By temperament Barack Obama reminds me most of Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower. Obama seems at times like an old-school Eisenhower Republican, set loose in the digital age. On a personal level both men's character were formed by solid Middle-American (Kansas) conservative values. Neither was born in Kansas, but both had deep roots there.
Against the "all deliberate speed" urgency of the pre-Civil Rights era, Eisenhower seemed to have believed more in evolution than in revolution. As America moves rapidly towards its role in the new international order -with the top economies of the world being The United States, China, Japan, India, and Brazil, Obama can arguably be called an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary.
In the digital age evolution may happen as swiftly as revolution used to happen, but it seems clear that Obama's approach is: "let it evolve" --in the Middle East, in Europe, in relations with China, and on the domestic front. And time after time it seems that his insights into the path of evolution are proving correct, leaving him the job of being the steady hand as the "change we can believe in" takes place all around us. In this Obama, a relatively young man, seems much like America's wise, old, golf-playing, Grand Pa Ike.
Big spending for the Obama administration was a necessity for the nation to get out of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Obama's hand was forced, and now it is being forced by income inequality to move boldly in fiscal matters. Just as Eisenhower was forced to send federal troops to Little Rock because Arkansas would not protect black school children from mobs. The two Presidents were swift when necessary, but deliberate otherwise.
Much evidence seems to point to the fact that Obama is fiscal conservative by nature. Remember how proudly he smiled when he paid for hamburgers for the people with him at Five Guys -like he was a big spender. Hamburgers?
Anyone who reads character well will find it difficult to imagine that a person like Obama would have a half million dollar revolving charge account at Tiffany's, as Newt Gingrich has, or making a $10,000 bet like Mitt Romney. Easier to imagine is a locked pinky finger bet where no money changed hands.
His wife, our First Lady, has had to yield to the demands and temptations of office and start buying some designer clothing; but remember she was a hospital administration with a huge salary, an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a law degree from Harvard who shopped at J. Crew, a mid-price clothier that I always thought was just a catalogue house.
Having been brought up among college educated black folk, I can spot certain "tells." Michelle LaVaughn Robinson wiki profile is full of them. I know that Barack Obama could not have wooed and won a woman like her unless he was basically conservative -nothing wild like Sarah Palin's family, or Gingrich's families
Our First Lady has the same birthday as my mom, of course 52 years different, but they are of the same Gullah people, except that FLOTUS's folk are from the South Carolina low country and my mom's people were from off the coast of Georgia on one of the Sea Islands. Gullah people are generally so conservative they are ritualistic.
My mom would not even tolerate any of us cooking collard greens differently over time. There was no good, better, or best way. That is the thinking of liberals. There is only "the right way." Obama used to often say "because it is the right thing to do." That is the thinking of conservatives
Once I saw video footage of FLOTUS ushering children into a room in the White House for a Black History Month celebration and I waited because it seemed that any minute she was going to thrust out her hand for a mischievous boy to drop his chewing gum into it. The life she came from is so conservative that children are not allowed to chew gum around of adults.
Much has changed of course with private schools and all for the First Children, but there is likely to be an impulse towards their not having permission to call adults by their first names. Herman Cain's figure was that at least 1/3 of black folk are conservative. I think the figure is much higher.
More than anything else blacks turned away from American political conservatism because of the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party. The Southern Strategy was a vote-getting technique adopted by the Republican Party in the late 1960s. It is best spelled out in Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), which is regarded as one of the most influential recent books shaping American politics.
Philips became disenchanted with the Southern Strategy's descent into an appeal to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, super nationalism, militarism, greed, and evangelical hatred. These "isms" and "phobias," in language direct and coded, are being expressed in the nasty Republican primary campaign now underway. Ike would be ashamed.
George Davis is professor emeritus at Rutgers University and the creator of the 5-book, interactive, world-sourced, digital series, Barack Obama, America and the World.
