OBAMA'S ON THE RIGHT TRACK - May 11, 2009

Barack Obama is the first US president known to have surfed. This distinction has no significant place in his public persona, but it is turning out to be an apt metaphor of his political and governing style. He is a master at catching and riding his wave. In the Democratic primaries he caught the same powerful wave of liberal anger at George Bush that Howard Dean caught in 2004, but where Dean soon lost his footing and wiped out, Obama rode the wave to the nomination and the White House. In office he continues to display a surfer's form and sense of timing. Not waiting to craft a perfect stimulus bill he assembled one in haste, but at the crest of economic anxiety, and shot the curl to a crucial early victory.

Unlike ordinary surfers, political surfers have the power to create their own wave – which is no guarantee that they will not wipe out trying to ride it. Obama created a wave in mid-April when he released the 'torture memos,' prepared by the Bush White House to authorize waterboarding of suspected al-Qaeda members. At the same time he positioned himself to ride it by immunizing CIA officers who acted under those memos, and indicated that he did not seek either extraordinary legal proceedings or a quasi-judicial 'truth commission' to investigate the top Bush Administration officials at whose behest the memos were drafted.

By releasing the memos Obama infuriated much of the right. By opposing a full-blown investigation he took the greater immediate political risk of infuriating his own supporters on the left. The liberal blogosphere was quick to embrace legalism, deep-rooted in US political culture, and insist on criminal investigations. Obama's resistance evoked much vocal dismay, with some flashes of anger. But their anger quickly found a less ambiguous target in conservative commentators who defended waterboarding, or could be construed as defending it. Obama, instead of being in the center of the rhetorical fury, has been left to one side of it. Which is no doubt exactly what he intended.

Viewed in abstract formal terms his decision to release the memos but not take legal action on them is incoherent. Viewed as an exercise of practical political morality, he has achieved what he wished to achieve. The memos and the conduct they authorized are now part of the record. These, and the resulting stormy debate, are necessary: Civil societies confront the misdeeds done in their names. But no investigation is likely to add much to the core facts already revealed, while extraordinary legal process, invoked by political leaders against their predecessors, has the whiff of proscription. Obama is wise not to go that route. Like a surfer he has kept his balance – and there is a reason why a balancing scales is a traditional symbol of justice.

The most powerful and turbulent wave Obama must now ride is the economy. The short term prognosis is favorable, in that the world economy no longer seems to be heading into a immediate death spiral. The Dow Jones average, after skidding some 1500 points in February and early March, losing a fifth of its value, bounced back starting with release of Treasury Secretary Geithner's plan for handling of toxic-waste financial assets.

Short term stock market movements are much hyped by the media but usually say little about the underlying economy.  as such, but this sharp. This plunge and rebound, however, are richly expressive of investor psychology. Investors peered into the abyss, but did not fall into it, and a self-fulfilling panic was averted, at least for now. This is no small achievement, since panic alone posed a real threat of catastrophic economic meltdown. Recovery is now at least possible, and President Obama's actions and demeanor bear no small share of the credit.

For now the economy has stabilized, still losing altitude but showing signs of responding to the controls. Obama's political standing with the US public has likewise stabilized, and at a comfortably high level. In my last column I noted that his approval rating, as measured by a composite of polls, had been gradually but steadily drifting downward from the euphoric high of last fall. About mid-March it stabilized at about 60 percent, and since then has moved only in a narrow range, suggesting that in the short to mid term he has a solid base of support.

His Republican opposition also has a solid base of support, but it is almost desperately narrow, only a quarter to a fifth of the electorate now identifying itself as Republican. (About 350 percent self-identify as Democrats, the rest as 'independents.') The defection of long-serving Republican senator Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania to the Democrats was almost purely expedient – but for the GOP that is exactly the problem. Its base has become so small and strident as to marginalize the party in a growing share of the country, and there is very little that Republican strategists can do about it. For now Republicans find themselves in the wilderness, able only to wait on events.

Absent a major international crisis, events means primarily the economy. Circumstances have arranged a nearly perfect political test of center-left versus conservative economic prescriptions. It is not a scientific test. The economy may be so badly distorted that it remains in a prolonged slump in spite of sound policies, or 'animal spirits' may produce a recovery in spite of unsound policies. The voters will punish or reward Obama and the Democrats based on the outcome, whether or not merited. Still it is about as fair a test as the real world can arrange, and if Obama's first term of office is a success it will surely mark an end to the Reagan-Thatcher era of conservative ideology.

Which, perhaps, is the largest wave that he is surfing. There is a level of irony here, because as Andrew Sullivan has astutely noted, Obama's style of governance is distinctly conservative in the small-c sense. He is no revolutionary. In the financial crisis, as with the torture memos, he has chosen a distinctly minimalist approach, one designed to achieve a desired result – stabilization in the one case, acknowledgement in the other – without committing his administration to sweeping actions such as nationalization or trials. His campaign's internal catch phrase was 'No-drama Obama,' and this has been his governing style as well. It is a surfer's style, riding the wave rather than trying to redirect it toward an abstract predetermined goal. So far, in the opening months of his administration, he is riding multiple waves with considerable success.

Rick Robinson

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Author of the article holds B.A. degree in Economics from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and M.A. degree in English from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California . Mr. Robinson worked as a county-level campaigner in Dukakis (1988) and Clinton (1992) presidential campaigns. He presently works as a journalist and political commentator.

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