PETER BAKER
ESSAY


Americans are feeling bewildered these days.
Can the president restore a sense of enterprise and boldness?


WASHINGTON

CONFIDENCE IS THE name of the game for Barack Obama, a new president trying to calibrate his message to match the moment, searching for a way to inspire a recession-weary country and convey hope that better times are ahead. It is a tricky balance to strike. If he sounds too gloomy, he could further depress a nation desperate for any sign of progress. If he sounds too optimistic, he risks looking as if he’s trying to fool the nation, a different sort of Confidence Man.

“You don’t want to overlook the misery and not look like you’re in touch with the challenges they’re facing,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.“On the other hand, you’ve got to give them a sense that there’s a light on the horizon that you’re pointing to and it’s visible.”

And Americans have grown more optimistic about the economy and the direction of the United States since Mr.Obama was inaugurated, suggesting that he is enjoying some success in his critical task of rebuilding America’s confidence, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released April 7.

Mr.Obama’s task is equally critical to many other countries whose economies rely on a confident American consumer. So when he flew to London to meet with counterparts to try to turn the world economy around, he vowed once again to restore “confidence in the financial markets.”

By the time he got to France, he told a town hall meeting that he was“confident that we can meet any challenge as long as we are together.”For good measure, he repeated the phrase twice more in his opening remarks. And in case the folks back home missed it, Mr.Obama taped a message declaring that“I am confident that we will meet this challenge.”

But Mr.Obama finds himself the leader of a nation with depleted confidence in all sorts of institutions of American life, from the banks and auto industry to government and the news media. America’s very place in the world seems in doubt to some, as China and Russia push to create a new international currency to replace the dollar and others challenge the nation’s economic, military and cultural dominance.

This is hardly the first time a president has confronted such a challenge. Franklin D.Roosevelt arguably turned around the mood of a country that appreciated his buoyant style, reassuring fireside chats and certitude that the only thing to fear was“fear itself,”even as the Great Depression raged on for years. Ronald Reagan took over a country following Vietnam and Watergate that suffered what Jimmy Carter had called a“crisis of confidence”and proceeded to emulate Roosevelt with a series of radio addresses and speeches expressing restless faith in the American spirit.

Regardless of how much credit they deserve, Roosevelt and Reagan, or their legends, have driven successive presidents to focus on their tone, knowing that they will be judged on it. George W.Bush projected steady assurance in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. But his relentlessly upbeat assessments of the war in Iraq later made him seem disconnected until he finally acknowledged that the war was going badly and changed his strategy.

“People just stopped believing him after a while,” said Alan Brinkley, the provost of Columbia University in New York and a presidential historian.“Obama’s different from Roosevelt and Reagan in that he’s kind of cool and calm and yet he can also be very charismatic. I think the sense of calm and reason is what makes people trust him. He doesn’t have the ebullient enthusiasm that Roosevelt had and Reagan had, but it’s a different kind of confidence.’’

The balance has eluded Mr.Obama at times since his election last year. For weeks, he sounded like a harbinger of doom, as he warned about a recession that could last a decade. At one point, former President Bill Clinton, the self-styled man from Hope (Arkansas, that is), urged Mr.Obama to level with the American people about the scope of the crisis but emphasize his faith in the future.“I just would like him to end by saying that he is hopeful and completely convinced we’re going to come through this,”Mr.Clinton said at the time.

Nevertheless, some experts dismiss the importance of confidence at a time when so many pillars of the system are broken.“That’s not going to fix it,”said Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland.“The economy got bad and the people lost their confidence, not the reverse. People getting their confidence back is not going to restore banks to solvency or consumer demand.”



President Obama doesn’t want to sound too gloomy, nor ignore a grim reality. A recent poll suggests that he is having some success in restoring confidence.