You know the guy. Everyone knows who the fat president is,
right?
William Howard Taft.
There he is, the 27th President of the United
States of America. Quite the looker. According to various sources, Taft weighed
“as much as 300 pounds” or even up to “350 pounds” during his time as the
sitting president. Though at that weight, one can hardly imagine him standing!
If you remember anything about him besides his corpulence,
it’s that he was the guy who had a custom extra-large bathtub installed in the
White House. If you recently completed a year of high school U.S. History, maybe
you know that he was Teddy Roosevelt’s hand-picked successor, and that his
failure to follow Roosevelt’s policies led to the latter’s formation of the
Progressive “Bull Moose” Party to try to retake the presidency. Otherwise, what
was Taft to you, or to history? He was merely the fat president.
A sort of glory happened in 2008 when the United States
elected Barack Obama to be president, a repudiation of the cynicism that said a
black man could never be elected president by the American people. But as his
presidency ossifies into immutable form, I fear that Obama will become another
William Howard Taft – known for one prominent trait, but ultimately an
insubstantial one. Will Obama be remembered as “the black president”?
Rather than seeing the Sandy Hook school shooting as a call
for high-minded action, I expect that Obama will see it as yet another chance
to stand with dignity above the fray, content to be The Great Sympathizer, the
guy who says the right things, that we need to circle the wagons around dead
kids, not dishonor them by arguing about guns. And that’s fine. He should be a
nice guy, as usual. History tends to remember nice guys, right?
Generally speaking, Americans do not want their presidents
to emulate Napoleon or Alexander the Great. Or do they? It seems like history
remembers presidents who stuck their noses into the big problems of the day,
Abraham Lincoln, for example, or Franklin Roosevelt. Is our gun culture really a
bigger problem to tackle than slavery or civil war, economic collapse or a
world war?
Rather than kowtowing to Americans’ supposed reverence for our
“strong tradition of gun ownership,” wouldn’t it be worthier to be remembered
as the president who stood up to the gun nuts and took away our freedom to turn
kids into hamburger? Better yet, be remembered as the president who forcefully
pried us away from our addiction to climate changing ways. There are probably a
couple of other big issues that would qualify. Oh, that whole slavery thing?
That hasn’t gone away entirely, has it? Equal rights for gays, those quaint
second-class citizens? Perhaps the gays are doing just fine pushing forth their
own agenda. They don’t need the president’s charity!
Everyone already acknowledges that presidents are highly
concerned with their legacies. So wouldn’t it be a good idea for Obama to get a
bit audacious with his leadership and his speeches, if only for the sake of his
legacy? I for one am rather frustrated with his campaign slogan: “Change, but
not too much. Forward, but not too fast.”
With reelection safely behind him, surely Obama can afford
to be himself? Isn’t that what people loved about George W. Bush, that he was
always himself? (Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to be anyone else, but that’s
beside the point.)
Even when we all loathed Bush for going bananas after 9/11
and plunging America into two foreign wars, we couldn’t deny that this was Bush
being Bush. And no matter what we might want to believe about the master of
overreacting, Bush did not destroy America. Regular old Americans did that when
we put our rights and future into the hands of the wealthy, the lobbyists, the
selfish few.
My worry is that this passivity and guardedness is Obama
being himself. That this is all there is to him.
Obama is fond of some words attributed to Martin Luther
King, Jr., who himself was actually quoting the 19th century
reformer and abolitionist, Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is
long, but it bends toward justice.” I can go along with that; progress takes
time. Hopefully, Obama can go along with being remembered only as “the black
president.”
Throw some bells and a red suit on him, and William Howard Taft
would have made a pretty convincing Santa Claus. President Obama, what do you
bring to the table?
