Obama’s speech tonight: Play the Eisenhower card

It should come as no surprise that prominent Eisenhower family members support President
Obama. Like Ike, Obama dislikes ideas like manned space travel, seeing them as carnival
stunts that disturb the healthy body politic; believes people have the right to
be happy with their families in their homes without external worries; and he accepts
the Roman peace. On a personal level, Obama is possibly the most mature president
since Ike, possibly because they share those same practical, earthy, flatland, Kansas
values of Obama’s maternal grandparents. And in his way he seems to accept that
he comes at the end of a period of history; Eisenhower’s a time of total war that
destroyed Europe and much of the East; Obama’s a time when our country has soared
on silver wings, which he must have felt last week honoring Merle Haggard, who took
his stand as an Okie from Muskogee in 1969 but likes to pal today with Hillary.
That he has shifted from the ideological left to the center almost overnight proves
that like Ike, he was never a committed ideologist. But it is something Eisenhower
would never have done. And it is, unfortunately, something most every president
since has done.

As longtime political commentator Michael Barone has been saying, ours is the time
of the “new people” as the ’60s was the time of the New Left; this time the Tea
Party, the state sovereignty movements and Hayek advocates like Ron Paul. Obama
hopes now to accommodate, moving to the middle (“Third Way”) with Bill Daley. A
new political entity could metastasize from this, one that would work for John Eisenhower,
who opposed the Republican direction of George W. Bush to support John Kerry in
2004, and Susan Eisenhower, who supported Obama in 2008. To keep the peace long
term that might be seen as his public task. I’m hoping for a surprise announcement:
Replacing Joe Biden with Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and replacing Secretary of State
Clinton with China ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. Huntsman is only 50 and can run for
president later. Hoping against hope.

The president is said to be reading a Reagan biography. He might also look at Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight
D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969 by David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon Eisenhower. David
Eisenhower, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, is an excellent historian
and storyteller and this book highlights the contrast and convergence that occurred
in the post-war period between Eisenhower and Kennedy. In reading it, I felt Obama
temperamentally had more in common with Eisenhower. Obama now has a marketing advantage
in that his party appears to have gotten past the Roosevelt nostalgia. Nostalgia
is the poison of politics and the Republicans are still stuck on Reagan and Bush,
not on policy issues but emotional ones. Obama could build now on his “other father”
— the one from the Kansas heartland — and find another part of himself there: one
that would help him build a new middle and one he shares with the Eisenhowers.