Hoping for Audacity

By Drew Westen
Psychologist and neuroscientist; Emory University Professor
Posted: June 22, 2009 10:10 AM
Huffington Post


One of the great character strengths of Barack Obama, and one of his greatest strengths as a leader, is his ability to treat people with civility and respect and to try to inspire others to do the same. We saw that in his speech on race in Philadelphia, in his restraint throughout the campaign on personal attacks against John McCain, and again more recently in his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo.

But our strengths and our weaknesses tend to flow from the same wells. In a paradoxical sense, as daunting as the problems the President has inherited, his greatest stroke of luck as a candidate and now as President was that the prior administration had so thoroughly destroyed our economy, our strength and reputation around the world, and the security most voters had felt in their homes, their jobs, and their health care that they were ready for more than a reshuffling of the deck. They wanted a new set of cards, one that wasn't marked.

The American people were tired of a Republican Party that had nothing to offer but the rhetoric of their most influential leaders, Herbert Hoover and Joe McCarthy, whose ideology of unregulated corporate fraud masquerading as a free market and the politics of terror masquerading as patriotism were the twin pillars of Republican policies and politics during the Bush era. The American people were tired of theocrats telling them that Terri Shiavo was alive and well and living in the minds of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and physician-turned-mind-reader Bill Frist (who believed he could tell what "Terri" was thinking without reading her scans).

Americans were even willing to tolerate a President with a nuanced intellect (okay, one who could also hit three-pointers for the troops) after the destructive, impulsive, Manichean days of "you're-either-with us-or-against-us" and "nobody ever told me there were Sunnis and Shiites in I-rack" George W. Bush.

But a pattern has emerged that is increasingly disquieting, not only because it is politically dangerous for a president who has inherited an economy that continues to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs per month, but more importantly, because it threatens to undermine not only the agenda Americans overwhelmingly endorsed in November but a moment in history that only comes around every half-century or so, when the country is ready for genuine, paradigm-busting progressive reform.

For the rest of the analysis click here.