Once more unto the breach...

Kenneth Branagh as Henry V^th

Henry V^th's stirring words, at least as imagined by Shakespeare; the words of a bold leader, a man of action and courage, leading literally from the front. Portrayed by Kenneth Branagh, Henry is 'ruggedly hansom' as Richard Castle [sic] likes to say of himself, although, the portrait of Henry in the National Portrait Gallery shows an effete, monk-like figure, hardly the stuff of cinematic hero-worship.   Which leads one to wonder if the victors re-wrote history... But I digress.

The idealized image of Henry, indeed that of any sovereign (and more latterly president) as a bold and courageous leader is an enduring one.  What is certainly true of any long-lasting leader is that their ability to stay at the top of the heap owes more to their political cunning than than to their ability to wield a broad sword or shoot an M-16.  

Henry V^th, National Portrait Gallery

Barak Obama, for all his careful judgment and nuanced deliberation, will likely not be remembered as one of the US' great presidents: he lacks political nous. He has neither the instinct nor the stomach for the dirty political machinations needed for to be remembered as having been an effective leader, regardless of his actual accomplishments. The court of public opinion is very different from a court of law. For starters there is no constraint on mendacity, not is there any interest in searching for the truth (thank-you Television Networks). 

Anyway, attribution is often post hoc rationalization. Who we give credit to, in a complex web of causality, may have little to do with what happened on the ground.

Courage, at least as personified by Shakespeare's stirring speeches, is a narrow sliver of a broader array of action-taking. And sometimes, taking no action is actually the most courageous thing to do; the teen who refuses to drink when all his or her peers are egging him on is courageous; cowardice is giving in to peer pressure when you know that what they are encouraging you to do is wrong.

That's part of the reason, I think, why Obama will not be fondly remembered. His detractors on the right would never admit as a matter of principle (a rather strange ill defined and amorphous principle, though but that's another story) that anything he did could possibly have been right.

And many on the left, at least those who didn't cut an run at the first sign of electoral woes, are disappointed by how uncourageous he appears to have become. The right accuse him of being unbending while the left think he has bent so far that he is almost unrecognizable as the bold senator who campaigned in 2008.

"Damm; this is harder than I thought."

A lot has happened in the last 6 years. The gap between rich and poor has widened; the middle class is being hollowed out; wages for the majority have declined in real terms; politics has become less about issues and even more about money (98% of electoral races this cycle were one by the candidate on whose behalf the most money was spent); and I've gotten grayer and more disillusioned. The 'economy' at least as measured by the stock market, has recovered though most people aren't better off than they were 7 years ago. We were out of Iraq but now we are, at last in spirit (and in the eyes of half the combatants), back in the fray. And the investments in infrastructure and education made in the 50s and 60s that were the antecedents to the economic growth of the last part of the 20th century have been allowed to fall into disrepair.  And the anger, somewhat mis-directed, that most people feel towards their representatives and leaders has, ironically, turned the Congress to stone. Most people agree that "America is on the wrong track" yet no one seems to be able to agree on what track it should be on.

Perhaps that's the leadership deficit; in wrestling with the quotidian demands and pressures of office,  Obama has lost his way, lost a guiding vision of where he think America should be heading. Perhaps he lacked the courage, the will, and the ruthlessness, to maintain the ideals that motivated him to run in the first place. 

As Larry Elison said of Apple, "we've done that experiment": we now know that good (apolitical) academics are ill-suited to high political office. So, given the choice between the Henry of the cinema, the head-strong rush-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread leader and the National Portrait Gallery's shrewd Machiavellian pragmatist, I think we'd probably be better off with the latter (although that would ultimately depend on who funded Henry's campaign).