Why is Obama picking a fight on an issue that, according to The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, is a “political winner” for the GOP?

Because of the way he interprets American history.

Every president tells the story of America’s past to justify the policies he’s pursuing in the present. For George W. Bush, the story was about America being roused from its complacency by external danger. In 1999, then candidate Bush quoted Winston Churchill as declaring, in the late 1930s, that “the era of procrastination, of half measures-of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close.” Then, in his second inaugural, Bush described his own era as “years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical” followed by “a day of fire.” The implication was that to fulfill his role in history, Bush needed to rally Americans against the evil that lurked beyond their shores.

Obama tells the story of American history differently: as America overcoming the evil within itself. In his 2008 Democratic convention speech, he talked about “a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west, a promise that led workers to picket lines and women to reach for the ballot.” The first two references—to immigrants escaping foreign oppression and pioneers overcoming nature’s hardships—are standard political fare. But by twinning them with workers battling exploitation and women battling sexism, Obama suggested that external and physical forces aren’t the only barriers to American progress. Sometimes, the barriers are other Americans.

It’s a theme that recurs in Obama’s speeches. In his first inaugural, he said America’s “greatness” resided in those Americans who “traveled across oceans in search of a new life ... settled the West ... and plowed the hard earth” but also those who “toiled in sweatshops and endured the lash of the whip.” In other words, America achieved greatness because Americans seeking dignity and freedom triumphed over Americans who sought to deny them those things. In Obama’s second inaugural he talked about the “star that guides us” toward full equality, “just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.” This March, on the 50th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, he said what occurred there was “a clash of wills; a contest to determine the true meaning of America.”

Obviously, Obama knows America faces enemies abroad. But unlike Bush, who took World War II and the Cold War as his precedents for the “war on terror” and thus cast America as a virtuous nation menaced by foreign malevolence, Obama refers frequently to America’s malevolence within. He sees American history as a series of moral struggles pitting Americans seeking equal opportunity and full citizenship against Americans who defend an unjust or bigoted status quo.

Obama clearly sees the current nativist, bigotry-laden, hysteria as such a struggle. He knows he may not win. But he wants future historians to know exactly where he stood. They will. And as a result, I suspect, they’ll record the Syrian refugee battle among his finest hours.

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