political approach.
I don't know. It seems paradoxical to me that the president would
be regarded as the face of political efficiency by day,
orchestrating massive domestic policy changes by the handful and
captivating the media, while remaining a soul-searching, Joseph
O'Neill-loving, wannabe novelist at night. It is tough to
reconcile these two characters: the pragmatic wonk who surprises
economists with an off-the-cuff tour de force interview on
economic issues, and the Harvard Law grad who eschews the
corporate world to lock himself in a Chicago apartment with the
Great Books.
