Walking Is Transportation

OBAMA AND INNOCENCE

Or, DISCERNMENT AND RESPONSIBILITY

I'm thinking that maybe I should have reversed the order. Maybe I should have started with Barack Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, rather than with Dreams for My Father, his first. Perhaps it would have been better just to dive into Audacity, which seems more clearly a campaign book and then, if I wanted to probe more deeply, move on, or back, to Dreams.

Except that's not what I've done. Instead, I've taken the opposite, more linear route. In part, because Obama's candidacy is so unprecedented in so many ways and seems to demand more background information and greater scrutiny. But I've also chosen the linear path because my decision to support Obama has been a matter of strategy (backing him vs. the fatally flawed Hillary Clinton) rather than because I'm inspired by his personal story, or what I know of it; or because I'm enthused about his policy ideas, which seem cautious and rather conventional. I want to be able to explain, even defend my position, if only to myself.

My linear route seems to have been the right one. For on Page 16, in Obama's profile of his maternal grandfather, I find this knowing observation about American political character, an assessment made too early in his career (13 years ago) to have been the product of presidential ambition.

Referring to his grandfather, Obama writes,

His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.

Clearly, Obama has thought about the dangers of this national innocence, the product of our long-standing isolation, our belief in the myth of American exceptionalism and our preference for personality over policy. This innocence, as Obama knows, promotes the rise of demagogues in our national political life--most recently in the eight-year global disaster of the Bush II presidency. This innocence is also an enduring theme of our literature, in a novel like Elmer Gantry, from the 1920s; or a screenplay such as Budd Schulberg's A Face in the Crowd, from the 1950s.

What struck me in Obama's description of American political character, the one contained in the italicized quote above, was not simply its discernment. What also struck me was the powerful responsibility this observation places on Obama's shoulders. Because the truth is that innocence--and not simply the innocence of the young--is a large part of what has propelled and sustained his campaign, and by design.

As he gets closer and closer to being the Democratic nominee, I hope he's thinking about what comes later, when political innocence collides with political reality.

For Barack Obama: The Part I Left Out

WHY OBAMA AND NOT CLINTON

In the preceding entry, I explained my decision to support Barack Obama as a strategic one. But I didn't bother to explain the strategy or describe how it came about. Sorry about that.

That strategy--a decision, really--solidified after I watched a group of video interviews conducted among voters of both parties following the maverick Florida primaries. I'd read and heard negative comments about Hillary before, but nothing like the venom spewed by a number of the male Republicans interviewed.

I concluded the depth of Hillary hatred isn't something Democrats should waste our time pondering or countering. I determined then that I would support Hillary Clinton if she won the nomination but would cast my primary vote for another candidate.

That 'other' candidate, originally John Edwards, was Barack Obama.

For Barack Obama

HOLD THE INSPIRATION

A woman, Hillary Clinton, and a black man, Barack Obama, both United States senators, are competing to become the 2008 Democratic Party nominee for U.S. president. What that says about America, and politics in America, probably won't be clear for some time. But this much I know:

Relative newcomer Barack Obama is a principled, informed and thoughtful political leader--and is, as well, a superb orator. However tarnished her personal history and cynical some of her policy miscalculations, Hillary Clinton is a talented and capable politician who has distinguished herself as New York State's junior senator.

For me the promise of a Democratic administration is bigger than a vote for or against The War; or a promise, failed or yet to be fufilled, to implement National Health Insurance; or a willingness to tackle yet another recession caused by underregulated capital markets that operate heedless of their ultimate impact on ordinary working people.

I'm not looking to be inspired. The notion that we can "turn the page" on "the failed politics of the past" sounds to me like a large vessel we are invited to fill with hoped-for reforms, both of policy and practice, rather than a bold plan of structural reform that acknowledges all sorts of uncomfortable truths and offers a way of confronting them while there's still time. How about, just for one example, real progressive tax policy reform instead of piecemeal giveback schemes?

After 30 years of fighting and failing to stop the dilution, subversion or destruction of progressive policies our parents and grandparents struggled to develop and implement, the measurable excitement at the Dems' primaries and caucuses has given me hope. But it hasn't dimmed my sense of caution or my skepticism.

Yes, I voted for Obama in the Super Tuesday primaries. And yes, I will vote for him if he becomes the Democratic Party nominee, running against a sometimes charming neanderthal named John McCain. But I will vote for the Democrat, whatever his or her gender, race or name. I don't vote from inspiration; I vote from strategy.