Barack Obama and positive discipline

This month's Esquire arrived the other day and, as usual, there's some fine material in it.

Forget the profile of cover girl Blake Lively, the "Gossip Girl" who strikes me as yet another one of the many interchangeable Next Big Stars in Hollywood who doesn't become one.

Instead go to the intriguing piece, "Barack Obama: Papa in Chief," and wrap your mind around this theory put out there by writer Tom Junod: To understand Obama, you need to understand the "positive discipline" movement, a philosophy of discipline that rests on the principle that children should never be punished but, rather, should be taught mutual respect through the parent's example.

"Positive discipline does not mean no discipline; it means that discipline is a matter of teaching mutual respect, rather than making your child suffer," Junod writes. "... and so when faced with intransigence, parents have to respond by stating their expectations, repeating the rules, and then giving their children the love and support they need to follow them. Always try to include, rather than isolate; avoid labels; don't negotiate, but don't escalate, either. If your children are not doing well, either take them out of the situation or remove yourself. You — and they — can always try again."

If you imagine Obama as the patient father, never raising his voice, never punishing his opponents, you can begin to see the consistency with which he's dealt with Congressman Joe ("You lie") Wilson of South Carolina, the intransigent Republicans seeking to block health care reform, Sgt. James Crowley (the cop who arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home) -- even Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. ("One could almost hear Obama saying, 'Use your words, Mahmoud. Use your words.' ")

Junod continues:

"The things we liked about him have turned out to be the things that drive us crazy about him. After eight years of the Decider, we elected the Deliberator ... and now we've decided that he's too deliberative, too methodical, too cool, too unemotional, too even-tempered, too undemonstrative, too rational, too conciliatory, too compromising."

Obama's style is so contrary to what we've become to expect from a president that we don't know what to make of him -- or ourselves. We liked it when he said he wanted to change Beltway politics-as-usual, but he frustrated the Left by not asserting himself more strongly in the health care debate and he drove the Right crazy by seeming, in their eyes, way too accommodating with foreign leaders and apologetic for past American actions and attitudes.
Is it him? Or is it us that doesn't get it?

"Most Americans respond to strength and decisiveness in a president the same way they do in a father," Junod writes. "It has been unsettling to have a president whose agenda for change includes changing our very notions of strength and weakness, and whose idea of decisiveness seems to involve mostly making good choices, which is not necessarily leadership. He has been able to lead by inspiration but unable to simply lean on people, and unwilling to try on the world stage. His uncertainty as an authority figure may or may not have encouraged our foreign enemies, but it has certainly emboldened his domestic ones, who seemed confused about whether to call him a tyrant or a weakling until they realized, like schoolboys, that they weren't going to be punished and started calling him whatever they damn well pleased."

If you buy Junod's thesis, then Obama's seeming indecisiveness appears to have a logical context. Consider:

"The biggest difficulty with all nonauthoritative approaches to authority is that, even when they work, they often don't work right away. Spanking a child, threatening a child, taking a child's toys away — they might not be the best thing for a child, but they generally get a child's attention. ... There are no orders in positive parenting, as there are no orders in the Obama administration. There are, instead, reasonable goals and clearly stated expectations. The approach is evolutionary, and on the most important domestic issue of his presidency — health-care reform — so is the Paleolithic progress of the debate."

So, is Obama outfoxing us all by sticking to a philosophy of positive discipline in the face of unruly opponents and an easily spooked, easily manipulated American public? Or is he following this approach to the political graveyard?

Read the piece here and decide for yourself.

Image: President Obama, by Adam Beane. Clay-and-wax-based composite material, 18 inches high. Commissioned for Esquire, December 2009.