[Dialogue] Unstoppable Obama

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Friday, February 15, 2008 by The Nation
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080303/ehrenreich>  

Unstoppable Obama

by Barbara Ehrenreich

When did you begin to think that Obama might be unstoppable? Was it when
your grown feminist daughter started weeping inconsolably over his defeat in
New Hampshire? Or was it when he triumphed in Virginia, a state still
littered with Confederate monuments and memorabilia? For me, it was on
Tuesday night when two Republican Virginians in a row called CSPAN radio to
report that they'd just voted for Ron Paul, but, in the general election,
would vote for. Obama.

In the dominant campaign narrative, his appeal is mysterious and irrational:
he's a "rock star," all flash and no substance, tending dangerously,
according to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, to a "cult of
personality." At best, he's seen as another vague Reaganesque avatar to
Hallmarkian sentiments like optimism and hope. While Clinton, the designated
valedictorian, reaches out for the ego and super-ego, he supposedly goes for
the id. She might as well be promoting choral singing in the face of
Beatlemania.

The Clinton coterie is wringing its hands. Should she transform herself into
an economic populist, as Paul Begala pleaded on Tuesday night? This would be
a stretch, given her technocratic and elitist approach to health reform in
1993, her embarrassing vote for a 2001 bankruptcy bill supported by credit
card companies, among numerous other lapses. Besides, Obama already just
leaped out in front of her with a resoundingly
<http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=284664>  populist economic
program on Wednesday.

Or should she reconfigure herself, untangle her triangulations, and attempt
to appeal to the American people in some deep human way, with or without a
tear or two? This, too, would take heavy lifting. Someone needs to tell her
that there are better ways to signal conviction than by raising one's voice
and drawing out the vowels, as in "I KNOW." and "I BELIEVE." The frozen
smile has to go too, along with the metronymic nodding, which sometimes goes
on long enough to suggest a placement within the autism spectrum.

But I don't think any tweakings of the candidate or her message will work,
and not because Obama-mania is an occult force or a kind of mass hysteria.
Let's take seriously what he offers, which is "change." The promise of
"change" is what drives the Obama juggernaut, and "change" means wanting out
of wherever you are now. It can even mean wanting out so badly that you
don't much care, as in the case of the Ron Paul voters cited above, exactly
what that change will be. In reality, there's no mystery about the direction
in which Obama might take us: he's written a breathtakingly honest
autobiography; he has a long legislative history, and now, a meaty economic
program. But no one checks the weather before leaping out of a burning
building.

Consider our present situation. Thanks to Iraq and water-boarding, Abu
Ghraib and the "rendering" of terror suspects, we've achieved the moral
status of a pariah nation. The seas are rising. The dollar is sinking. A
growing proportion of Americans have no access to health care; an estimated
18,000 die every year for lack of health insurance. Now, as the economy
staggers into recession, the financial analysts are wondering only whether
the rest of the world is sufficiently "de-coupled" from the US economy to
survive our demise.

Clinton can put forth all the policy proposals she likes-and many of them
are admirable ones-but anyone can see that she's of the same generation and
even one of the same families that got us into this checkmate situation in
the first place. True, some people miss Bill, although the nostalgia was
severely undercut by his anti-Obama rhetoric in South Carolina, or maybe
they just miss the Internet bubble he happened to preside over. But even
more people find dynastic successions distasteful, especially when it's a
dynasty that produced so little by way of concrete improvements in our
lives. Whatever she does, the semiotics of her campaign boils down to two
words-"same old."

Obama is different, really different, and that in itself represents
"change." A Kenyan-Kansan with roots in Indonesia and multiracial Hawaii, he
seems to be the perfect answer to the bumper sticker that says, "I love you
America, but isn't it time to start seeing other people?" As conservative
commentator Andrew Sullivan has written, Obama's election could mean the
re-branding of America
<http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/04/the_rebranding
_.html> . An antiwar black President with an Arab-sounding name: See, we're
not so bad after all, world!

So yes, there's a powerful emotional component to Obama-mania, and not just
because he's a far more inspiring speaker than his rival. We, perhaps white
people especially, look to him for atonement and redemption. All of us, of
whatever race, want a fresh start. That's what "change" means right now: Get
us out of here!

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805063897?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0805063897&adid=0P182S9JDW5QHAFNG75J&> Nickel and
Dimed (Owl), is the winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize
<http://www.nationinstitute.org/awards/puffin> . 

Copyright C 2008 The Nation

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/15/7086/

 

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