A Little Lincoln, a Little Reagan

It was not a memorable speech, not even remotely comparable to those of JFK (Kennedy) or FDR (Roosevelt). But no “word” would have been able to be compared with the simple “fact” that Barack Obama became the forty-fourth president of the United States, the first black in more than two hundred years of history. After all, it was yet another display of the sobriety that marks the man.

A sobriety that he will have to keep at bay, so that, in distressing times like the current ones, it does not risk being seen as rigidity. The smile that he gave to the world, while he was stumbling on the words of the oath, makes us hope that he does not want to follow his model, Abraham Lincoln, even in the sad moralism as a preacher. On the other hand, one could say, the time of speaking is over, and now it is necessary that the facts begin to speak, and that the new president, as he himself has repeatedly asked, can be judged for what he does, and not for what he embodies.

Barack Obama will, in the first place, have to be a grand ferryman, or if he prefers, be that “interpreter in chief” that Ronald Reagan knew how to be, capable of taking by the hand a country shaken up by a lost war, by a presidency of divided prestige, from the economic crisis and from the outrages undergone on the international level, and put it on its feet, in the name of authentic “American values.” It could appear paradoxical to put the Obama “era of responsibility” side by side with the “Reagan hedonism,” but, in fact, both are able communicators and convincing interpreters of the political discourse of the Founding Fathers.

“Unprecedented challenges” and “new instruments” therefore, but “old values” the solid values of those stubborn country gentlemen, who decided to become Americans because, by remaining British subjects, they would not have been able to continue being free men. As Paul Berman was observing yesterday in the interview by Maurizio Molinari, after the more ideologically connoted presidencies of Clinton and George W. Bush, we are turning to the past, to that mixture of idealism and pragmatism that represents the most authentic (and least imitable) aspect of American policy. To marry challenges, instruments, and values and to ferry Americans today beyond this rigid winter of crisis, as Washington ferried his thin troops across the frozen waters of the Delaware to go and capture victory at Trenton and show to the world, even before his countrymen, that “when nothing more remains than hope and worth” that once again Americans have known how to face a danger, and united, to have reason.

While he was recalling the values of American tradition, President Obama did not, however, refuse to maintain that aspect of openness to the world, whihc makes him a unique interpreter, almost the prototype of a “new” American spirit, adequate for the challenges of the twenty-first century. He did not limit himself to saying, with clarity, to his 300 million co-citizens that the economic and political renewal of the United States would not be possible without the help and collaboration of friends and allies, “because the world has changed and we must change with it.”

Although in a time of serious economic and financial crisis, when a conspicuous part of the resources and attention of the country will be absorbed by internal misfortune, he wanted to reiterate how American leadership would be reaffirmed only under the condition that it knows how to maintain is universal vocation. Because an America strengthened in its most authentic values could return to being a “beacon on the hill,” but only an America open to the world could succeed in rediscovering its deep soul, which made it, in the eyes of the world, “the land of the free and the brave.” Not Washington, not Lincoln, but surely Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the true architect of the institutions that have justly defined the 1900s as the “American century,” could have undersigned these words, or even pronounced them.

An ambitious program, that of Obama, as it necessarily must be in order to attempt to defeat a crisis that is both economic and of confidence, and for this realization he has asked, in the first place, for collaboration, the commitment of every American citizen. Maybe he did this for the extraordinary political ability that he has demonstrated to have so rapidly accumulated. We prefer to think that, more probably, he did it in the awareness that, in democracy, what is really crucial is neither the denunciation of problems nor the individuation of the many possible solutions. But the capacity to decide what to tie one’s fortune to and to find the necessary consensus to transform it from plan to reality, from words to actions.