President Barack Obama said during the 2008 campaign that the most essential book in his White House ? other than the Bible ? would be Doris Kearns Goodwin?s ?Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.? Goodwin?s 2005 book is a history of Lincoln and his Cabinet, depicting Lincoln as an extraordinary leader in part because he was able to win over his onetime political opponents and enlist them to help save the Union. It?s not hard to see why the book resonated with Obama, who has often cited Lincoln as a personal political influence.
On ?Meet the Press? this morning, Goodwin offered a different political model for Obama as he heads into a difficult reelection campaign: Teddy Roosevelt. She explained:
I think the post-partisanship has to go. That is what he came in hoping for, it proved not able to work. But if you look back at Roosevelt, FDR, he first tried to be a bipartisan leader, and then he got so hurt by the rancor of the Republican right, who called him a traitor to the class, that he went right after them, and he wins in a landslide. You know, "The forces of entrenched greed hate me. I welcome their hatred." I don't think that'll work for Obama because he's not a warrior, a happy warrior in that way. But there is a model for him in Teddy Roosevelt. Similar time to our, squeeze middle class, up and down gap between the rich and the poor. And what he does is say, "I like corporations as long as they do well by us. I like union?unions as long as they do well for us. But if they start screwing around with us, I'm going after them." And he called for a square deal, fundamental fairness. And that's where the country's at right now. When Obama first talked about the failure of the supercommittee, when he put out his grand proposal, it was the idea that people want fairness, they want balance. That's what Teddy Roosevelt was all about. Every sentence was balance.?
A shift in emphasis from conciliation and consensus, to fairness and balance, would be a subtle but significant one. It?s fair to wonder whether Teddy Roosevelt, who came to office in a moment of national crisis, amid rising anger over the uncontrolled influence of banks and other entrenched interests, would have been a more effective role model for Obama all along.?He's a president that Obama's 2008 opponent, John McCain, has tried at times to emulate, quoting TR in his own efforts to curb ?malefactors of great wealth? in the present day.
Continue ReadingWe may hear Goodwin ? for whom I once worked as a researcher ? develop this theme further over the next year. The Washington Speakers Bureau notes on her speaker page that she?s currently working on a book about ?the progressive era focusing on Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft and the golden age of journalism to be published in 2012.?
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