[Dialogue] Unstoppable Obama

Sun Feb 17 14:48:57 EST 2008

Thanks, Harry!  Again, you have forwarded to us a very deep and insightful "pedagogical" piece.  Perhaps we might even want to "chart" (he, he, he!) this article to make keep it "low enough for the goats to reach".   Funny how many of the political "pundits" are having a difficult time "de-mythologizing" this thing called "CHANGE".  En da spanis, it's "Cambio" -simple and easy enough.  Or...if we want to be more scriptural...it's like being hit by lightning on the road to somewhere, and then...suddenly changing, making a 360-degree turn in one's Life.  "Change", as in "adios" to the same old, same old, and "change" as in welcoming the New, the Future, the Yet-to-be (he, he, he!  ah luv da jargonese, this upagainstness we're all up-against).

Anyway, Change = Cambio, from No longer to Not Yet or Yet to be.  Change, as in making a complete turnaround from War to Peace; from Meddling and Intervention to Non-Intervention.  And yes, Change - as in turning from NAFTA, CAFTA, turning away from Big Business that has all of America in a stranglehold...to turning toward best interests of the American People.  What's so complicated about all that?

And yes, this "Obama Thing", this "Obama Tsunami" sometimes defies reason or logic, because that's what an "awe-full encounter" with something beyond us is supposed to be.  The guy has "charisma"?  No, it's more than that.  I call it "Saving Grace".  And at this point, I don't want to understand it, analyze it, rationalize it.  At this very moment...I can only accept it.   In all seriousness, we have before us a rare opportunity to redeem ourselves,whether we be rich or poor, literate or unlettered, or black, tan,brown, white, red or yellow.  We deserve more, we deserve CHANGE.

Addi Batica

From: h-wainwright at charter.net
To: dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:18:51 -0500
Subject: [Dialogue] Unstoppable Obama

Published on Friday,
February 15, 2008 by The Nation 

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
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. 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 Nickel and Dimed (Owl),
is the winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize. 

Copyright © 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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