Obama is not that unprecedented

Here’s a story from Politico about the fact that Obama says “unprecedented” an awful lot. Apparently the current White House enjoys calling everything they do a “historic first,” which I guess is already pretty obvious to most people.

I’ve been thinking about this lately. I like presidential trivia as much as the next guy, and I found Obama’s election to be a big thrill because of how “historic” he was. And Obama’s people clearly got a big thrill too, which is precisely why they market him as doing “unprecedented” stuff all the time. There’s already a mainstream perception that Obama is a president unlike any other, largely stemming from the premise, that he, as a person, is so unusual for the presidency.

But when you really stop to think about it, he’s not that special.

He’s the “first black / African-American president.” But, of course, he’s only half-black. And his father was an actual African. Someday a politician who was born in the south to two millionth-generation black American parents will be elected president, and when that day comes historians will probably have to re-christen Obama with a more convoluted title, like “first president to not come from an entirely European heritage,” since the “pure” black (an ugly phrase, but how else to describe the situation?) guy will be more deserving of the “first African-American” title. A good analogy can be made to Jamaica. They had a string of brown-skinned, bi-racial prime ministers, but then in the 1990s a pure black guy was elected, and suddenly he was christened the “first black” PM.

A sort of related point- though he’s a big jerk, I think it’s a bit unfortunate that Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential run is so thoroughly forgotten today. By any reasonable standard, he was the first “serious” African-American presidential candidate. He won many primaries and was considered a legitimate, if not incredibly threatening, opponent to the Dukakis campaign. I’m sure the history books will make much of Hilary’s “historic” run forevermore, and fair enough, but by that same standard it’s unfair that Jackson’s gets very little kudos for essentially accomplishing the same thing.

He’s the first Pacific president. This is something Obama himself proudly chirped the other day when speaking to Asia. Some guy at the National Review did a pretty good put-down of this claim. If we define the criteria of being a “pacific president” as “being of the pacific region in some significant way” then many other presidents, such as former Philippine Governor-General William Howard Taft, qualify. If being a “pacific president” involves nothing more than being born in Hawaii, though, then fine, Obama wins.

He won a historic landslide. Because Obama was the first non-white president, and because people hated Bush so much, I think some folks, especially young peoples, tend to ignorantly assume that Obama achieved some sort of enormous (unprecedented?) electoral victory. That “feels” right, and the commemorative coin and plate industry have certainly done their best to keep this perception alive. But if we consult history, we see that Obama actually won smaller percentages of the popular vote and fewer votes in the electoral college than a whole gang of other presidents, including Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower…

The fact that Obama got the most votes of any presidential candidate in history is an irrelevant statistic. Any reasonably popular president will achieve this victory simply due to the fact that the US populace keeps getting larger, and thus winning 51% of the vote in a 50% turnout, or whatever, increasingly represents bigger and bigger amounts of people.

Everything else remarkable about Obama is even less remarkable. He’s not the youngest president, there have been other handsome presidents, other presidents have written good books, other presidents have had non-American parents… it goes on. And, of course, that Politico article has some good examples of a number of Obama’s mundane, thoroughly precedented policy victories that his PR people have vainly tried to exaggerate into history-shattering revolutions.

This is the sort of thing that galls some people about Obama. It’s not that he’s so different, and that some people hate change. It’s that, in many ways, he is not really that different at all, yet expects excessive applause as if he were. When people say Obama is a narcissistic weirdo who doesn’t get America, his administration’s apparent ignorance of the history of presidency he now occupies is a pretty decent piece of evidence.

On a completely different note, I just wanted to say that while it obviously raises some interesting points, this Politico story is a monstrously bad piece of journalism. It’s an opinions piece masquerading as legitimate reporting, for starters, but it’s also full of enough rambling asides and disjointed trivia “padding” to embarrass even the laziest sixth grader. Check out this quote, for example:

Andrew Jackson was the first president to use the word “unprecedented,” in 1831…

And so on.