By Jon Kraushar
Communications Consultant

Speaking about educating students in an address to African-American leaders in 2006, President Bush said, “We need to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations. If you have low expectations, you’re going to get lousy results.”

AP photo

The reverse of that applies to President-elect Barack Obama. In educating the American people about his plans and about the people he is selecting to serve in his administration, Obama needs to challenge the hard bigotry of high expectations. If he doesn’t, expectations of him will grow so high that he’ll get lousy results.

Time magazine has depicted Obama on its cover as the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During Obama’s campaign, Oprah Winfrey called him “The One.” Louis Farrakhan implied that Obama was “The Messiah.” Spike Lee said, “You’ll have to measure time by ‘Before Obama’ and ‘After Obama.’”

Obama needs to challenge the hard bigotry of high expectations. If he doesn’t, expectations of him will grow so high that he’ll get lousy results.

To his credit, almost as soon as he was elected, Obama tried to lower expectations. He said, “It is not going to be quick and it is not going to be easy for us to dig ourselves out of the hole that we are in. But America is a strong and resilient country, and I know we will succeed if we put aside partisanship and politics and work together as one nation.”

Robert Gibbs, Obama’s campaign spokesman who has recently been named the president-elect’s press secretary, said right after the election, “It’s important that everybody understands that this is not going to happen overnight. There has to be a realistic expectation of what can happen and how quickly.”

Obama needs to communicate caution with just a tinge of optimism that “we will prevail.”

However, the hard bigotry of high expectations is also spreading to Hillary Clinton as our next, likely, secretary of state.

Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that, “On pro-Clinton e-mail lists, supporters were already calling their heroine the next George Marshall, a figure who would reshape the world…”

Similarly, last Friday, several news organizations attributed a stock market rally of nearly 500 points to reports that Obama has selected New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner to be Treasury Secretary.

This, and any other enthusiasm about other high-level picks such as Lawrence Summers as chief economic adviser is premature “irrational exuberance.” Credentials of key players in the upcoming Obama administration may be encouraging to some, but how many times have we seen “the best and the brightest” turn out to be the “worst and the dumbest”? Recall how President Kennedy’s “brain trust” haplessly thrust America into its involvement in Vietnam, and that many of those same “brains” extended the catastrophe into the Vietnam War during President Johnson’s years in office.

Obama needs to communicate caution with just a tinge of optimism that “we will prevail.” Flying too close to the sun melts your wings and promising the moon sets you up for an eclipse.

President-elect Obama should keep his enthusiastic supporters (both in and out of the news media) in check by keeping expectations low. Much of his tough talk should focus on repeating how tough it will be to turn around the dismal economy and then gradually to tackle the rest of America’s challenges. Obama has a better chance of looking good later by making things look horrible now.

If he doesn’t do that, the hard bigotry of high expectations could turn “No Drama Obama” into “Future Shock Barack.” That would be bad for our new president, for his top appointees—and for us.

Communications consultant Jon Kraushar is at www.jonkraushar.net.