Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (review)

James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama is a high-speed and breathless journey through over 200 years of American political history and theory which gives the work of John Dewey a place of central importance. According to its narrative, these two centuries of American thought find their natural fruition in the political career of Barack Obama. The book, through an introduction to some of the most prevalent intellectual currents in American politics (both past and present), philosophical pragmatism as embodied in the work of John Dewey and his expositors (most specifically the work of Richard J. Bernstein) and various conceptions of constitutional democracy, is intended to construct an understanding of Obama as an intellectual president best understood through his theoretical influences. Kloppenberg’s ultimate claim is that when viewed through this framework, it becomes clear that Barack Obama offers a new type of civic republican founded upon a backdrop of philosophical pragmatism. Most concretely, it is argued that Obama shows a strong awareness of conditions of uncertainty and provisionality as well as the necessity for an experimental stance in the realm of politics. Out of this complex “matrix,” Kloppenberg ultimately portrays Obama as extraordinarily sophisticated and deep in his understanding of the American tradition, ultimately realizing that “democracy in a pluralistic culture means coaxing a common good to emerge from the clash of competing individual interests” (xiv).

In chapter 1, “The Education of Obama,” the above themes are all in evidence. First, Obama is described as “a man of ideas”—so much so that it seems that Obama has exhaustively absorbed and synthesized the whole set of political ideas offered an American in the twenty-first century. One might find this portrait of Obama a little too rose colored. Indeed, one might conclude (as I am tempted) after reading Reading Obama that Obama himself has not actually embodied or digested all these ideas, but rather that it is almost too easy to project upon Obama the ideas one wants to see. So, for example, an academic might see in Obama the real-world fruition of the academic study of politics—or even see Barack Obama as the academic president. This, of course, is a trait quite useful if it is desired to offer hope and a sense of broad possibility to a voting public. Hopefully, this tempting interpretation will prove wrong.

In any case, Kloppenberg claims that Obama actually embodies and acts on a quite extended and sophisticated set of ideas. Obama’s education is, indeed, actually reflective of a certain type of American experience. From Occidental, to Columbia, Harvard, and finally the University of Chicago (where he apparently continued his education by teaching law and acting as community organizer), Obama’s education was, simply put, conducted among the American academic superstars of his time. The names dropped in Reading Obama make up a substantial list, but among the few listed at the beginning are John Dewey, Gordon Wood, Cass Sunstein, Michelman, Tribe, Alain Locke, Unger, Kagan, Mikva, Nussbaum, Stone, and Posner. A layman could get a somewhat accurate sense of the intellectual elites of our time (and earlier) by just listing the names dropped by Kloppenberg in relation to Obama’s education. (As an intriguing aside, one might also create an interesting and informative counter-narrative by noting the significant names at each of these institutions that are left off Kloppenberg’s lists. And, of course, the California elites at Stanford and Berkeley are not really present.) Along with the names given significant emphasis, there are also the various concepts deemed central. As with the names of individuals, ideas such as civic republicanism, philosophical pragmatism, historicism, and communitarian discourse are all introduced in an equally breathless fashion. According to Kloppenberg, Obama ends up upon completion of his education with a heartfelt conception of democracy as based upon dynamic deliberation wherein communication builds consensus and a type of communal democratic virtue. Dewey returns to...