The New York Times magazine has published an extensive profile of Ben Rhodes, the 38-year-old foreign policy wunderkind and failed novelist who, along with President Obama, has helped craft a new American “narrative” for the flat-earth digital age. He is obnoxious.
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Here are five reasons, as outlined in the profile (which at times reads as clever satire of the juicebox intellectualism that has thrived in the age of Obama), why Ben Rhodes is not someone with whom you’d want to take a long road trip:
1) He’s the Obama Whisperer
Rhodes’s relationship with the president is described, frequently and with confidence, as a “mind meld.” He speaks with authority on behalf of the commander-in-chief because “he knows what the president is thinking,” and that’s a major reason why Rhodes has become such an influential figure in the Obama administration. “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends,” Rhodes explained, humbly.
2) He’s Holden Caulfield
According to his Pulitzer Prize-winning and “silver spray-painted rock ‘n’ roll sneakers”-wearing colleague Samantha Power, Rhodes is just like Holden Caulfield from Catcher In The Rye because “he hates the idea of being phony, and he’s impetuous, and he has very strong views.”
If your goal is to make a favorable comparison to a literary character, Caulfield is an odd choice. He is the privileged, underachieving, prep-school educated son of an Upper East Side power-lawyer who despises “the system” and entertains a wild hipster fantasy yet ultimately settles for a bail-out from his rich parents.
Perhaps the comparison is apt. Rhodes also grew up on the Upper East Side and attended the Collegiate School (annual tuition $40,000), but wasn’t a great student, he said, because “I was drinking and smoking pot and hanging out in Central Park.” He presumably never dreamed that one day he would fuse brains with the most powerful man on Earth.
3) He’s a failed novelist
Rhodes’s foreign policy credentials include a degree in English and political science from Rice University and an MFA in creative writing from NYU. He reads “To Kill a Mockingbird” to his infant daughter. He reads other books by himself sometimes. He wanted to be a writer, and to publish his first novel by age 26. He ended up being the co-author of American foreign policy.
… He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.
4) He thinks his life is a Don DeLillo novel
Rhodes said being in New York on September 11, 2001, reminded him of a Don DeLillo novel. If his life was a novel, DeLillo would be the author.
“That’s the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics,” Rhodes explained. “That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.”
5) He brags about lying to reporters
Rhodes, who led the administration’s public-relations effort on the Iran nuclear deal, openly boasted about selling a convincing narrative to the public via foreign policy reporters who “literally know nothing.” As the author of the profile points out, many of the details in Rhodes narrative were “often misleading or false.”
Rhodes doesn’t seem to care. His narrative won the day, thanks in no small part to a press corps that was either gullible, complicit or both. “The tactics worked,” he said. “We drove [the deals opponents] crazy.”
Photo illustration: Heat Street
