The headline out of the December 19 news conference was that the US president was happy. Barack Obama’s post-midterm-election scowl was gone, replaced by the wide smile that once charmed America. Emerging from his bunker, he blithely engaged reporters (all of them women), calling out a “bless you”, when he heard a sneeze.
The news conference took place after some real and surprising post-election gains: A climate deal with China, an executive order protecting five million undocumented immigrants, a ruling on ozone emissions from the Environmental Protection Agency, a budget deal that kept the government open and the historic restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba. He sent Sony Pictures a stern message that it was wrong to pull The Interview because a North Korean dictator, who dresses like Johnny Cash and wears a porcupine on his head, had made some empty threats.
Maybe Obama was just in a holiday mood, knowing he would soon be winging it home to Hawaii for a Christmas vacation with the family, whose company he prefers to all others’. Each year, we swear Scrooge’s oath to keep the holiday in our hearts year round. That is hard enough for anyone, let alone a guy with Obama’s headaches, but perhaps December 19 was a dress rehearsal for the months ahead. In the midst of responding to the reporters’ questions, there was a quiet moment when he stopped to acknowledge to reporters in the room that neither he nor they spend enough time with loved ones. That is an Obama you would not mind seeing more of.
There is no guide to presidential happiness, although bookshelves groan with advice for the rest of us. Stay close to siblings; have a best friend; spend money on activities not things; get a dog. Americans do not much care if their presidents are happy except when they are running for office, when surveys show they prefer the candidate they would like to have a beer with. They may even be suspicious of a cheerful chief executive. What is so funny? They sleep better at night knowing their hair is turning grey with worry.
On the other hand, they know that happy’s close cousins, optimism and resilience, are essential to getting things done. Obama allowed that there had been problems such as Ebola and children crossing the border that “may not get fixed in the time-frame of the news cycle”, but that eventually do get fixed. “When we work together, we can’t be stopped.”
That is a better approach than pounding your fist on a table or your head against a wall. It is painful to picture Richard Nixon roaming the White House, talking to portraits and asking Henry Kissinger to kneel and pray. Presidents are always having to put on a happy face and bounce back. During the impeachment process, pundits thought Bill Clinton was the Titanic until the iceberg went down. Night was day on the White House lawn; his daughter knew the most intimate and needy details of his sex life, as did her classmates. Clinton was such a stock joke for the late-night comedians that Hillary would mute the TV in the solarium when David Letterman came on. Neither cracked, and if they had, as bad as it was, it would have been worse, like parents who overslept and stopped getting the children off to school. On his 52nd birthday in August 1998, Hillary led the staff in song as if Bill were a 10-year-old whose behaviour had earned him a pony and a trip to Disneyland.
One of Obama’s biggest mistakes was to create and then stick with the idea that if only he had had a bourbon with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, or a golf game with House Speaker John Boehner, or suffered through just one more dinner with congressional Republicans, they would have stopped somewhere short of their 40th attempt to repeal his health care plan. Presidents have suffered from polarised capitals since before he arrived, indeed, since before he was born. Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton were all backslappers to varying degrees, all reached across the aisle, and all ended up relying on their own parties to get things done. Modern presidents have to accept going it alone.
On December 19, there was a glimpse of the genial charisma that charmed America (enough of it anyway) to elect a first-term senator to the presidency. If Obama could get back in touch with that, his remaining two years in office could be a gift to all. As Scrooge reminds us, it is never too late to change.
— Washington Post
Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist.
