I was plunged into depression, when after writing my blog this evening I looked at the day’s news and discovered that the Israelis had followed up their devastating air attacks by mounting a ground offensive. Depressing to face the fact that before Obama takes office, hundreds more Palestinians and scores of Israelis will be dead. Made me feel that me rabbiting on about Arthur Schlesinger was idealistic whistling in the wind.

Until I happened on an article by Andrew Sullivan to be published in the London Sunday Times tomorrow. Sullivan has been stateside throughout the Obama campaign and has had far more contact than I have had with him and his aides.

The headline gives the gist of his story:

Wary Obama will make the Middle East wait

Hamas and Israel will find out soon enough that he isn’t easily pressured

 He has noticed, as I have, that Obama has been very quiet since his election success. But the conclusions he draws from that are very different from mine. He thinks that they show that Obama is above all a pragmatist, not a ‘hero of the left’ but a man of the American centre.

He then goes on to characterise Obama in British terms. Saying he is a Blairite. And that his priority is his massive aid package to revive the US economy and that everything else, including the Middle East crisis, will have to wait.

Hence the Sunday Times headline.

As part of his evidence he supplies a long quote from an Obama pre-Christmas speech, which I reprint here:

“Two years from now, I want the American people to be able to say, ‘Government’s not perfect; there are some things Obama does that get on my nerves. But you know what? I feel like the government’s working for me. I feel like it’s accountable. I feel like it’s transparent. I feel that I am well informed about what government actions are being taken. I feel that this is a president and an administration that admits when it makes mistakes and adapts itself to new information, that believes in making decisions based on facts and on science as opposed to what is politically expedient.’ Those are some of the intangibles that I hope people two years from now can claim.” 

This quote jolted me out of my depression, because it made me realise, what I did not know earlier this evening, that Obama is a ‘Schlesingerite’.

I put it in quotes, because I don’t even know whether Obama has ever read any of Schlesinger books. But the views he epouses and the tactics he used in his campaign echo much of what Schlesinger wrote and did in his lifetime. But Obama’s ideas and his rhetoric are much more like those of Schlesinger that they are of Blair, or Brown, or Wilson, or Jesse Jackson, not to mention Martin Luther King or James Baldwin.

It is not surprising that the British press has not made this connection. It is more surprising that the American press has not pointed it out.

Perhaps that is something to do with geography as well as history and the sociology of class background.

I can illustrate this from Schlesinger’s Journals. Despite my liking for his ideas his ‘revelations’ about Richard Nixon actually made me feel sympathy for ‘tricky Dick’. Even though, I had his quote from Ford, regretting that he had given Nixon a pardon and saved him from jail.

He has a section based on what happened when Nixon, when after the disgrace of Watergate he had gone back to being a lawyer and happened to buy a house on the Upper East Side of New York, whose back garden adjoined the back garden of Schlesinger’s house.

Even before Nixon had moved in, this had stirred Schlesinger to dash off a letter to the head of security forces, who had told his infant son to get off the wall, on which he was sitting. He writes a couple of pieces after Nixon had moved in, making fun of Nixon because he was playing with his young daughter in the garden dressed in a suit and a tie.

Presumably, Schlesinger, never went to play with his kids in the garden until he had changed into his casuals!

Since it is late at night I shall have compress a lot into the last paragraphs.

Like Schlesginer I thought Nixon was a ‘crook’ well before Watergate. But his paranoia was fuelled by the east coast elite contempt of the intelligent, but socially inept, provincial. And although it was the elite press, notably the Washington Post and the New York Times, who exposed Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, the US press has back-pedalled massively since then, and given an easy ride to Lyndon Johnson, after he went mad, and to both the Bushes, who like Schlesinger, and many others, were themselves schooled along with the American east coast elite.

Obama has come to power without the help of the US press. Much of it was hostile, notably Fox News. Amongst the heavies the New York Times made no secret of its support for Hillary Clinton, while the Washington Post went through most of the campaign sticking to its line of not declaring for any candidate, but striving to maintain the convention that journalists should report the facts, not push their opinions in the face of the readers.

Whatever Sullivan thinks, come 20 January, Obama will have to deal with Gaza, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, the collapse of the banks and the credit crunch. And he will have to deal with the international press as well as the US press.

And despite my depression at today’s news, I think that he might find something in Schlesinger’s Journals that will be helpful in his new job.