Obama - The WYSIWYG President

Modern and postmodern presidents generally have avoided presenting their true selves to the American people.  Be it the replackaged product that hid the real, dark character of Richard Nixon, the simulated image of Ronald Reagan as the ideal president we might see in a movie from the 1940s, or the American Dream presidency Bill Clinton, presidents rarely present themselves as themselves.  Even relatively straightforward presidents like Carter and George H.W. Bush hid behind images (Carter the humble, hardworking puritain and Bush the silver-spooned tough guy).  Not so with Obama.

I have to give credit for this insight to my colleague at Providence College, Julia Jordon-Zachery.  In a series of conversations I have had with her since Obama's election, she has convinced me that all that we should expect from Obama is that which we have already seen in him.  In other words, he is WYSIWYG (a now-antiquated computer term, "What You See is What You Get").

What does this mean for us?  We should not expect him to change his pragmatism.  We should not expect him to make moves that are dramatic.  We should not expect him to make ideologically-motivated decisions.  And, we should not expect him to do anything other than try and stay in the middle.

For liberals, Obama will continue to disappoint.  But they should also take heart, because Republicans will never be able to pull off the tactic, now-outdated, as demonizing him as an extremist.  The fact that the GOP still tries to do this (even in the face of extensive evidence to the contrary) is an indication of how addicted they have become to the politics of personal destruction.  Unlike Bill Clinton, whose personal conduct (even before we realized he was doing inappropriate things with an intern) always suggested that Republican critics were right, Obama's personal character, which is apparently who he really is, cannot be associated with the excess of big spending liberals. 

So, the lack of inference between Obama's character and excess makes it hard for his opponents to successfully pull off a "Clinton," and the reality that Obama's policy approach matches his character means that we have a symmetrical presidency, one where what we are seeing is actually an accurate reflection of what we are getting. 

I know that people are used to the separation of the concept of a person and the actual person, but, as I have written before, Obama is a throwback.  Who is the last president to be WYSIWYG?  My pick is Truman...