Barack Franklin? Benjamin Obama?

Say what?

This post is the result of the confluence of two stories, one about President Obama, the other about Benjamin Franklin. Go with the flow of my stream of consciousness, dear reader, and listen as the currents of the two tales intermingle and babble over the sandy shoals of what passes for knowledge of the character of these two Americans.

Earlier today I came across Johnathan Chait's article in the January 12, 2014 issue of New York Magazine entitled History Will Be Very Kind To Obama (And if it's not, it will be for a highly ironic reason.) It's worth reading.

Coincidentally, I'm almost finished with A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America by Staci Schiff.

It is a long book, which is unlikely to be read by those whose total knowledge of American history consists of what they remember of the simplistic, patriotism-instilling myths they heard as children.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere...

(Never mind that Revere was captured and failed to finish his ride. Revere's fellow rider, Billy Dawes, on the other hand, did finish, but his name does not lend itself as easily to patriotic poesy.)

But I digress. (Meander might be a better term, given the aquatic metaphor with which I began.)

In Schiff's book I found a great deal of similarity between how Benjamin Franklin was viewed both at home and abroad as he sought help from France during the Revolutionary War and how President Obama is judged on those same fronts for his efforts to serve simultaneously as the first Black American President and the leader of the free world.

For both men the various factions within the home crowd succumb to personal and tribal prejudices. They fail to recognize the value of a gifted politician with the extraordinary and singular ability to set aside his own prejudices and desires in order to do the job his country asked him to do.

For both, citizens of foreign lands are enamored not with the man's acumen but with his celebrity, uniqueness, and affability. They heap praise upon him, which his detractors and enemies use to undermine his efforts at home, claiming he seeks the limelight at the expense of his country.

One passage from the Chait article on Obama parallels much of what Schiff says about Franklin.

The president’s infuriating serenity, his inclination to play Spock even when the country wants a Captain Kirk, makes him an unusual kind of leader. But it is obvious why Obama behaves this way: He is very confident in his idea of how history works and how, once the dust settles, he will be judged. For Obama, the long run has been a source of comfort from the outset. He has quoted King’s dictum about the arc of the moral universe eventually bending toward justice, and he has said that “at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” To his critics, Obama is unable to attend to the theatrical duties of his office because he lacks a bedrock emotional connection with America. It seems more likely that he is simply unwilling to: that he is conducting his presidency on the assumption that his place in historical memory will be defined by a tabulation of his successes minus his failures. And that tomorrow’s historians will be more rational and forgiving than today’s political commentators.

Schiff says this about Franklin in her introduction. It's tenor could quite easily apply to Obama.

Always a generous soul, Franklin left his best years to his biographers. The outline for his unfinished Autobiography ends: "To France. Treaty, etc." This is the story of those four words, with emphasis on the last. Although its subject shied from doing so, Franklin's revolutionary odyssey has been examined before. In the simplified version, his is a kind of messianic entry into Paris that will precipitate a violent exit, thirteen years later, stage left, with noble French heads o pikes. In John Adams's worst nightmare, the story of the American Revolution assumed a different formulation: "The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod–and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures, and war." In the romantic version, the French mission is reduced to a tale of baroque international melodrama, boasting a cast of aristocratic lovelies who transform Franklin into a debauched European. From there it is a short distance to the hostile misconceptions, in which Franklin is "the first to lay his head in the lap of French harlotry."

I encourage you to read both and see if I am not justified in asking Barack Franklin? Benjamin Obama?