Back in the early civil rights days when people were beginning
to explore race relationships, there was one story you heard over
and over again. It went like this:
I went to a suburban high school in (you name it). We
had one black boy in our class. No one ever spoke to him and he
never spoke to anyone. But in our senior year we elected him class
president.
A similar phenomenon now seems to be boosting the stock of Barack
Obama.
The kids in those suburban high schools, of course, were trying
to bridge what seemed like an unbridgeable racial divide. It was a
nice gesture. (In another version of the story, the black kid was
voted "most congenial" or "most popular.") But it seems a pretty
slender reed upon which to base a Presidential campaign.
Nonetheless, Barack Obama is the candidate of the hour. A smart,
well-spoken Harvard Law School graduate, he gave a rousing speech
at the 2004 Democratic convention even while he was running his
first campaign for Senate. On the basis of this slim resume,
Time just featured him on the cover as "our next
President."
How has Obama earned such an accolade? Well, he is a former
Chicago community organizer with a lawyer wife and two attractive
children. His father was a Kenyan Muslim and college professor who
left when he was two years old. His mother was a poor Midwesterner
who married at 18 but completed her education and became an
anthropologist. She later married an Indonesian and moved to
Jakarta, where Barack spent four delightful years "chasing chickens
and dodging water buffalo." As a teenager, he returned to Hawaii,
where his grandparents took over his upbringing. In short, in his
younger years Obama probably saw more of the world than many
Americans experience in a lifetime.
He also appreciates and understands the story of his country. As
he writes in The Audacity of Hope:
When I find myself in such [bad] moods, I like to take
a run along the Mall....Most of the time I stop at the Washington
Monument, but sometimes I push on [to] the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial. . .
And in that place, I think about America and those who built it.
This nation's founders, who somehow rose above petty ambitions and
narrow calculation to imagine a nation unfurling across a
continent. And those like Lincoln and [Martin Luther] King, who
ultimately laid down their lives in the service perfecting an
imperfect union. And all the faceless, nameless men and women,
slaves and soldiers and tailors and butchers, constructing lives
for themselves and their children... brick by brick, rail by rail,
calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our
collective dreams.
It is that process I wish to be a part of.
My heart is filled with love for this country.
It is that sort of haunting reflection that has rocketed Obama into
prominence.
All this is making some people a little nervous. Conservatives
don't like it, of course, because it seems like an affirmative
action Presidency. Here comes this guy who has little more to say
for himself than an interracial background and that's supposed to
make him a candidate? Rush Limbaugh has been calling him "Osama
Obama" -- albeit in mock tribute to Ted Kennedy's famous
malapropism.
But a lot of liberals aren't very happy, either. After all,
Obama's meteoric rise is the only thing currently dimming Hillary
Clinton's star. That's why the long knives are already coming out.
Even as copies of The Audacity of Hope arrived on the
shelves, Harper's had a cover story, "Barack Obama, Inc.,"
arguing he's just another politician. Columnist Andrea Batista
Schlesinger announced her opposition because Obama "backed an
energy bill that piles big subsidies on oil and gas companies and
voted to make it even harder for regular people to get access to
the courts when they've been hurt by corporations." On the other
hand, Richard Cohen says the best thing about Obama is that he
wasn't around in 2003 to vote on the War in Iraq. Why not choose
candidates right out of high school?
Obama has a very nice perspective on his own party:
Mainly...the Democratic Party has become the party of
reaction. In reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear
suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who
proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use
market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to
religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and
forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our politics with
a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil
Republican plans. We lose the courts and wait for a White House
scandal.
What will probably get him in trouble is his desire to be all
things to all people. Straight out of the Clinton playbook, Obama
is billing himself as a mediator, a bridger of gaps, a thoughtful
moderate. All this works for a while but eventually becomes
monotonous. Right-to-lifers have a point but he still favors
abortion. Free-traders have a point but he still voted against the
Central American Free Trade Association. He sympathizes with
Christians who find themselves excluded from public places but
notes "we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist
nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers." And so
forth.
Where this falls apart completely is in foreign affairs. Reading
The Audacity of Hope, you'd think September 11th was an
auto accident a few years back in which somebody's grandmother got
killed:
It had been four and a half years since I'd first heard
reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I had been in
Chicago at the time, driving to a state legislative hearing
downtown. The reports on my car radio were sketchy, and I assumed
that there must have been an accident, a small prop plane perhaps
veering off course.
All this occurs on page 291 of a 362-page book. There is no sense
of urgency, no recognition that we are in a cruel international
conflict and that our world has changed forever.
As a solution, Obama dutifully recites the Democratic line: FDR
and Truman confronted our enemies through consensus. They got
international support for their actions. (Somehow the Korean War
gets lost in all this.) We should do the same. Just get everyone in
the world on board and there won't be any need for those nasty
conflicts.
All this leaves Obama seeming a little wet behind the ears. The
domestic stuff may seem conciliatory but he is lost in a world
where terrorism easily crosses international boundaries, where
religion can be a rationale for violence, and where "people of
color" are often at each other's throats. The genocide in Darfur,
for example, is a matter of Sudanese Muslims slaughtering Christian
black Africans. How do we conciliate our way out of that one?
In the end, candidate Obama's biggest problem may be that he is
in the Senate. As John Kerry discovered in 2004, that means voting
on too many important issues. (Hillary Clinton faces the same
problem, of course, but her charisma dates from her days in the
White House.) My advice to Obama is to go back to Illinois and run
for Governor in 2010, get some executive experience, and while
you're at it try to formulate a little more realistic view of the
world. One Jimmy Carter a century is enough.
topics:
Education, Trade, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Religion, Abortion, Law, Military, Iraq, Africa, Energy, Oil
