Our President, Our Selves

I went to Barack Obama’s inauguration. I did not have a ticket, so I would have seen and heard more if I had stayed at home in North Carolina. But I had experienced the Bush II years as a coup d’etat, as the seizure of the government by a dangerous cabal. I wanted to stand as a witness to the restoration of the proper relation between me, as citizen, and the national state. The occasion did not disappoint. It was not the ceremony itself or Obama’s speech that made me glad I went. It was the experience of solidarity with the crowd, of the almost giddy well-being that we all felt while exchanging silly smiles and high fives with strangers in the shadow of the Washington Monument. That Obama is half-black and that the fellow-feeling in the crowd conspicuously crossed racial lines only heightened the sense that I was experiencing what America could be if my (our?) deepest fantasies came true. After reading the four books reviewed here, I felt chastened. My feelings and hopes on that day not only repeat time-worn cliches in American history, but, if Dana Nelson, Peter Shane, and Sean McCann are to be believed, undermine the possibility of true democracy in these US. In their view, “Presidentialism,” the increasing power of the executive branch plus the tendency of citizens to look to the president to transcend the petty squabbles and difficult negotiations of politics, alienates sovereignty from the people to a potent figure from whom we expect/demand redemption. We passively cede power to this charismatic leader, abrogating deliberative democratic processes. Jeff Smith takes a more benign view of the (to him) inevitable creation of narratives that feature the president as protagonist. Those stories reflect our hopes and fears, but he does not sit judgment on some of those imaginings as less legitimate or more harmful than others. He is more interested in how presidents