If Obama Had Read More of Machiavelli

Like many others, I was once enamored with President Barack Obama's promise. And like many others, I have grown more and more tired of his conciliatory approach aimed to appease his enemies only to embolden them. As Maureen Dowd wrote eloquently in the New York Times recently, " He thinks he’s doing the right things to crawl out of W.’s mudslide, but he ends up being castigated by the right as a socialist, by the left as a conservative, and by the middle as wobbly."

I have lost my interest in following the events in Washington DC for a while. But as I read "What Happened to Obama?" by Drew Westen (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/what-happened-to-obamas-passion.html), I realized that indeed no one could really not care.

As Westen wrote, "The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation. "

And at the end of the article, he lamented, "But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks. "

FDR once proudly stated in public that he knew he had incurred the wrath of many millionaires and yet he was unapologetic. The irony of democracy is that one has to be popular enough to get elected, and then does not care about popularity so much that he ends up being crippled and impotent.

More and more, I realize that perhaps, just perhaps, the right balance for a politician in this country is to adopt the bi-partisan, eloquent and compassionate rhetoric of Barack Obama when running for President and then once in office, be completely ruthless in pursuing the right mission without fear of creating enemies. After all, the enemies were already there and never intended to be converted to friends. Not recognizing a lost cause is either a sign of stupidity or naivete. Indeed no one loves confrontation or battles, but a demonstration of fear of confrontation is usually the best way to invite even more belligerent confrontations.

It all sounds so Machiavellian - and come to think of it, indeed it's taken us over 2000 years to once again understand that politics remains the same as before - just less bloody in the literal sense. Obama's fault might as well have been due to his naive notion and supreme arrogance that somehow he could transcend human nature.