Once More for Good Measure

A piece of mine on Obama’s Americanness is up at Frontline. The surprising thing I learned from talking to Germans at the speech is that big political spectacles like this look “American” to them. Is it true that politicians in Europe avoid throwing such big events only since World War II, because of the memory of fascism in Berlin and Rome? (Spain may be an exception.) No one minds so much when it’s an American throwing the party—our tradition of big political spectacle has different roots, and everyone seems to know it. But it’s interesting that Europe has less high-profile politics and more “big government.”

Of course a whiff of the White House makes you an automatic world celebrity. But it’s still just government work. A US president is not “the most powerful man in the world”; he’s just the top bureaucrat.

     posted 29 July 2008 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. I guess I’d argue with the last premise, and that is exactly why George W. Bush has been so scary. It is the most powerful position in the world. It’s, like, important on a “nuclear” level; very lethal how much more powerful it is than any other position in the world. It is kind of awesome how much good or bad a POTUS can do compared to any other person in the world.

    This hit me once when I was at a reception for Bill Clinton in 1993 during an APEC conference in Seattle. It was a terribly long affair, and it gave me time to think about how excited I was he was POTUS, but then it got kind of scary when I started looking around the room at several other world leaders around him and I thought, “Wow. He really is the most powerful guy here.” It was the first time my knees buckled on how important a POTUS is, really.

    What worries me is that the US has dumbed that down for seven years.

    It’s like being Paul Allen owning a sports team and knowing that ALL of the other owners COMBINED don’t have as much cash as you do to build your team.

    e

    — e    Jul 29, 12:07 pm    #

  2. The most powerful bureaucratic position. There are a number of kinds of power. You can argue that he has more potential influence over more lives with our nuclear arsenal; but even a president can’t use it single-handedly. He has to go through channels. I think the mystique around presidents (and and other powerful drudges) has skyrocketed in my lifetime. Would anyone have called Harry Truman “the most powerful man in the world” in 1945, even after the bombs dropped on Japan? With Einstein, Gandhi, and George Bernard Shaw still alive? People just didn’t think that way.

    — Mike    Jul 29, 12:22 pm    #

  3. I think it was the 1992 general election in the UK when the Labour Party decided to throw a big rally-like party. Indoors, admittedly, so not so huge, but still a very unusual, American-seeming-to-us event. Then Neil Kinnock, the party leader, appeared on stage shouting, “We’re all right! We’re all right!” It’s probably on youtube but I can’t bear to look for it in case I catch a glimpse of a single cringe-worthy second. They lost. The Sun newspaper, which was very, very anti-Kinnock, claimed, “It’s The Sun Wot Won It,” and that rally probably become much more famous after the election. In any case, no-one will rush to hold a similar pre-election rally in the UK any time soon. The objection is nothing to do with WWII, of course. Just that the showiness seemed too unBritish.

    — BiB    Jul 29, 12:51 pm    #

  4. Was that the same year that the Tories got Kenny to do “let’s bomb Russia and kick Michael Foot’s stick away!”

    — Bowleserised    Jul 29, 03:54 pm    #

  5. I believe, and I might be wrong, that was the last official Lee Atwater election in any country. This only rings a bell because Kinnock lost.

    Mike: I would say that, yes, Truman was the most powerful man in the world even with those people alive. He had just nuked two cities. Einstein hated it all, Gandhi was starving to death, and Shaw was not really appreciated in real-time. I am not championing this as being all good, but more to the point of how you can do really great stuff and do it well, or you can fuck humanity. I understand the chain of command argument, but I am pretty reserved and more than a bit cynical about that now when it comes to POTUS. Partly, I think G-Dub is smarter than people give him credit for and I think he hit a tipping point of changing Washington that the Clintons et al only aspired to.

    It’s the most powerful position. For sheer gut-wrenching good or bad, it’s leverage is the greatest in the world.

    e

    — e    Jul 30, 05:37 am    #