If you have heard one Barack Obama speech, you have heard them
all. In a way, his words are as limited as his legislative
accomplishments, which explains his now-famous cribbing off Deval
Patrick and JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen, among others.
The only variation in his speeches comes from the slight
rearrangement of cliches, while the quality of thought in them
never rises up the level of an episode of Oprah. That she
launched his campaign is altogether fitting.
In the Oprah age of fantasy and instant happiness,
feel-good babble about this or that problem, usually determined not
by reality but by political exigency, is all that is needed to
captivate crowds. If it feels good, just say it, and if anyone
scrutinizes your promises too closely, accuse them of “fear” and
cynicism.
“The fierce urgency of now”: To what momentous injustice does
that Obama line, borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr., refer? It is
not clear and apparently it doesn’t matter. Who cares what it
means? It feels good.
The right words and principles, you see, aren’t as important as
the right feelings — a defense to which the Obama campaign
resorted after Michelle Obama’s declaration of sudden pride in
America. Her brazen words were defended by the campaign and
sympathetic media commentators on the grounds that they conveyed a
vibe of justified feeling from a black woman. Anyone who says
otherwise is “parsing.” The Obamas won’t take responsibility for
the words lifted from others or even their own.
“Hope is making a comeback,” she burbled fatuously. But what she
calls hope, sober historians would call raw demagoguery, which is a
sign not of a society’s renewal but of its accelerating
decadence.
Obama’s faux-radicalism and idealism, carefully stirred into a
safe brew of truisms, is catnip for a decadent elite that would
rather feel good than be good and complains amidst prosperity of
the need for dramatic change. But how urgent could their
“revolution” possibly be if it was hatched down at a Starbucks?
Perhaps Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in between sips of
a Latte, but the Obama craze is ridiculous, evidence not of
revolutionary idealism but of a prosperous democracy’s slide toward
dilettantism. Were the country truly in a bind, it would never take
a chance on a rookie senator whose only real accomplishment is
revising and extending his remarks.
The fakeness of it all reminds me of Robert Redford’s The
Candidate, in which an attractive but vapid pol says upon
winning: “What do we do now?”
THE BLANKNESS OF Kirk Watson — the Texas legislator who, under
barking questions from Chris Matthews on Tuesday night, couldn’t
come up with a single accomplishment by Obama in the Senate —
captures the hollowness of Obama’s movement.
Obama appeals to an increasingly childish class of adults who
crave an emotion-based politics and don’t particularly care about
the details of the package in which it comes. There is a “Kids for
Obama” section on his web page but it is not clear where it ends
and the rest begins.
Obama presents his campaign as one of high principle and great
courage, but in reality it simply sparks off liberalism’s low and
perennial appeal to man’s appetites and emotions. This is what
makes “progressive” liberalism so easy to sell in a modern
democracy: it straightforwardly caters to fallen human nature,
“challenging” people to take a low road Original Sin takes them
down anyways.
Conservatism, on the other hand, is a tricky sell (which is why
it is so quickly compromised), as it asks people to follow reason
despite wayward emotions — a message fallen humans don’t care to
hear until a crisis hits which brings them back to reality.
For many years the Clintons played these demagogic games too,
casting corruption as change and failed liberalism as progress.
“Yesterday is gone, yesterday is gone,” they enlisted Fleetwood Mac
to screech.
And it is. Obama has surpassed their sophistry, scooping up
yuppies who jumped off Hillary’s train as they saw it begin to
derail. While the Clintons couldn’t stop “thinking about tomorrow,”
Obama was busy stealing away their supporters with his similarly
sham “fierce urgency of now.”
