Barack Obama and the Idea of America
by Benjamin Ramm
This “push” must be willed by the body politic and delivered by its leader, one “who truly thinks of his country’s citizens as ‘we’, not ‘they’”. Over one and a half million Americans have donated money to Obama’s campaign, in itself a notable feat, and one achieved without many of the bloc populist pledges offered by his opponents, particularly on the economy. Unlike John Edwards and Mitt Romney (both populist, but not that popular), John McCain and Barack Obama (both popular, but not that populist) have sought to challenge leftist and conservative orthodoxies on trade, emphasising retraining over regressive rhetoric. This is notable in that it illuminates a key aspect of Obama’s approach: a resistance to the facile choice, such as a ‘gas tax holiday’, and the presentation of choices as facile; each driven by his devotion to altering the paradigms through which American politics is framed. Hence the intriguing riff on Gandhi: “We are the change that we seek”; a shift that is both generational and self-generating, self-defining and necessitating a redefinition of the self. This is the awe – the audacity – of liberalism: that it dares the individual to imagine his potential and challenges him to rise to it, to work to ride “the tide that lifts every boat”. Steiner writes that “Liberal education directs us to the dignitas in the human person, to its homecoming to its better self”; to Obama’s determination to “eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white”. (Consider in this context John Pilger’s disgraceful labelling of Obama as a “glossy Uncle Tom”). The role of a leader, he suggests, is not merely to re-present the citizens he represents, but to nurture what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” – to exemplify this culture and express its aspirations: to be the best that has been thought and said. To this end, Obama is – not only but also – a ‘Noble Cypher’, an “imperfect messenger”, as he put it in North Carolina; one whose awareness of his own shortcomings is, as Ali Eteraz argues, part of his appeal:
People see in him a man who doesn’t think of himself as a finished product but as someone who views himself as a canvas upon which life is constantly drawing new lines.
Obama, then, is doing nothing more – or less – than ‘Keeping America’s Promise’, and being faithful to “the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams”:
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old – is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know – what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
(‘A More Perfect Union’ address, Philadephia)
This is audacity: to quote Wright’s phrase back at the pastor, so as to prove Wright wrong. For all the time Obama spends bemoaning “the silliness of a modern Presidential campaign”, he has begun to relish rising to the challenges posed, sharpening his formidable intelligence in each and every bout. Now vanquishing his foes – left, right and centre – Obama is playing out the ultimate American narrative, selecting his weapons of choice from a dazzling armoury; exorcising the demons of history, slaying the protectors of the status quo, laying claim to the mantle of the ‘Joshua generation’. This bold biblical allusion – a strange and ironic echo of Hillary Clinton’s comments about Dr. King and Lyndon Johnson – has been something of a refrain throughout the campaign:
I thank the Moses generation; but we’ve got to remember, now, that Joshua still had a job to do. As great as Moses was, despite all that he did, leading a people out of bondage, he didn’t cross over the river to see the Promised Land.
(Voting Rights Commemoration, Selma, Alabama)
(The assertion is doubly ironic if one finds currency in the idea that God prohibits Moses from entering the Promised Land as an act of mercy, since it was bound to disappoint...). Like Moses himself, King ‘saw’ – figuratively – what many of his generation could not literally see: the dissolution of division rather than the consecration of it, as idolatry in the form of identity politics. Perhaps a little clumsily, Obama’s metaphor communicates his desire to transcend these barriers, to overcome once more, to persevere – hope against hope – for a less tribal political culture.
If Hellenic concepts offer Obama an approach that is evolutionary and incremental (“CHANGE...We Can Believe In”, reads one of his campaign banners, conveying both credulity and conviction), then the Hebraic maps out a means of channelling the energies of a generation, and cultivating what Bobby declared ‘hope’ to be: “the awareness of possibility” (“...I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”). Contrary to the popular perception of his speeches, Obama’s presentation at times masks the complexity of the content: for example, when he speaks of ‘hope’, Obama really means something more akin to ‘vision’: to an ability to envision how change may be brought about, and how it may be stimulated on a civic level. For Americans can only “write their own destiny” if their imaginations are sparked, and if they are inspired to contribute to the nation’s ‘story’. In other words, ‘Change’ can only come through ‘Hope’, which is not passivity, nor “blind optimism":
hope is not ignorance of the barriers and hurdles and hazards that stand in your way – hope’s just the opposite. I know how hard it will be to provide health care to every single American. Insurance companies, drug companies, they don’t want to give up their profits. I know it won’t be easy to have an energy policy that makes sense for America, because the oil companies like writing the energy business...But I also know this: that nothing in this country worthwhile has ever happened except somebody somewhere decided to hope.
(MLK Day, SC)
Post this article to:
Del.icio.us | 
Digg | 
Facebook | 
NowPublic | 
Reddit