Presidents as Thinkers: Barack Obama and His Progressive Predecessors

Abstract

All presidents are political leaders. Some are also political thinkers. This article situates Obama securely in the traditions of Progressive political reform and progressive political thought, while also presenting the firmly embedded hurdles to progressive reform that exist within American democracy. Obama’s Progressivism is rooted in the pragmatic, anti-machine politics of the early twentieth century and draws much of its moral impetus from the same social gospel that inspired reforms a hundred years ago. At the same time, he worked to overcome resistance to reform based on “persistent localism, distrust of the federal government, a deep ambivalence about engaging in world affairs, and a racism that appears as deeply entrenched in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.”