President Obama: A Modern Cicero?

[guy]

Although I wish our new President well, I think some of the praise heaped on him may be a little too much. The poor man has lots of pressure on him already (dealing with the economy, a couple wars, the environment, health care, etc.) without having to deal with unrealistic expectations.

 

Hopefully, Dr. Tom will comment:

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/2...#history-byline

 

 

 

guy also know as gaius

[Kosmo]

Nice. Thank you for sharing!

[AEGYPTUS]

Very interesting article, thanks for sharing. I would say Obama is going to have a hard time meeting the globes expectations for him. Reading articles such as this reinforces this ideal in my mind. Being compared to Greek Gods and orators such as Cicero is going to be a hard expectation to meet.

[caesar novus]

Interesting, although I cannot stand the oration style of almost any US president... to the extent that I still lunge for the mute button with a sense of desperation on any newsclip. It just seems blatant opiate for the masses, although maybe my nonsense radar is too quick to engage.

 

I have only responded to oration from some almost evil figures, and one recent example must have been fictional where a BBC portrayal of Crassus explained to his troops why he had to decimate them. Wow... passionate about ideals, direct about his disappointment, and to the point about his gruesome solution. If I heard that I may have been mesmerized enough to not bring up the obvious point... "Sir, must it be every 10th man to submit to the hammer or every first out of 10"?

 

Such oratory may be what is needed more than actual correct content right now. Just like FDR, who co-opted and kept at bay various populist rebellions with rhetoric and some pretty bad actions. It is increasingly recognized in the economics world that, unlike the myth, many of Roosevelt's famous actions stifled or reversed recoveries, that did actually work out in other countries without those steps.

 

Anyway, here's some criticism about Obama CONTENT that has even led to a lot of known O. supporters in the financial world to repeatedly plead to him publicly along the lines of "please shut up!". His high toned but populist slant built up from mid Jan to mid March, and I think took a recent reversal which is reflected in this graph: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=PGF&t=...;q=l&c=^DJI

 

The violent downdrafts in early March were directly tied to his loose-cannon statements about wiping out investors who were trying to help out troubled banks (pgf curve) or <<oops, this wrong example now removed>> . This was bad relative even to the well known Dow Jones disaster curve. His philosophy to punish some past scapegoat actually punished the folks coming in to carry the load of recovery (some wiped out forever; had to call it quits before partial rebound).

 

Same thing with his recent call to arms to be ruthless about bonuses. Some folks that are giving up AIG bonuses were experts recently hired to untangle the mess, with a salary of only one dollar in addition to the bonus and have now quit (I earlier posted here about how populist outrage would make the turnaround experts stay at home). It's the height of idiocy to cause a brain drain out of this company that the taxpayers needs to sell back to the private sector to get their billions back (besides punishing employees not a bit to blame).

 

So he soothes the masses with oratorical style while Rome burns. Well, after it got to the point where his oratory incited death threats against his targets, it appears he has stopped pandering to the populists and either found Clintonian pragmatism or else realized how well the financial world bankrolled his election. I'm not impressed, but didn't expect much from either him or his elderly opponent, neither of whom seemed to have the executive experience of even a child who has run a lemonade stand. Can learn on the job, but I don't see why this one has had the automatic benefit of doubt from the intellectual set. Maybe my oratory blind spot prevents seeing real aptitudes, though...

Edited March 27, 2009 by caesar novus

[Ursus]

And the Italian PM was recently compared to Caesar. http://www.economist.com/world/europe/disp...ory_id=13377316

 

All we need now is a Cleopatra.

[Antiochus III]

I can think of a great poll to go along with this!

 

Antiochus the Great

[guy]

And the Italian PM was recently compared to Caesar. http://www.economist.com/world/europe/disp...ory_id=13377316

 

Berlusconi? Caesar? Mamma mia!

 

Whether one likes him or not, he has been one of Italy's most memorable politicians.

Here's an interesting clip of Berlusconi being Berlusconi for those of you who speak basic Italian.

(I know some of Italy's political incorrectness might offend, but...mi scusate tutti. That's Italy)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Xt_Z9JLLc

 

guy also known as gaius

[M. Porcius Cato]

Interesting article, but it's much more valuable for its analysis of Obama's powerful speeches than for its chief thesis. The argument for the comparison with Cicero is actually somewhat weak:

It is not just in the intricacies of speechifying that Obama recalls Cicero. Like Cicero, Obama is a lawyer. Like Cicero, Obama is a writer of enormous accomplishment - Dreams From My Father, Obama's first book, will surely enter the American literary canon. Like Cicero, Obama is a "novus homo" - the Latin phrase means "new man" in the sense of self-made. Like Cicero, Obama entered politics without family backing (compare Clinton) or a military record (compare John McCain). Roman tradition dictated you had both. The compensatory talent Obama shares with Cicero, says Catherine Steel, professor of classics at the University of Glasgow, is a skill at "setting up a genealogy of forebears - not biological forebears but intellectual forebears. For Cicero it was Licinius Crassus, Scipio Aemilianus and Cato the Elder. For Obama it is Lincoln, Roosevelt and King."

In actuality, most US Presidents have been "new men" -- i.e., without family members serving in office. The rarer attribute is being without any military record, which only includes J. Adams, Jefferson, J.Q. Adams, VanBuren, Fillmore, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, and Clinton. Of these, Obama--with his idealism, intelligence, and academic background-- reminds me most of Woodrow Wilson, whose 'idealism' dragged the US into its most costly war to date, established the (previously unconstitutional) progressive income tax, laid the legal groundwork most responsible for the crash of '29 (which he later regretted, "I have unwittingly ruined my country"), sponsored a new round of alien and sedition acts, spearheaded the League of Nations and its disastrous Treaty of Versailles, and campaigned passionately against the checks-and-balances of the US Constitution.