Barbara Leaming: Churchill's Lesson for Obama

[Barbara Leaming is the author of two New York Times bestselling biographies and three New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her most recent book, a biography of John F. Kennedy, focused on the influence of British history and culture on the 35th president.]

By this time, everyone knows that in the moment of victory, President Obama returned the bust of Churchill. Whatever the gesture actually meant, many people took it to mean that unlike President Kennedy who had been studying Churchill's strategies since boyhood, Obama was unlikely to look to Britain's most famous Prime Minister for inspiration or advice.

But now, in the wake of the Democrats' midterm defeat, it is Churchill who has a stark and important lesson for the President. I do not mean the triumphant Churchill of the war years, but rather the Churchill who was overwhelmingly defeated in 1945. These are the years I have just written about in my new book, Churchill Defiant: Fighting On, 1945-1955.

Obama at his press conference spoke of a"shellacking." In 1945, Churchill endured a"shellacking" of his own -- a far more terrible one than the President's. Having just saved his country, Churchill was hurled from power, as Labour swept out the Conservatives. Shaken and personally devastated though Churchill was was, his response was typically Churchillian: defiance.

He refused to retire from political life, and in a matter of months the then seventy year old Churchill launched one of the most astonishing political comebacks in history. Over the course of the next six years, he not only held onto the leadership of his party (a party where there was broad sentiment that he ought to step aside), but also he fought his way back to the center of world events and then, in the General Election of 1951, back to Downing Street and the premiership.

One of the reasons Churchill was able to do this -- and this is where the lesson for the President resides -- is that he was able to make it clear to everyone what his reason for staying on was (though of course there were also strictly human reasons mixed in as well). In short, he followed his own dictum that it is essential always to have a"theme". In defeat, Churchill was quick to articulate his theme, and he stuck to it, hammering it home again and again, never wavering, until the day he left Downing Street at age eighty, at the close of his last premiership.

Churchill's theme -- and this is the brilliance of it -- was concise and easily understandable, something people could grasp and remember. It made clear exactly what his goal was and how he intended to achieve that goal. He said that his goal was to make a lasting peace, and he left no doubt that the way he planned to accomplish that was by going to the summit and negotiating with the Soviets.

Now for Obama and how this applies to him: There is broad agreement that the President is not communicating. His supporters say so, his opponents say so, and even he himself concurs. But to say that he is not communicating does not really help get to the root of the problem. You have to understand what he is not communicating. And what Obama is not communicating -- never has communicated -- and must find a way to put across soon is his theme. As Churchill would say, Obama and his administration lack a theme.

The President has never clearly defined" change." People do not know what he means when he says that he wants to bring change. Even his supporters do not really know what the change he calls for means exactly or how he intends to achieve it.

So Churchill's lesson for Obama in defeat would be this: He must find a way to explain his theme to the people. The word change is amorphous. At the moment, the President completely lacks a sharp statement of his goal and of how he plans to get there. And without that clarity, his opponents can suggest that" change" means just about anything: socialism, communism, whatever. Without that clarity, his supporters will continue losing focus and enthusiasm.

I am not suggesting that Obama needs to search for inspiration in the speeches of Churchill. The President has a very different task right now, one that has to be accomplished before it is time for big speeches. He does not need to look to how Churchill constructed his signature set-piece speeches, but rather to how he managed to be concise, to communicate a big idea in such a way that people can easily understand it. Obama needs to study Churchill's gifts of concision.

If Obama manages to articulate a theme, it would not merely be good for him -- it would be good for the country, for it is the confusion about his goals are that partly stokes the acrimony. It surely will not be easy, but I am confident that the author of Dreams from My Father is supremely capable of precisely the sort of thinking that will be required. Obama does not need to bring the Churchill bust back to the Oval Office, but he would certainly benefit from considering the lesson of the defeated Churchill.