Can I ask, what do you expect from Obama? I of course am not inquiring in a demeaning, argumentative manner but rather as a student intent on gleaning a fuller and richer understanding of a sensible, political viewpoint opposite my own.
I’m not capable of providing that – others here are much better versed in policy points and the citing of statistics than I am. All I can do is share what is necessarily a very personal – even private -- opinion (more of a diary entry, really), not a logical case for voting for Obama. The last thing I’m interested in – or capable of – is trying to change someone’s mind. To state the obvious, I don’t speak for any of Obama’s supporters; if anything, I’ve no doubt done them a disservice.
What do I expect from Obama if he becomes President?
I expect to be disappointed again and again.
Annoyed. Angered. Disgusted. Betrayed. Because he’s a politician and because no politician I’ve ever lived under or studied has ever not done the same. I don’t understand people who talk about their candidate as though that candidate is somehow something more than human.
So I expect him to be human, which is to say he’ll fuck up, scramble to cover his ass, try to place the blame elsewhere, try to manipulate us and probably lie. He’ll make deals with people I find repugnant, compromise things I hold to be inviolable, break promises that were based on raising my hopes, and make me watch him become smaller and smaller over 4-8 years.
Why? Because that’s what Presidents do. I’m under no illusion; I haven’t drunk the Kool Aid; I’ve given up on miracles.
But I have to vote for someone; sitting it out isn’t an option, not if I want to reserve the right to bitch and moan about my beloved country. And, no, that doesn’t mean I’m despondently choosing the least bad of three evils. I believe him to be head and shoulders above the others. Well, not above. But apart.
I’m voting for him because as far as I’m concerned the country is indeed in the toilet and the handle is about to be flushed. Falconfan disagrees with me, thinks we’re a great country that’s been temporarily sidetracked by seven years of incompetence. I think we’re a great country, too, a magnificent country, but we’re on life support – economic, spiritual, educational, social, cultural, infrastructural, environmental and above all moral life support. (It may be the difference in our age that accounts for our differing perspectives.) Simply reinvigorating the economy won’t change that. We’re in much worse and far more imminent trouble than we were in the shockingly turbulent ‘60s and time is running out fast.
Just as World War II brought forth an FDR and a Churchill, and Jim Crow brought forth Martin Luther King, we need someone of larger than life stature to loom on the horizon, rise to the occasion, do the impossible, and save us from ourselves before it’s too late and the earth implodes.
And that person doesn’t exist.
We have John McCain – a cipher to me and no doubt to himself -- and Hillary Clinton – a largely well-intentioned workaholic who’s spent her entire adult life in fight-or-flight mode and possibly hasn’t drawn a peaceful breath in fifteen years. Neither of them exactly “looms”.
And then there’s Obama. Young; indisputably brilliant; angry (though he’s not allowed to show it); occasionally naïve (how could he not think Jeremiah Wright would become an issue?); largely untested in the conventional sense (which is to say he hasn’t yet been chewed up and shat out like John and Hillary); capable alternately of crystalline eloquence and flat-footed stuttering; cocky at times and, now, humbled. Not a demi-god. A human being.
It’s not simply for his policies that I support him; by most measures he and Hillary are not terribly far apart (and, in fact, I suspect her health plan may be better than his). It’s for what I expect (there’s that word again) his style of governance will be.
In a weird kind of way I expect he’ll be in the (please God forgive me for saying this) Reagan mold in the sense of governing in an executive style, surrounded by “the best and the brightest” (he’s already done an extraordinary job of choosing people for his campaign who by any measure have done an extraordinary job in helping him get this far against overwhelming odds), setting the tone from the Oval Office and expecting those who are experts in there various fields to take macrocosmic direction from him. Hillary, on the other hand, I suspect would be much more Carter-esque in her governing style; in the trenches, covered in mud, working an abacus, an Uzi and a frying pan all at once.
Much as I love and respect Jimmy Carter, I don’t think his style of micro-management governance is enough now – not after eight years of unprecedented, cancerous malignity on a global scale. I think we’re at a unique turning point in American history and, though it may already be too late in some areas (especially as regards climate change), it’s now or never. We need to take a giant step back and do nothing less than redefine the zeitgeist of our era.
Neither Hillary nor McCain thinks in those terms. Obama does.
This, I think, is what Obama was referencing when he was criticized by many on the left for speaking admiringly of Ronald Reagan several months ago – not for his policies, God knows, but for his visionary approach, which was indisputably transformative. Reagan, of course, left us culturally divided and grossly in debt and for Obama to be able to pull off the nifty hat trick of balancing the budget, withdrawing from Iraq, rebuilding our infrastructure, resuscitating the economy, launching health care for all for the first time in American history, appeasing pro-life and pro-choice advocates, addressing gun control – ad infinitum – is not just unlikely it’s impossible. I “expect” that he’ll fail again and again in the particulars – as will any President.
But I hope (so incendiary a word) that he’ll go down with his eyes on the prize. I hope that he’ll appeal to our better angels. I hope he’ll be guided by Martin Luther King’s dictum -- "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" -- and refuses to let
us be silent. I hope he’ll shake us up and remind us that “all men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality” [MLK again] and that we don’t have the luxury of domestic or international factionalism; the fate of the world, quite literally depends on it.
Obama – and people like me -- has been criticized for being starry-eyed, romantic, naïve and grandiose. But I think we have no choice but to think big. Four or eight years ago I’d’ve voted for Hillary; I happily voted for Gore and God knows he, like Hillary, is the ultimate wonk. But times have changed dramatically since 2000 and we need to do nothing less than create our reality anew.
It’s called radicalism, an empty-handed leap into the void. This is how, when I’m at my best and most courageous, I’ve lived my life for forty-eight years. It’s stood me in good stead again and again and I’ve been rewarded for it with embarrassing abundance. I’ve fallen on my face a hundred thousand times, but it’s never let me down. Not once. Not ever. How could it? It’s what life itself is.
