Opinion More poetry,please

Without it,though,the president’s eloquence,his unique ability to inspire people to get out of their seats and work for him,has been muted or lost in a thicket of technocratic details. His daring but discrete policies are starting to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through,and endlessly compromise over,just to finish for finishing’s sake — not because they are all building blocks of a great national project.

What is that project? What is that narrative? Quite simply it is nation-building at home. It is nation-building in America. I’ve always believed that Mr Obama was elected because a majority of Americans fear that we’re becoming a declining great power. Everything from our schools to our energy and transportation systems are falling apart and in need of reinvention and reinvigoration. And what people want most from Washington today is nation-building at home. Many people,including conservatives,voted for Barack Obama because in their hearts they felt he could pull us all together for that project better than any other candidate. Many are what I’d call “Warren Buffett centrists.” They are not billionaires,but they are people who believe in Mr Buffett’s saying that whatever he achieved in life was due primarily to the fact that he was born in this country — America — at this time,with all of its advantages and opportunities.

I believe that. And I believe that without a strong America — which,at its best,can deliver more goods and goodness to its own citizens and to the world than any other nation — our kids and many others around the world will not have those opportunities.

I am convinced that this kind of nation-building at home is exactly what Mr Obama is trying to deliver. But to deliver this agenda requires a motivated public and a spirit of shared sacrifice. That’s where narrative becomes vital. People have to have a gut feel for why this nation-building project,with all its varied strands,is so important — why it’s worth the sacrifice. One of the reasons that independents and conservatives who voted for Mr Obama have been so easily swayed against him by Fox News and people labeling him a “socialist” is because he has not given voice to the truly patriotic nation-building endeavour in which he is engaged.

“Obama’s election marked a shift — from a politics that celebrated privatised concerns to a politics that recognised the need for effective government and larger public purposes. Across the political spectrum,people understood that national renewal requires big ambition,and a better kind of politics,” said the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel,author of the new best seller — Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? — that calls for elevating our public discourse.

But to deliver on that promise,Sandel added,Obama needs to carry the civic idealism of his campaign into his presidency. He needs a narrative that will get the same voters who elected him to push through his ambitious agenda — against all the forces of inertia and private greed. “You can’t get nation-building without shared sacrifice,” said Sandel,“and you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good — a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavour,not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves. Obama needs to energise the prose of his presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign.”

The New York Times