By George Neumayr on 2.14.08 @ 12:08PM
His message is as simple as it is false: hope equals liberalism.
Senator Barack Obama rejects the "politics of the past" while
borrowing from its phoniest chapters. His promised caravan toward a
new Camelot, with Teddy Kennedy bringing up the rear, may generate
feelings in Chris Matthews' leg and cause women to swoon, but over
time it is likely to pall and bore.
Obama's speeches are like cotton candy, sweet but substanceless
and dangerous to one's health if turned into a steady diet. Is he
saying nothing? Unfortunately not. Glimpsed through the haze of his
sophistical rhetoric is something, and it is tiresomely false,
namely, the dogmatic assertion that "hope" and liberalism are
synonymous.
His reliance on sentiment and rhetoric rather than reasoning to
advance that assertion will not inspire a new politics of
bipartisan unity but revive old and bitter resentments. Liberalism,
after all, has no monopoly on hope, and the chapters of history to
which Obama makes implicit reference -- the New Frontier and Great
Society -- concluded in despair.
While the Democrats won't stop squealing over him for some time,
the larger culture has already begun to mock Obama as a
platitudinous lightweight. Imitations of his empty and windy
speaking style are popping up left and right.
OF COURSE, WE'RE told that young people can hardly contain their
excitement, as parents across the land like Caroline Kennedy and
Maria Schwarzenegger listen attentively to the summons of their
pro-Obama children. But I wonder about the depth and breadth of
youth interest in him over time. In a Jimmy Kimmel/Simpsons/South
Park culture of nonstop corrosive but often accurate satire, how
long can saccharine words of uplift sustain their interest and
credulity?
The recent numbers suggest an uptick in youth interest in
voting, but the vast majority of teens still don't care and
dangling another version of AmeriCorps in front of them, as Obama
did in his Tuesday speech, probably isn't going to electrify them.
Most teens, I would guess, don't want to go through the
bureaucratic rigmarole of entering yet another piddly, sham
government program.
Obama talks about moving beyond the "false promises" of the
past, then delivers a handful of new ones, none of which appear any
more promising than the claims of the Great Society. He talks about
serving "one nation," then proposes programs that exclusively
benefit the special interests of the left.
The government programs he conflates with "hope" would help (if
they truly helped anyone at all; always an open question with
federal initiatives) a fraction of the population at the expense of
the whole. Someone has to pay for Obama's hope. Who will it be?
Basically it will be the Americans who don't vote for him. The
classic "politics of the past" -- tax your opponents, rig up new
programs for your constituents -- is as much on display in Obama's
presentations as anyone else's.
IT IS SPECIFICITY that vaporizes his rhetoric, so it is surprising
that Hillary, whose one interest is policy wonkery, hasn't used
that dissolvent to cut through it. She spends more time telling
people about Obama's lack of experience and policy knowledge than
actually showing it. That just makes her claims appear ad
hominem.
In one of the early debates, Obama, moving from the abstract to
the concrete, got hopelessly tangled up in an incoherent answer
about driver licenses for illegal immigrants. The moment made him
look like the rank amateur Hillary claimed.
But the moment passed, the safe platitudes resumed, and all was
forgotten. In order to have any chance of winning, Hillary in the
next debate has no choice but to draw him into the details of a
bruising policy debate in the hope that that exposes his hollowness
and kills the rhetorical glow.
I recently re-read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great
Gatsby and its theme of the destruction that accompanies
intensely false dreams seems to me applicable to American politics
today. Whether it's Jay Gatsby, JFK, or Obama, beware of seductive
dreams and obsessive hope.
To paraphrase Fitzgerald, the problem is not in Obama's capacity
for dreams, but in the "foul dust that floats" in the wake of
them.
topics:
Barack Obama, Satire, NATO
