April 9th, 2008

Crêpes we can believe in

It’s not enough to say I don’t get Barack Obama. But I don’t.

I do not believe mine is a jaundiced heart, immune to soaring rhetoric, flightless under the weight of cynicism. I do not believe I am so hidebound by my (considerable) ideological differences with Obama that I’d be deaf to the music in a good speech, unable to appreciate it for its sonority. But I don’t swoon, and I wonder why.

Living in San Francisco, in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the ur-liberal city, I’m surrounded by Obama signs, some distributed by the campaign, and others handmade and impromptu. The hand-drawn portraits of Obama always have a socialist realist quality. I don’t look at his visage and expect that, within four years, we’ll all be flipping cards in massive synchronized May Day celebrations. But I can’t help but wonder if I’m looking at the Che Guevara t-shirt of the 2030’s.

Our neighbors up the block have an Obama sign in their window and a BMW parked illegally on the sidewalk, most evenings. It’s that kind of neighborhood. When San Francisco returned to district elections for its Board of Supervisors (think city council) eight years ago, ours was the neighborhood that sent Matt Gonzalez—an unindicted vandal who’s currently Ralph Nader’s running mate—to City Hall. Sorry about that. It wasn’t my idea.

So every time I leave the house, I’m reminded that the enthusiasm for this first-term senator from Illinois is palpable. Especially as I pass this on the way to my favorite lunch spot. But why?

His speeches are full of promises to unify us, to bring us together to solve problems. How exactly? Those are the questions that serve only to divide us, silly. Even his much-vaunted speech on race only flirts with answers to hard questions; he acknowledges the contradictions inherent in affirmative action, but carefully dodges the question of what we’re supposed to do about them. He promises unity and change, and if that isn’t good enough for you, well, you just don’t get it.

There is little in his history as a legislator to justify great expectations. When pressed for his legislative accomplishments, his supporters usually sputter, and the few that don’t recite a pretty thin list. He took a trip to Russia with Richard Lugar to talk about non-proliferation. He helped veterans in Illinois get their disability checks. He co-sponsored this and that, an act that consists mainly of filing a form.

His performance in debates improved in the latter half of the campaign, but still leaves much to be desired. When Saturday Night Live called the press on their fawning, unskeptical coverage, the requisite period of self-flagellation didn’t result in tougher questions. Moderates see in him a moderate and liberals see a liberal; the latter, at least, do so with more justification in his voting record. Free-traders insist he’s really one of them; his record shrieks no. Alarming hints of a world view at odds with his cautiously hopeful rhetoric surfaced in the words of Jeremiah Wright, but the smoking gun eludes.

So are we left only with, as Obama himself posited, the “desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase race reconciliation on the cheap”? Is Geraldine Ferraro right? Or is a nation exhausted by eight years of divide-and-conquer politics just reaching out for the candidate furthest in tone from George W. Bush?

Maybe it’s all of those things. But I’m unmoved and unpersuaded. I see an adequate orator saying a lot about hope, and too little about anything else.

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Thoughts, en passant:

"No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study, and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think." —John Stuart Mill

"Earnestness is stupidity sent to college." —P.J. O'Rourke

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." —H.L. Mencken

"This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there as no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world's history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men." —C.S. Lewis

"Politicians taking credit from what they’ve done for the economy are like little kids working the controls of video games without putting any money in. There’s all kinds of stuff happening on the screen of the video game and they think that it’s all due to the frantic work of their fingers." —Tom Foreman

"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." —Ed Howdershelt

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big." —Daniel Burnham

"Careless exaggerations are a million times worse than the Nazis." —Merlin Mann

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