Barack Obama’s Machiavellian Side
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons Something tells me the president is not a regular reader of the New Criterion. But perhaps, in between his regular servings of Jonathan Chait, Ezra Klein, and Josh Barro, he snuck a peek at the October issue of the conservative arts magazine. He might have scanned an essay by Harvey Mansfield, “Machiavelli’s Enterprise,” on the legacy of the first modern philosopher. It’s a legacy that very much includes the president.
In the essay, Mansfield discusses the Machiavellian discovery of “effectual truth.” What is effectual truth? In his 2007 Jefferson lecture, Mansfield put it this way: For Machiavelli, the effectual truth is the “truth shown in the outcome of his thought. The truth of words is in the result they produce or, more likely, fail to produce.” Consequences matter most. “Deeds are sovereign: When confronted by a necessity, Machiavelli advises, do not worry about justice, but act and the words to justify your action will come to you afterward.”
In recent weeks the world has woken up to the fact that President Obama is one of the most committed disciples of effectual truth telling in recent history. Time and again, when confronted by political necessity, he and his administration have told falsehoods in order to achieve their objectives. The fallout from the president’s lie that under Obamacare you can keep your health insurance is just the latest and most glaring example. The false explanation provided for the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012, and the misleading and occasionally fictional nature of the president’s memoir and campaign biography, are two more cases of effectual truth telling. The thinker whose teaching influences Barack Obama the most isn’t Frantz Fanon. It’s Niccolò Machiavelli.
The president now says that when he was barnstorming the country for his health care law, he was telling people, “If you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law has passed.” What he actually said, though, was much simpler: If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance. The Washington Free Beacon counted 36 times when he said exactly that. Politifact counted 37 times. No subordinate clauses. No mention of granddad.
The president and his administration have been caught in an untruth, in a prevarication, in a false statement. And there are no doubts as to motive: If Obama had actually said what he says he’s been saying, the chances of passing Obamacare into law, which were dicey to begin with, would have gotten much smaller. Most Americans already had health insurance prior to Obamacare, and the prospect of losing that insurance would have made them more reluctant to support the law, which they didn’t actually support all that much anyway. Omitting the consequences of the law for the individual insurance market was one of the most effective—i.e., effectual—ways to win support for the bill from congressional Democrats. The obstacles to Joe Biden’s “big f—ing deal” were necessities to be overcome. And President Obama overcame them by lying. The result—a national health insurance entitlement—makes the dishonesty worthwhile. Or at least it does for him.
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