Speaking One’s Mind

July 26, 2009 | admin | Comments 2

There is no owner’s manual for the Oval Office, no school to learn how to be a Barak-Obama president. Perhaps most challenging for any new president is learning how powerful that megaphone really is. Every offhand word, every spontaneous remark, every comment informed more by emotion than calculation risks profound consequences.
President Obama was reminded of that again last week when he declared that the police in Cambridge, Mass., had “acted stupidly” in arresting a prominent black scholar at his own home. He did not anticipate how those words would inflame an already searing national debate on race. But he soon concluded that, as aides quoted him, “it was stupid to use the word stupid.”

Many political observers were surprised because Mr. Obama seems so disciplined. When he speaks extemporaneously, he often pauses before he speaks and appears to be thinking his answers through even as he gives them.
But his comment last week on the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor, was not a slip of the tongue, advisers said. Mr. Obama said what he wanted to say. The question is whether presidents can really do that.

“They want to be genuine, they want to speak their mind,” said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary for President George W. Bush. “But there’s the recognition that you’re no longer able to muse the way you’re used to. If you’re too candid, that can really haunt you. So presidents learn the art of being circumspect. And they chafe at it. They want to be genuine. But in many ways, they all become more guarded as time goes on.”

Mr. Bush eventually regretted the swagger of some of his early “dead or alive” rhetoric after Sept. 11, 2001. But that could extend to smaller issues, like sports. Mr. Fleischer recalled how Mr. Bush, a former part-owner of the Texas Rangers, concluded that he should not discuss baseball as president and instead “gave boring, bland answers.”

As it happens, Mr. Obama has not shied away from weighing in on sports. He bluntly urged college football to adopt a playoff system, picked North Carolina to win the college basketball tournament this year and favored Michael Jordan over Kobe Bryant when asked who was the better professional basketball player.

But he has learned on several occasions that spur-of-the-moment remarks can come back to bite him. A joke about Nancy Reagan’s holding séances required him to call her to apologize. (She told Vanity Fair that he said he was actually thinking of Hillary Rodham Clinton.) He had to make another apology after joking that his bad bowling skills qualified him for the Special Olympics.

When Mr. Obama was outraged by hefty bonuses paid to executives at firms receiving federal bailouts, he scolded them not only for that but for flying to, say, Las Vegas for fancy conferences — unwittingly causing a raft of cancellations in that city even by conferees not receiving taxpayer money. To remedy the situation, his senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, arranged for him to meet with hospitality industry leaders.

David Axelrod, another senior White House adviser, acknowledged that Mr. Obama’s comments on the Gates case had reflected a president still getting accustomed to his new position.

“I think there’s something to that,” Mr. Axelrod said. “The fact of the matter is he’s a human being. As gifted and bright and disciplined as he is, every once in a while, he doesn’t use words exactly as he intended or in retrospect discussion it had meaning beyond what he wanted to express.”

Eventually, most presidents learn that what they could say as a governor or a senator is magnified a thousand times when coming from the most powerful man in the world. President Bill Clinton, just a few weeks after he took office, sharply scolded an aide at a photo opportunity without realizing that his words would be caught on camera. Chagrined, he learned for the most part to keep his temper in check in public.

John D. Podesta, who was Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff and has advised Mr. Obama, said the new president would learn, too. “The remarkable thing about President Obama is his discipline — it is always business, never personal,” Mr. Podesta said. “This got a little personal, and I suspect we won’t see that happen again, at least in the near future.”

If Mr. Obama needs any lessons, of course, he has only to look to his vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who after 36 years as a senator continues to make a career out of explaining away impolitic statements — as recently as this weekend.

Mr. Biden’s assessment of Russia as a weak nation with a “withering economy” that would ultimately have to bend to American interests undercut the message of reconciliation that Mr. Obama took with him to Moscow early this month. Unhappy White House aides put out a statement trying to clean it up.

In the end, Mr. Obama said he did not regret weighing in on the Gates case, only the wording he chose because it had offended police officers in Cambridge, Mass., and because it had distracted from his push for health care legislation. He tried to fix that Friday by saying he should have “calibrated” his remarks more carefully while still maintaining that the arrest was unjustified.

George C. Edwards III, a scholar at Texas A&M University and editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly, said presidents needed to be careful to not let their agendas be hijacked. “It takes iron discipline to remain on message, and it is easy to understand why the president had strong feelings about the Gates incident,” Mr. Edwards said. “Nevertheless, given the nature of race as an issue in America, he needed to say something like, ‘I certainly sympathize with anyone who has to prove that he is in his own house, but I really cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.’ ”

But there is a cost to that, too, and others said they hoped Mr. Obama did not take that lesson from the episode. Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, said plenty of other presidents had talked about race. “What might be deemed different about Obama’s statement is how clearly the weight of the presidency supported a minority,” Mr. Bunch said. “It is a new day.”

Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

News Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/us/politics/27memo.html

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