When the Republican Party took control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2010 election, attention quickly focused on the implications of the vote for President Barack Obama and his administration. We asked Michael A. Genovese, professor of political science, to talk about President Obama and the January 2011 State of the Union address. Genovese was interviewed by Editor Joseph Wakelee-Lynch.

President Obama is now two years into his presidency. But he faces significant opposition from the Republicans and deep doubts among Democrats. Where is his path to success?

Well, if past is prelude, it’s the Clinton model in which you triangulate yourself in between the hard right of the Republican Party and soft left of the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton did that very effectively. Obama will probably have to do that politically. The reason why he’ll be able to get away with it politically is because while there is a disgruntled Left in the Democratic Party, there is simply no place for that disgruntled Left to go and no candidate to throw their weight behind who could challenge Barack Obama. He has a great margin of safety in moving away, at least in his message, from the Left of the Democratic Party and moving toward the center, because the Democrats will vote for him anyway and if he’s going to win he has to have the moderates. He has lost the moderates in the last eight to 10 months. He has to get them back.

Do you think last night’s State of the Union address laid the foundation for two years of triangulation?

I think it did that and more. Obama has taken ownership of “the future” and has challenged Republicans to either be backward looking or to work with him to build a better future. If these are the terms on which the next election is fought, Obama wins in a slam dunk. “Winning the future” is an aspirational vision that can animate his agenda and further fracture the split identity of the Republican Party. With two Republicans giving two different responses to the president’s State of the Union address, the Republican Party runs the risk of both appearing to be divided and actually becoming divided.

The past few months have been very good for Barack Obama. His poll numbers are up, people are coming around to see that the economy is slowly improving, the Republican mainstream is at odds with the Tea Party folks, and Obama has positioned himself in the middle-left of the political spectrum. I am sure there are some very contented Democrats in the White House right now.

The president has been criticized for not connecting at an emotional level with the American people. Do you agree that that’s important to be a successful president?

I think it's true. President Obama has failed to connect with people in the way that he did in the primaries and in the general election. I think that’s been a problem for him, because on the one hand, his personality is cool and professorial. But it’s sometimes too cool and he needs to bring more warmth and more of his humanity to it. He did that in the speech in Arizona. So you know he has the ability. I think he’s more professorial than political in that sense. He analyzes rather than emotes.

Connecting at an emotional level is part of leadership. It’s part of being an effective president or leader to be able to connect with the people who are supposed to be your followers. His inability to do that, or perhaps simply his reluctance to do so, has hurt him tremendously, because a lot of people who are sympathetic to him have “left the family,” and he needs to bring them back into the family if he is going to be, No. 1, a successful president and, No. 2, a re-elected president.

Which presidents were the best at doing that?
Bill Clinton did it fairly well. Ronald Reagan did it incredibly well. FDR did it incredibly well. Presidents who at least appear to be empathetic and connected felt it was important to be so. All three that I mentioned were skilled at the public performance side of the presidency and self-dramatization, but they also knew how important it was. Reagan got that from his training as an actor: You always have to connect with your audience. Clinton got it from his psychological issues: He needed to connect with people. Obama’s connection to people is different because of his very unusual background: growing up in Hawaii, then going overseas, being an African American in a white society — all of which probably distanced him, in some ways, from what Reagan did so naturally, which was to connect to the American ethos.

For much of the post World War II era, presidents have intentionally asserted the power of the executive branch as compared to the other branches of government leading to what is called the “Imperial Presidency.” Is it too early to say whether President Obama is carrying on that legacy?

It’s too early to say it definitively, because at this point it appears to be “Imperial Presidency-lite.” He has shown respect for Congress, which George W. Bush often did not. He has deferred to Congress, even on health care, which Bush did not. But the seeds are there. The seeds are planted not just in the president’s personality but also in the president’s situation and context. American power and authority is linked to strong presidential authority, and it’s almost inevitable that American presidents will be called imperial at one point or another, and it’s almost inevitable that they will behave in an imperial style at one time or another.

Bush was more imperial, Obama less so. Bush, through the Office of Legal Counsel memos, articulated the unitary executive theory of the presidency, which was a fairly well thought out justification of imperial power. It was unconstitutional, and it was not legitimate, but they made a strong case for it, and they backed that case with action. Obama has backed away from that articulation of an imperial presidency as a constitutional model and has said, no, I don’t think we should torture, I don’t think we should keep prisoners at Guantanamo. And yet, we still have Guantanamo. I think Obama is well aware of the potential pitfalls of the imperial presidency and of articulating that vision in constitutional terms, but he also aware of the political blowback that can occur.

Although we have a two-party system, it seems that over the past 10 years independents have become an unofficial third party. Have there been occasions in the past when each party needed the independent vote to win?

Since the break-up of the New Deal coalition, the Democrats have noticed more and more — the Republicans have always noticed — that they need to have independents. For the ’30s, ’40s and even the ’50s, Democrats felt they could rely on building up the New Deal coalition every election. By the ’60s, that coalition had evaporated, and independents became more important. As people drifted away from the two parties — about 35% of the public says they are Democrats, and 32% say they are Republicans —a big chunk of voters took up the middle. That is why when you campaign in the primaries, you campaign to the extremes, Democrats to the left and Republicans to the right. Then once you get the nomination, you quickly run as fast as you can and try to claim the center as your territory.

Obama has a good claim on the middle because that’s what got him in office in 2008. He has lost those people. He can bring them back.

Source: LMU Magazine