Lively Thought

In the days leading up to Super Tuesday, Michael Chabon wrote one of the most lyric and powerful defences of a politician I have ever read.  Obama vs. the Phobocracy, though it was written only a few months ago, feels like it belongs to an earlier time. Reading it again today reminds me of the hope that Obama’s candidacy truly represents. Before we got bogged down in the day-to-day sniping and histrionics of this campaign, before hatred of Sarah Palin seemed to dominate the discussion, before the constant mocking of McCain’s age, we had the simple luxury of being able to imagine what it would be like to have a President like Barack Obama. The main question at that time was whether we were ready to let ourselves believe, or whether we would let fear win the day; fear of “the other,” fear of losing yet again, and most powerfully: fear of our own disappointment.

Well, Obama won the nomination and we moved on to a new phase of the campaign. Inevitably, there were disappointments along the way. It’s hard for anyone to remain perfect in our eyes. That first blush of love must wear off as we get to know the real man in whom all of our hope was invested. Even for us progressives, the most wide-eyed Obama supporters, by the time of the Democratic National Convention, this race had become less about Hope than it was about Winning.

Michael Chabon’s wife, Ayelet Waldman, was an Obama delegate to the convention and he tagged along for the ride. The experience as Chabon has written it up in The New York Review of Books, in a piece called Obama & the Conquest of Denver, manages to capture the exhilaration of this moment in history, even given the realities of a long and difficult campaign. Chabon acknowledges the fact that Obama has been a little bit tarnished by the race so far, but he concludes that the candidate has comported himself with as much honour as could be expected and that he has revealed himself to be that which he has always claimed to be: a principled, but pragmatic man.

No major writer at the moment confesses such a debt to genre fiction as Chabon does, and he starts off describing the convention as though it was some combination of scenes from Dune and The Lord of the Rings.

It was [...] like the change that might occur between the first and second volumes of some spectacular science fiction fantasy epic. At the end of the first volume, after bitter struggle, Obama had claimed the presumptive nomination. We Fremen had done the impossible, against Sardaukar and imperial shock troops alike. We had brought water to Arrakis. Now the gathered tribes of the Democratic Party—hacks, Teamsters, hat ladies, New Mexicans, residents of those states most nearly resembling Canada, Jews of South Florida, dreadlocks, crewcuts, elderlies and goths, a cowboy or two, sons and daughters of interned Japanese-Americans—had assembled on the plains of Denver to attempt to vanquish old Saruman McCain. Suddenly it was hard not to feel that we were, once again, teetering on the point of something momentous, but something different than the previous momentousness.

There is some spectacular writing here. This is Chabon describing the concelebratory nature and mass nostalgia of the whole event:

There was a daily mass recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone stood up—on the last night, Obama Night, tens of thousands stood up, and put their hands over their hearts, and said the magic word, indivisible. I was a little self-conscious about doing that, at first, but found that I still remembered the words perfectly, and it was like singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the seventh-inning stretch, an act of collective recollection of the past, of a time when people routinely stood up and sang together, stood up to recite pledges, credos, oaths, poems. The entire party convention is a collective act of that kind. It’s a throwback, a holdover, a relic, like baseball. It’s also, weirdly, a formal, public celebration of spoken language, a kind of political eisteddfod.

Wonderful word that: eisteddfod. I had to look it up.

If I have a complaint about this piece, it’s that Chabon simply can’t let the baseball analogies go. Here he is on the impossible expectations of Obama’s acceptance speech:

Like everyone, I found myself wondering about the speech that he was going to give on Thursday night. Everyone seemed to agree, employing another term from the approved glossary of bromides, that his speech needed to be “a home run.” Obama needed to “hit it out of the park.” But that was not quite the honest truth. We needed Obama to hit it out of the park. That was what we had drafted him to do. He was our hottest prospect in a very long time. Everything we hoped for in the grandstands he would carry to that podium on his shoulders. And that was why I had come to Denver: to add my little featherweight of hope to his burden.

The Republican Convention was dominated by mocking attacks at Obama, with very little room, it seemed to me, given to the ideals that the conservative movement is based upon. It was nice to be reminded in Chabon’s piece of some of the truly wonderful moments of the DNC:

At one point (Bill Clinton) said, “Barack Obama knows that America cannot be strong abroad unless we are first strong at home. People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power,” and I felt, for the only time before Stevie Wonder sat down behind his keyboard on Thursday night and started in on “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” something of the shiver of pleasure that artistry induces. Only Obama and Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana on Tuesday night, who abandoned his prepared and vetted speech for a skylarking series of off-the-cuff remarks, managed to pull off the same difficult trick of sounding, while engaging in oratory, like he was putting his genuine beliefs into the only form, the only words, that truly suited them.

There has never been a more highly anticipated political speech than the one that would wrap up the convention. Surely there have been speeches that were more watched, and there have definitely been speeches that were more important, but there has ever been another speech where so many people were expecting to witness greatness from a speaker.

But I still had not heard what I had come to hear, what we had all come to hear, the speech of a lifetime (to date) by the greatest orator of his generation. One of the things that had served to discourage me over the course of the primary season was a general acceptance of the premise that oratory was a specious, feckless, inherently untrustworthy art. The Obama camp would rightly dispute the charge of offering only “pretty words,” but they never seemed to argue the larger truth: that ultimately words were all we had; that writing and oratory, argument and persuasion, were the root of democracy; that words can kill, or save us; something along those lines. “You can only say what you can first imagine,” as I heard Tobias Wolff (the short-story master, not the Obama campaign adviser) explain to a group of people at an Obama fund-raiser. It was a mark of Obama’s fitness to lead, to me at least, that he possessed sufficient natural reserves of imagination to kick oratorical ass.

Because of the expectations, there was no way that the speech could fail to disappoint, at least a little bit. There was simply too much work to be done in the speech (outlining specifics, appealing to undecided voters, reassuring Americans that he was really one of them) to allow room for a truly great speech from beginning to end. There were great moments, and there has never been a better performer, and the last 15 minutes of the speech were truly wonderful. Ultimately though, it was what the speech represented, more than the speech itself, that mattered. Chabon writes:

Over the years my hometown of Columbia lost its vision and became divided by lines of race and class and religion. The candidate who promised to try to remake our politics had yet to fulfill his goal. He might fail. But promises, I thought, were like speeches; if you didn’t make them, you would never be able to imagine the better world that they implied.

In the end, the notion of that better world is what matters so much about this election to me. I understand the pragmatic arguments that McCain supporters make. I can even recognize the fact that Obama’s resume might seem thin to some people. I suppose I can even make peace with the fear of the unknown and that will drive some voters away from him. Ultimately though, I just don’t understand how people can resist the hope of a better future that only Obama could possibly deliver. Even if he fails, even if all the hope turns out to have been false, it will have been worth it just to try, just to have that moment when the problems of the world seem solvable.

After Obama vs. the Phobocracy and Obama and the Conquest of Denver, I cannot wait for the third installment of the great Chabon/Obama trilogy, hopefully to be titled: Barack Obama in “Raiders of the Lost Constitution”

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