The Supreme Court has ruled, the 4th of July has arrived, the heat is sweltering, and the presidential candidates have been taking a few days off from the campaign trail – President Obama at Camp David, and Mitt Romney at his lake house in New Hampshire. But since no American vacation would be complete without a batch of summer reading, here are a few titles, old and new, that the president might profitably leaf through while he waits for the rest of the country to stop sweating and tune back in to politics. (His challenger is busy overseeing the Romney clan’s annual regimen of sports and games – a hypercompetitive affair known as the “Romney Olympics” – so I’ll save his reading list for next week.)
First, as he tries to put his first term in context, the president could benefit from the historical perspective provided by Jonathan Rauch’s “Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working.” Originally published in the early 1990s and then revised and reissued after the Gingrich Revolution petered out, the book is a dense and depressing look at how and why the modern administrative state resists attempts to overhaul it.
Rauch’s arguments apply to reformers in both parties, but they have a particular relevance for the current president, who inspired sky-high, New Deal 2.0 expectations and then struggled mightily to live up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s example. Obama-era liberalism, Rauch’s book suggests, is a victim of the Democratic Party’s past success: The programs and bureaucracies that were created in liberalism’s heroic age are precisely what make it impossible to bring that heroic age around again. The system is too complicated, the government has too many stakeholders and its various clients too much power, and would-be revolutionaries end up thwarted, corrupted, or (all-too-frequently) both.
“In a society dense with professional lobbies,” Rauch writes, “F.D.R.’s brand of experimental central government cannot exist.” Obama would no doubt cite some of his legislative feats as evidence to the contrary. But he should turn to “Government’s End” if he wants to understand why even his victories feel compromised, and why he’s achieved less than so many of his supporters hoped.
To reckon with a more specific instance where those hopes have fallen somewhat short, he should turn to last year’s “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America,” by Richard White. One of the president’s preferred themes is the idea that government “investment,” broadly defined, has been crucial to America’s economic success. And the transcontinental railroad is one of his favorite examples of this kind of domestic nation-building, consistently invoked in presidential speeches as an example of the good old days when even Republicans (Abraham Lincoln, in this case) supported industrial policy.
But White’s new history of that endeavor – written from a left-wing, muckraking perspective – tells a rather darker story, rife with corruption, back-room dealing, and private investors using public subsidies to line their pockets and enrich their allies. The federal government’s railroad investments, the book strongly implies, had a little more in common with contemporary follies like Solyndra than the president’s mythmaking suggests.
It’s not an account that will woo Obama away from his faith in green jobs and high-speed rail, necessarily – but at the very least it should unsettle that faith a little.
Finally, speaking of faith, a president who chose to start a fight over religious liberty with the Roman Catholic Church might profit from reading 2010’s “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” in which the sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell examine the ways in which religious practice tends to make people better neighbors and citizens.
Putnam and Campbell are not writing about religious freedom per se. But one of their major themes is the extent to which both individuals and society benefit, not from belief alone, but from faith communities in all their myriad forms. This suggests an implicit perspective on what the Bill of Rights means when it protects not just freedom of conscience, but the free exercise of religion. The First Amendment isn’t just there to defend private conviction. It’s there to protect public and communal expressions of faith as well.
The controversy over the contraception-sterilization-morning-after-pill mandate erupted because the Obama White House decided to take an extremely narrow view of this protection, crafting a religious exemption that would apply to houses of worship but not to religious hospitals, charities and schools.
But the “grace” that Putnam and Campbell are describing works precisely because it isn’t confined to the churches where it’s nurtured: It spills out of the pews and into society as a whole. And there are worse things President Obama could do with his summer vacation than ponder that reality, and then shorten by one the list of controversial policies that he’ll need to defend this fall.
