Obama's Trap

It is difficult for an honest person, regardless of their political persuasion, not to see Obama as the most masterful politician since Reagan and possibly ever.

Did he and his staff arrange a trap for the Republican noise machine to fall into?

Consider these three speeches. Obama used virtually the same language as Ronald Reagan, making Newt look dumb (not hard). I know the two speeches were miles apart time-wise, but was this a set up waiting for someone to fall into the trap? Is Obama that good or are the Republicans that dumb?

I doubt Obama's people thought about the Reagan speech at all. It does make Gingrich look a little silly, but one could come up with a defense of Gingrich citing the differing stage upon which each of the speeches were made and the circumstances surrounding each one. It isn't much of a defense, but one could make a somewhat lucid argument on that basis.

It is also quite possible that Gingrich thought it was intellectual nonsense when Reagan said it. He was, after all, the man who, during the Reagan years, called Bob Dole the "tax collector for the welfare state". He was a rehtorical bomb throwing backbencher through the 80s, so there is no reason to think he agreed with everything Reagan said.

I doubt Obama's people thought about the Reagan speech at all.

Really? Reagen is (arguably) one of the most beloved Republican figures. You don't think the Obama's speech writers would borrow a line like that to try and make him more palletable to moderate "Reagan" republicans? Maybe Obama himself wasn't familiar with it, but I bet some of his people were.

I could go along with the rest of your post. You're right there is a legitimate argument in there. Not everyone liked Reagen or agreed with him. My opinion is that Newt wanted so badly to disagree with Obama and separate himself from the President, that he was unconcerned about anything else. It's a gotcha moment from a gotcha kinda show host.

The problem with saying that Obama's people looked for palatable Reagan lines to borrow for Obama to use is that the "citizen of the world" line is so utterly generic and was so unmemorable in Reagan's speech that using it wouldn't resonate with much of anyone. If you want to evoke Reagan, you go with something that references the "tear down this wall" speech, or the "morning in America" line. Otherwise the reference is pretty much lost.

I'm not sure whether Gingrich knows it or not but one prominent source for the idea of a world citizen (Weltbuerger) is Kant; one can find the term in his essay "Perpetual Peace" (1795) which can be found in Kant: Political Writings. So Gingrich, wittingly or unwittingly, is calling Kant’s idea “intellectual nonsense”. Obama, speaking in Berlin, undoubtedly was aware of what he was doing and likely suspected the statement that he is a citizen of the world would be understood by a German public that would (unlike much of an American audience) be able to identify the Kantian origin of the idea (Nb. The discussion of “cosmopolitanism” in contemporary political philosophy has developed in part from the Kantian argument; perhaps the most prominent German philosopher working inside this debate is Juergen Habermas.)

Whereas Gingrich associates the “intellectual nonsense” of the idea of a world citizen with the non-existense of a world state, in Kant world -- or cosmopolitan -- citizenship is not associated with a world state.

“Peoples who have grouped themselves into nation states may be judged in the same way as individual men living in a state of nature, independent of external laws; for they are a standing offence to one another by the very fact that they are neighbors. Each nation, for the sake of its own security, can and ought to demand of the others that they should enter along with it into a constitution, similar to the civil one, within which the rights of each could be secured. This would mean establishing a _federation of peoples_. But a federation of this sort would not be the same thing as an international state. For the idea of an international state is contradictory, since every state involves a superior (the legislator) and an inferior (the people obeying the laws), whereas a number of nations forming one state would constitute a single nation. And this contradicts our initial assumption, as we are here considering the right of nations in relation to one another in so far as they are a group of separate states which are not to be welded together as a unit.” (p. 102)

I doubt Obama desires a world state (Nb. Another problem with the state of public political discourse in the US is the absence of ‘hermeneutic generosity’ from both the left, right, and center). The implicit charge in Gingrich’s statement is understandable: he wants to suggest that Obama is representative of “liberals” who allegedly seek to cede US sovereignty to some supra-national entity. This is part of a long standing argument made by US conservatives that the UN is a threat to this sovereignty. I consider this a piece of red meat Gingrich was throwing to his well fed audience, more erudite than much of the red meat tossed around, but still a pile of chopped sirloin. Whether Reagan used the term “citizen of the world” or not is besides the point. I don't think Obama set out to 'trap' Republicans. After all, they do that all by themselves.

Thanks theoria. That's a great post.

I agree this was not an intentional trap, but you are also correct, the Republicans trap themselves quite well, thank you!

I agree about your red meat assessment, but all this does is drive the Republican party into a deeper and deeper hole of anti-intellectualism. we've just seen eight years of Republican anti-intellectualism and it ain't pretty. Nor, does it work as a governing strategy in today's world. Newt knows this, but if you are the smart man in the land of the stoopid, you can be king. This is what Newt is after. He's not talking to people who can think for themselves, he's talking to people who need their ideas pre-defined, pre-digested, and served as intellectual pablum. That group gets smaller and smaller every time he opens his mouth. You would think he'd catch on.

I don't agree with Gingrich often, but I think he is intelligent, and not anti-intellectual. I think he is similar to what I've heard said about Bill Clinton: smart but undisciplined (which is perhaps why they cathected and clashed). If he had debated Obama last fall, the debates would have been a lot more interesting (no Joe the Plumberisms) and more enlightening. I think he is caught in the set of oppositions that appear to divide conservatives and Republicans: is conservatism a governing philosophy (a set of ideas) that is adaptable or is conservatism bound to a recent presidency (Reagan) and a set of positions taken on specific issues that have arisen and become politically salient since the 1960s: abortion, feminism, intelligent design, affirmative action, immigration (legal or otherwise), and gay rights.

I probably agree with him more often than you, but hardly all the time. But he's an original. People often complain of colorless, safe, unthinking politicians, but this guy is colorful, erratic, intellectually engaged--and he was, briefly, the most powerful man in US politics.

#1: I don't know. I do think Obama's a somewhat better used car salesman than most politicians. But when half the American population is idiotic enough to vote for Bush II, how much skill do you really need to swindle the other half into voting for Bush III?