As with many governmental pathologies, Obama has only accelerated a pre-existing trend. Presidents for three decades now have been substituting anecdotes for governance. Starting with Ronald Reagan in 1982, most State of the Union addresses have name-checked what the White House Press Corps calls “Lenny Skutniks”—individual Americans with stirring, teachable stories. (Reagan praised the original Lenny Skutnik for rescuing a drowning woman.) Obama, while making no reference in his 2012 State of the Union to the 1,000-day anniversary of responsible budgeting, waxed poetic about Jackie Bray, “a single mom from North Carolina who was laid off from her job as a mechanic” but then was heroically retrained by a public-private partnership.
Politicians who can’t handle reality don’t have much choice but to traffic in symbolism. Luckily for them, they have a press corps that prefers symbolic discourse to the messy and unsatisfying details of applied government policy. The Republican presidential debate season has been a festival of groan-inducing journalistic pleas for candidates to “speak from the heart about how you would navigate this country,” to tell Americans “what you would say personally, sitting in your living rooms.” Moderators have demonstrated more interest in the would-be presidents’ empathy for the common man than for their thoughts about, say, the Euro-zone financial crisis…
It should come as no surprise that when we treat our current and potential presidents like personal life coaches, while at the same time failing to hold them accountable for abdicating the most basic of their responsibilities, they lose all sense of proportion about where the government ends and their own superpower begins. Barack Obama’s latest State of the Union speech featured a flurry of bizarre, over-personalized boasts about the things Super-POTUS will single-handedly circumvent.
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