More home thoughts from abroad. It’s a measure of the intensity of what’s going on in America, which feels for the first time in my long experience in some ways less predictable than a place like, say, Ukraine, that I was wandering under the cold March moon of Kiev last night, past the 800 year-old onion domes and down the cobble-stoned slopes, and thinking with sadness in my heart about Barack Obama.
For the Rev. Wright business seems to this humble observer to have ended Obama’s chances of miraculously winning over the broad middle of white (or non-black) America and becoming our president. Whether that’s good or bad I can’t say, but it is sad. It is like the abandonment of the last dream of youth, finding your old poems in a drawer, maybe realizing they weren’t really that good after all, but still turning a sad corner as you stash them away, and recognize you can no longer manufacture the sef-omnipotent rapture you felt writing them. This is what I think of now as a man a bit older than Barack himself, as I see him reach his limit.
Obama’s once-a-generation inspiration-ness (if i may coin a phrase) rested for me on two things: 1) He was/is a politician who projects himself as a real human being, someone you might have hung out with in college and be overjoyed to meet again on the street, rather than a construct of scripted proto-human politician-like gestures and responses. He has this ability to be lifelike while also rising to the spotlight and becoming larger than life. And 2) Through him the younger part of the U.S. population — and by that I mean not so young, under 40 — channeled a previously unknown but patently intense desire to move into a post-racial society, to be rid at last of the endless, disgusting legacy, the double standards and excuses as well as the hatred and prejudice. If anyone could be judged by the content of their character, by God it was/is Barack Obama. And from what we can see, that character seems good, not perfect of course but as good as anyone’s likely to be gripped with the extreme ambition necessary to be President.
But it was not to be. Obama’s very determination to be a full more-or-less normal human being, after his black-white-Asian, outsider- everywhere childhood, led him to seek community the only place he really could in our society, among his “fellow” blacks in a congregation like Rev. Wright’s. (Colin Powell, living his life in the military, may have found community within this specific multiracial society, but one imagines if he had run for president the opposition would have found his “blackness” too along the way.) A minister like Rev. Wright would inevitably spew some soundbites that sound natural enough to his audience but hopelessly toxic to the American majority. (Don’t get me wrong; I’m a white guy myself who finds the idea that the government deliberately infected black people with AIDS disgusting and the most childish form of denial). And this very gulf in perception — as much in this case the “fault” of blacks’ victim-gaming as white bigotry — shows there is no post-racial America. Not yet anyway.
Faced with the crisis, Obama once again chose (seemed to choose) his own humanity over ambition. He didn’t sell out his pastor and congregation (or his grandmother either). His great speech, to one distant observer, conveyed a subtext of: “Maybe I won’t in fact get elected but I am going to tell you how I feel about what has defined my life emotionally.” It renewed the sense of a man who could be genuine and statesmanlike simultaneously, and America is a better place for him having given it. But I don’t think it will rescue his candidacy.
In short, Barack wouldn’t sell his soul even to be elected president. This is in sharp contrast to Hillary, who conveys the aura of having sold it long ago, remortgaged it and taken out three lines of soul equity credit. But maybe having an intact soul isn’t really the most important prerequisite for being a world leader. Maybe, given the harsh decisions that are constantly demanded, the brutality and shamelessness of the perpetual attack on one’s person and pursestrings, the likely necessity of having to order the deaths of large numbers of people, one’s own and the “enemy’s,” a fully palpitating human soul is a positive impediment to doing the job. What’s better is a certain abstract desire that history applaud you for basically decent objectives, which Hillary seems to have (and John McCain for that matter).
As for Obama, I’m more disappointed in his trying to avoid the “do-over” elections in Florida and Michigan, cling to a technical nomination victory with Harvard lawyer wiles rather than embrace the opportunity to win it fair and square. Barack, I thought you were better than this.
