Barack Obama, Banal Democrat

As Jon Chait notes, Cornell West’s speculations on the “Kansas influence” on Barack Obama’s thinking serve as a kind of counterpoint to the “Kenyan socialist” theory of Obama’s ideology espoused by the Koch brothers and Dinesh D’Souza.

What’s striking about this is that in ideological terms, Barack Obama is one of the least interesting presidents we’ve had in decades. George W Bush took foreign policy in a genuinely unexpected direction, Bill Clinton marketed himself as a repudiation of the past generation of Democratic Party thinking, George HW Bush’s budget politics prompted massive defections from his political coalition, Ronald Reagan was the winner of an intense intra-party ideological struggle, etc. Barack Obama, by contrast, waged and won a largely issue-free primary campaign with the support of the vast majority of the party’s congressional leaders. The main policy vulnerability that he was able to exploit was the fact that Hillary Clinton had broken with the majority of Democrats to endorse the use of force in Iraq. There’s just absolutely nothing about Obama’s approach to the presidency that’s in any way exotic or in need of explanation. He’s a guy with an interesting life story and a totally uninteresting approach to governance. And if anything, his unusual life story and exotic origins push him at the margin to an exaggerated banality since there’s less incentive to try to use policy to make himself more interesting. Tim Pawlenty would benefit from a “signature issue,” but Obama doesn’t need one.