Driving Home, page 48
I’m not talking about blind optimism here … I’m talking about something more substantial … The hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs. The hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores … The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.
God gets the obligatory mention, but the true divinity here is America itself, a mystical entity that holds out the same promise of miraculous liberation as Jesus does in Wright’s sermon.
That address, received with rapt applause at the convention, remains the template for Obama’s grand set pieces on the stump, where his adaptation of Good News in Bad Times continues to play to packed houses. When he has the stage to himself, and turns his audience into a congregation, he can be an inspiring preacher, but he shrinks when lined up alongside his fellow candidates in debates, where he’s often looked more like an embattled Ph.D. student defending his thesis in an oral exam. He is far better taking questions in town meetings, where he listens gravely, thinks out loud, and comes up with answers that are at once complex and lucid, always seemingly unrehearsed, and lit with occasional shafts of irony.
Obama’s transparent intellect, his grasp of legislative detail, the fine points of his health-care plan versus Clinton’s, and his views on early childhood education are not what draw the big crowds to his events (and if crowds were votes, he would win the nomination in a landslide). Rather, it is the promise of the “narrative arc” that Obama credited churches with bringing to the lives of black Americans. People want the sermon, not Obama’s well-turned thoughts on foreign or economic policy. What the crowds crave from this scrupulous agnostic is his capacity to deliver the ecstatic consolation of old-time religion—a vision of America that transcends differences of race, class, and party, and restores harmony to a land riven under the oppressive rule of a government alien to its founding principles.
Watching the tail-ends of these events, one often sees boredom and disappointment on the faces of people who came for the evangelist but got the competent politician. It is a problem for his campaign that there are several Obamas now running: the charismatic preacher, loved by all; the adroit and well-briefed policy wonk; the lean, dark-suited, somewhat aloof figure so engrossed in his reflections that he seems to be talking as much to himself as to his audience, Hamlet brooding on the state of Denmark. There’s also the man who can look far younger than his age (he’s forty-six), like a boy with sticking-out ears, the Obama whom Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, labeled “the child prodigy.” For this last Obama, one suffers—especially in debates—as one suffers for one’s precious offspring on the night of the school play, crossing one’s fingers that she won’t screw up. Sometimes Obama bombs.
You never know which of these personae will be on show at an event, which is probably why Michelle Obama, barnstorming the country for her husband, has rather over-egged the pudding in her attempt to ground him in domestic reality. From Michelle we’ve learned that he snores, has “stinky” morning breath, is incapable of returning the butter to the fridge, and is “just a man”—an assurance hardly required of any other candidate, but necessary in his case because the line between demigods and demagogues in U.S. politics is dangerously fine, and Obama, on a religiose roll, can seem, like snake oil, too good to be true.
What seems entirely genuine in his candidacy came out unexpectedly in the last televised debate, when the moderator asked Obama why, if he represented “change,” so many of his advisers were drawn from Bill Clinton’s two administrations. Hillary Clinton immediately interjected, “Oh, I want to hear that!” and gave vent to her painfully stagey laugh, which was echoing in the rafters when Obama replied, “Well, Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me as well.” The audience laughter that met this return of service nearly drowned Obama’s next remark: “I want to gather up talent from everywhere.”
The point where Obama’s lofty secular theology and his skills as a practical politician merge is in the likely face of an Obama administration. If Hillary Clinton wins the nomination and the presidency, it’s depressingly probable that her cabinet will look a lot like Margaret Thatcher’s team of sworn loyalists, purged of “wets.” Were Obama to become president, one might fairly look forward to the third branch of government becoming more ecumenical than it’s been in living memory, an administration of all the talents, drawn from the ranks of political opponents as well as party allies. Wright says that Jesus comes for the folk you love, yes, and the folk you can’t stand. Obama, in 2004, put the thought another way:
The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.
In Obama’s sacralized “United States of America,” folk sit down with folk they thought they couldn’t stand—Republicans with Democrats, Americans with Iranians and Syrians. He’s managed to articulate this so persuasively that poll after poll shows his support mounting among registered Republicans, despite the fact that all his declared policies are far to the left of those of the present Republican Party. In a speech in Iowa on December 27, he announced that he was out to “heal a nation and repair the world.” On Thursday even Fox News showed an unprecedented soft spot for this Democratic candidate. It says a lot about the damaged state of America now that even Republicans hunger to take Obama seriously.
Guardian, January 2008
I’m for Obama
I want a hero: an uncommon want
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one.
Byron, Don Juan
FOR THE LAST FEW WEEKS, I’ve left the blue-sheathed national edition of the New York Times out in the yard, where it’s tossed over the gate at 3 a.m., and gone straight to the paper’s website, because news printed nine or ten hours ago is too old to keep up with the fast-moving course of the Democratic nomination battle. As an Obama supporter, I tremble for him as one trembles for the changing fortunes of the hero of an intensely gripping picaresque novel. What does the latest poll say? Has his campaign, usually sure-footed, stumbled into some damaging foolishness? Has another skeleton been uncovered in his closet? Has his vanity got the better of him again, as when he delivered his smirking line, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary”? Are the cloyed gazettes finally tiring of him?
As recently as February 29, those of us who were finding the suspense already unendurable were looking to March 4 to provide a swift denouement. Then stuff happened—news of Professor Goolsbee’s clandestine visit to the Canadian consulate, the “red phone” TV ad, the start of the Antoin Rezko trial—and the Texas and Ohio primary results made clear that this book has at least a hundred pages yet to go.
This may not seem a very grown-up method of following an election, but it’s been forced on us by the apparent shortage of serious policy differences between the two remaining candidates. The question of whether or not the future president should meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or if people who fail to pony up for subsidized health insurance should have their wages docked, don’t inspire much impassioned conversation at the watercooler. So we’re down to arguing over the character and style of Clinton and Obama, rather than—tut-tut!—“talking about the issues.” But in this case, character and style are issues because they supply the best available clues as to how each candidate might set about forming an administration and handle the business of government.
In Seattle, one of the most solid liberal-Democrat constituencies in the country, people have been so united in their loathing of the Bush administration and all its works that until now they had pretty much forgotten how to disagree. They have relearned fast. Friendships are strained, dinner parties wrecked, marital beds vacated for the spare room over the Obama v. Clinton question. Our lefty congressman, Jim McDermott, currently in his tenth term (last time around, he beat his Republican opponent by 79 percent to 16 percent), has wisely chosen not to endorse either candidate; and when he showed up at the local caucus on February 9, it was to escort his wife there, not to participate himself.
Some women I know take the rise of Obama as a personal affront. They’ve seen him too often before—the cocky younger man, promoted over the head of the better-qualified female. They circulate (“I hope you’ll share this with every decent woman you know”) op-ed pieces by Gloria Steinem (“Why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?”) and Erica Jong (“If I have to watch another great American woman thrown in the dustbin of history to please the patriarchy, I’ll move to Canada”), along with a grand tirade by Robin Morgan, a reprise of her 1970 essay “Goodbye to All That”:
How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse U.S. youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the boomer generation—the majority of which is female?
Morgan’s piece ends with the resounding but opaque antithesis: “Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.” Her furious italicizations fairly represent the tone of the quarrels at which I’ve been present: quarrels in which the word “bullshit!” is freely deployed on both sides, by people whose use of the expletive is as surprising as if they’d suddenly broken into fluent Portuguese.
Two days before the Washington state caucuses, I picked up my fifteen-year-old from her high school, where she’s a freshman. She was full of what had happened at morning assembly. A senior (“and he’s kind of popular”) had stood up to announce that Hillary Clinton would be speaking that evening on the Seattle waterfront, and “the whole school” had erupted in catcalls, boos, and hisses.
“The whole school? Didn’t the girls stand up for her?”
“It was everybody. I think the girls were loudest. Nobody’s ever hissed or booed at Community Meeting before. It was totally weird. Then another senior got up to say that Obama’s going to be at Key Arena tomorrow morning, and everyone was clapping and cheering. It was like the building was coming down.”
Next day, her French class had to be canceled because half the school was playing truant at the Obama rally.
Age, gender, race, and class have featured so prominently in the quarrel that they’ve sometimes seemed to define it as merely demographic warfare and led the pundits to forecast the primary results by doing the simple arithmetic of counting up whites, blacks, browns, union members, college graduates, under-thirties, and over-sixty-fives. But again and again the pundits have got it wrong, suggesting that the real divisions between the Obamaites and the Clintonites are to be found elsewhere.
In a recent issue of New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, an Obama skeptic, complained that his positions on foreign policy and national security had “a certain homeopathic quality,” more calculated to appeal to his “legions of the blissful” than to meet the needs of an “era of conflict, not an era of conciliation.” “I understand,” he wrote, “that no one, except perhaps Lincoln, ever ran for the presidency on a tragic sense of life; but if it is possible to be too old in spirit, it is possible also to be too young.”
I think Wieseltier raises the right point, but gets it backwards. For a tragic sense of life is exactly what has marked Obama’s candidacy from the beginning. His powerful memoir, Dreams from My Father, written in his early thirties, is shot through with that sense: its gravely intelligent, death-haunted tone, beautifully controlled throughout the book, is that of an old voice, not a young one—and the voice of the book is of a piece with the plangent, melancholy baritone to be heard on the campaign trail.
Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening. His routine stump speech is built on the premise that America has become estranged from its own essential character; a country unhinged from its constitution, feared and disliked across the globe, engaged in a dumb and unjust war, its tax system skewed to help the rich get richer and the poor grow poorer, its economy in “shambles,” its politics “broken.” “Lonely” is a favorite word, as he conjures a people grown lonely in themselves and lonely as a nation in the larger society of the world. (Obama himself is clearly on intimate terms with loneliness: Dreams from My Father is the story of a born outsider negotiating a succession of social and cultural frontiers; it takes the form of a lifelong quest for family and community, and ends, like a Victorian novel, with a wedding.)
The light in Obama’s rhetoric—the chants of “Yes, we can” or his woo-woo line, lifted from Maria Shriver’s endorsement speech, “We are the ones we have been waiting for”—is in direct proportion to the darkness, and he paints a blacker picture of America than any Democratic presidential candidate in living memory has dared to do. He courts his listeners, as legions not of the blissful but of the alienated, adrift in a country no longer recognizable as their own, and challenges them to emulate slaves in their struggle for emancipation, impoverished European immigrants seeking a new life on a far continent, and soldiers of the “greatest generation” who volunteered to fight Fascism and Nazism. The extravagance of these similes is jarring—especially when they’re spoken by a writer as subtle and careful as Obama is on the printed page—but they serve to make the double point that America is in a desperate predicament and that only a great wave of communitarian action can salvage it.
By contrast, Clinton wields the domestic metaphor of the broom: “It did take a Clinton to clean up after the first Bush, and I think it might take a second one to clean up after the second Bush.” It’s a deliberately pedestrian image, and it has defined her campaign. Stuff needs to be fixed around the house, but the damage is superficial, not structural. She has a phenomenal memory for detail and, given half a chance, reels off long inventories of the chores that will have to be undertaken—the dripping faucet, the broken sash, the blocked toilet, the missing tiles on the roof, that awful carpet on the stairs. Clinton tends to bore journalists with these recitations, though her audiences seem to like them: after the visionary but catastrophic plans of the neoconservatives, the prospect of a return to commonsense practical housekeeping has undeniable charm. Swiping at Obama, she says: “I’m a doer, not a talker” (a phrase with an interesting provenance—it goes back to the First Murderer in Richard III, by way of Bob Dole in his failed bid for the presidency in 1996). But it’s a line that unwittingly draws attention to the intellectual as well as the rhetorical limits of her candidacy.
“We can get back on the path we were on,” she promises, meaning the path from which we strayed in November 2000, as if the 1990s were a time of purpose, clarity, and unswerving Democratic progress, as well as a period of (largely coincidental) economic prosperity. Memory’s a strange thing, and Hillary Clinton’s own most notable contributions to those years—the absurd mess of “Travelgate” (widely held to be a factor in Vincent Foster’s suicide), her imperious management of her health-care plan, whose ignominious defeat contributed to the Republican landslide in the midterm elections of 1994, her invocation of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” at the time of the Lewinsky allegations—say a lot about her intense personal involvement in projects, good and bad, but hardly speak well for her judgment or diplomatic talents. On the campaign trail now, she presents herself as “a fighter,” battle hardened and combat ready, prepared to take on the Republicans “from Day One,” thereby reminding everyone that from January 1995 until January 2001 a state of war existed between the Clinton administration and the Republican-controlled Congress, and that of the many memorable battles in which Hillary Clinton herself was directly engaged, it’s hard to name one she didn’t lose.
Politicians who receive mass adulation are a suspect breed, and it’s natural to feel pangs of disquiet at an Obama rally in full cry: the roaring thousands, the fainting women, the candidate pacing slowly back and forth, microphone in hand, speaking lines that have become as familiar as advertising jingles but are seized on by the audience with ecstatic shouts of “I love you, Obama!” to which the candidate replies, with offhand cool, “I love you back.” Lately, I’ve been listening to ancient audio recordings of Huey Long exciting crowds as big as these with his pitch of “Every Man a King,” also to Father Coughlin, the anti-Semitic “radio priest” from Michigan, just to remind myself of the authentic sound of American demagoguery. But to see a true analogy for an Obama rally, one need only attend almost any large black church on a Sunday morning and hear the preacher’s sermon kept aloft by the continuous vocal participation of the congregants.
“A-men!” they shout; “That’s right!”; “Yes, sir!”; “Oh, my sweet Lord!”; “Unh-hunh!”; “Yeah!”; “It’s all right!”; “Hallelujah!” The antiphonal responses allow the preacher to pause for breath and thought, and from my one experience in the pulpit of such a church, during a mayoral election in Memphis in 1979, when the Rev. Judge Otis Higgs invited me to speak on his behalf, I know firsthand how readily magniloquent phrases leap to the tongue when you’re urged on by several hundred people hallelujahing your every other sentence. Five minutes or so in that pulpit kept me high for days.
