Thread: Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney: Self-restraint in an age of rage

Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney: Self-restraint in an age of rage

American politics has become so angry and divisive that it favors candidates who appeal to extremists and eccentrics, and even are extremist and eccentric themselves.
The nonstop circus of modern campaigns, meanwhile, has left the county’s most accomplished and capable people on the sidelines, with scant interest in running for office.

Or so the argument goes.
But something strange — or rather something normal — is happening in 2012.
One of the most familiar refrains from this age of polarization — that rhetorical bombast and ideological zealotry are what carry politicians to the top — is running headlong into the reality of Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney.
The general election will pit one exceptionally self-contained, self-disciplined, self-motivated man against another with precisely the same traits.
Voters have a choice between two men whose minds gravitate to rationality and logic — both of whom have expressed disdain for the disorder and surliness that pervade modern governance.
There may be more than coincidence at work with this seeming paradox. During a time when politics is defined by media saturation and relentless attacks, there is a premium on politicians who live by an ethic of constant self-control.
Whatever the reason, the prospect of Obama and Romney sitting atop national politics this year is challenging all sorts of conventional notions.
The center, it is widely asserted, has collapsed in American politics. Yet this fall will feature two nominees trying to convince supporters that they are wedded passionately to partisan principles — despite long records from both men suggesting they are more interested in practical difference-splitting to get things done.
This is an age of rage, by all accounts, with strains of populism and a disdain for elites animating both parties. But this same age is serving up a presidential contest featuring two men who took their graduate degrees at Harvard. (There has been an Ivy League degree held by at least one of the nominees in every presidential election since 1988.)
And there’s also this old standby: The most talented people just are not interested in politics.
Whatever one thinks of Obama or Romney, it is a fact that since both men were in their twenties, they were recognized by peers and elders alike as men of unusual promise. Both , for better or worse, are supremely products of the great American meritocratic obstacle course. Before seeking the presidency, they both had in hand the most shimmering credentials — governor, senator, university professor, businessman — that our society uses to sift and tag its brightest talents.
And, as both parties and both presidential campaigns gear up well-rehearsed programs to demonize the other side’s nominee, let’s try this one on for size: This year’s political process has produced two decent and well-adjusted nominees.
There’s no doubt that many people find Obama and Romney genuinely unlikable and misguided people. It’s possible that Obama and Romney genuinely think this of each other.
But this reality can’t trump another: In the larger sense, both men over the course of decades have established reputations among people who know them best as good and conscientious people. Both have raised, or are raising, attractive children in strong families.

And nothing in the known biographies of either man suggests the mania and neurosis and tendency toward melodrama that is a signature of the modern presidency.
Can the partisans who most dislike Obama or Romney imagine learning that they carried on affairs with teenagers or shared a girlfriend with a mobster, as was true of John F. Kennedy?

Is it likely that aides to Obama or Romney might become so alarmed by their angry and paranoid-sounding ravings that they would wonder, as some of Lyndon Johnson’s aides wondered, whether the boss had gone clinically unhinged?
One has to squint very hard to imagine them using the IRS as a political weapon, or fulminating against Jews, or plotting criminal conspiracies from the Oval Office, as Richard Nixon did.
Even by more recent standards, neither Romney nor Obama seems likely to replicate Bill Clinton’s sprawling soap opera, or George W. Bush’s penchant for rigidity or religiously scented certitude.
After all, it was Romney who declared at a GOP primary debate in December: “I’m not a bomb thrower, rhetorically or literally.” And it was Obama who told the country virtually as soon as he took office, at the height of outrage over bonuses at bailed-out companies, that he took “a couple of days [to respond] because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”
The question echoes: How could an era of volatile, flamboyant politics produce two subdued and steady-as-she-goes nominees?
There are several explanations:
The actuarial tables favor disciplined, rational politicians — even if it doesn’t always seem that way.
One distinguishing feature of modern politics is the lavish rewards — cable TV exposure, contributions, the love of activists — that come to politicians willing to engage in ideological and rhetorical extremes.
But it’s also true that there are large penalties for politicians who make mistakes navigating these extremes.
Obama won a hard-fought nomination battle in 2008 in large measure because his campaign was more disciplined and focused — and made fewer mistakes — than Hillary Clinton’s did.
Romney has effectively clinched his party’s nomination — despite inspiring little ardor among the GOP’s conservative base — because he was simply more relentless in saying and doing what needed to be said in the daily message battle.
He made gaffes — dumb comments about his wife’s Cadillacs or his friendship with NASCAR owners — and he lost big primary battles. But over time, Romney’s self-control defined his primary campaign more than his lack of self-awareness. No one has wondered whether Romney is “stable”— which is more than can be said for Newt Gingrich, whose temperament Romney surrogates routinely criticized.
And he made far fewer rhetorical and strategic errors than Gingrich or Rick Santorum, much less — in what now seems like the distant past — Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain or Tim Pawlenty or Rick Perry.
The American electorate is calmer — and more self-regulating — than meets the eye.
The anger and dissatisfaction with politicians — and lots of other elites in business and the media — is not feigned. The frustrations are grounded in substantive failures of many elite institutions.
But the evidence of 2012 is that there is a big difference between a voter being intrigued or thrilled by a flamboyant politician — a Bachmann or Cain — and their belief that this person should really be taken seriously as a potential president.