The Obama Chronicles

The last chapter of my soon-to-be published book, Reading the Room, applies its theory, Structural Dynamics, in an analysis of President Barack Obama’s behavioral profile. These chronicles will, from a Structural Dynamics (systems) point of view, comment on the dilemmas Obama faces as he seeks reelection and the decisions he makes in the period leading up to the election and beyond.

A June 2nd article in the New York Times, Employment Data May Be the Key to the President's Job, begins “No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2%”. Today, roughly 9% of Americans who want to work are unemployed. The chances of reducing this rate to the article’s alleged threshold are dim if not grim. A second article in the Times of this same day, A Way Through the Debt Mess , describes how Lyndon Johnson faced the problem of how to raise the debt ceiling while also raising taxes. Obama faces the same debt dilemma, which is linked to unemployment. Johnson’s tactics offer important lessons.

In systems terms, Johnson, a master politician and tactician, looked for pressure points, what we would call leverage points, to move a stuck system. When a system is stuck, Structural Dynamics says, it is sometimes necessary to perturb it. The idea is that when a stuck system is “blown up”, so to speak, and the dust settles, it will have changed. Such tactics do not come natural to Obama. Let us say that, with reelection at stake, he has no choice and must consider imitating Johnson’s famous ability to twist arms in order to get his way.