Hope Does Not Spring Eternal
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It should have been cold out. It was December, in Columbia, South Carolina, the home of the game cocks, and I stood there, waiting for Barack Obama to speak. He’d win Iowa in a little over a month, but that day, he was still a candidate with an uncertain future. And yet the frisson of change surrounded him already: That day it was a little over seventy degrees — proof, it seemed, of his mysterious powers. Near me was Howard Fineman of Newsweek. He was swaying a little bit to Arrested Development’s song, “Everyday People,” which the band, a good-vibes rap throwback from the early 90s, was playing boisterously in front of him. As one band member finished an incredible vocal solo, and another raised his hands and touted their collective accomplishment of “putting out positive hip-hop” for over a decade, Fineman couldn’t restrain himself any longer and emitted an enthusiastic “Yeah!” while nodding approvingly. There was nothing to be embarrassed about; it was a hell of a vibe.
Oprah took the stage and explained why she had descended from the high mountaintop of daytime television. “For the first time, I’m stepping out of my pew because I’ve been inspired. I’ve been inspired to believe that a new vision is possible for America. Dr. King dreamed the dream. But we don’t have to just dream the dream anymore. We get to vote that dream into reality.” Obama got up on the stage and did his Obama thing. He name-checked a few awful schools — some of them suffering from a century of neglect that he would not continue. There was a lady to the left of the camera banks, screaming that she was a teacher in one of his academic hellholes. She was falling out of her seat, her clothes, and her senses. I have been to Assembly of God prayer rallies and seen people touched by the Holy Spirit; I’ve seen teenagers speaking in tongues and falling on their knees so hard I’ve felt physical pain as their eyes tremble. Oprah called him “The One,” like Neo from The Matrix (except with more personality), and his wife explained to the crowd that her husband was going to change the way we felt about one another. The whole time, all I could think was: Man, these people are going to be disappointed.
And we know the rest: Fired Up!, Ready to Go! And a lot of Yes, We Can! I called my editor and told her that I thought Obama would crush Clinton in South Carolina and then win the nomination. She told me to calm down and stick to my original story. But as we all now know, Yes He Did!
Hope marches on, and even the the most jaundiced have a tear in their eyes.
In a cover story for Esquire, Charles P. Pierce, an embattled and sincere liberal writer, tried to steel himself in the era of Obama-hysterics. Pierce declares our own era one of complicity, one in which we hear the roar of shredders in the executive branch of government, see the disenfranchisement of minorities, witness the trivialization of citizenship, and do. . . nothing. Pierce does not believe in the awesome God of the blue states or the gay friends in the red states. He wants to see the people in the streets. His fierce prose conjures an image of in my mind: The author shoving a photograph of the tortured Matthew Shepherd in the face of a Bush voter, then one of a poor kid in a too-black school district, then the wreckage of Fallujah, then a dead American soldier. “Repent!” he insists.
Pierce protests the unspoken premise of Obama’s campaign. By offering himself — a friendly, smooth, and re-assuring black man — Obama was giving America absolution without penance. But what would be the drama of this glossy feature if Pierce’s heart didn’t melt just a little. After his long, labored (and often convincing) yawp for a return to justice and rightness, Pierce eyes the long, polished candidate, ambling to the stage.
And the cynic [Pierce] realizes at last that he is more naive than anyone else here, particularly more than the slim, smooth candidate himself, stalking the stage in his edgeless way and looking out over the crowd at something in his private distance. The cynic believes in an old, abandoned country that’s no less illusory than the redeemed one Obama is promising to this crowd.
Eureka! And so even the most battle-hardened, faithless progressive turns his eyes upward and makes demands:
Convince me America is not an illusion. Convince me that it never was. Convince me that you’re not a pious mirage. Convince me that we’re not. Now that you brought it up, convince me.
Convince me.
Convince me.
Convince me.
Whereas the public school teacher in South Carolina is the ecstatic joyful mystic, Pierce is the weary, wary theologian, whose learned formulas of forgiveness give out underneath his sudden gnawing need to believe. Is he ever going to be disappointed!
God does not finish his work in a man’s soul with an election, nor is history ever redeemed by one. President Harding may have rolled back the horrifying war powers of Wilson, his predecessor in the executive, and released political prisoners. But a Return to Normalcy will always be accompanied by a tawdry Teapot Dome scandal, just as Bush’s restoration of “honor and dignity to the office of president” came with a disastrous war of choice in Iraq. Conservatives were once euphoric over Reagan. Then, as he struggled, they expressed their faith in him, crying, “Let Reagan be Reagan.” But after the Beirut disaster and Iran-Contra, one wiser conservative said it best: “Let someone else be Reagan.” When American bombs drop in eastern Europe (or some other place Americans cannot find on a map), when gas prices rise suddenly, when a new program leaves some poor child behind, they will say “Let someone else be Obama.”
If he wins the White House, Obama will leak damaging news on Fridays. He will flinch. He will misspeak from podiums adorned with the presidential seal. He will make stupid and damaging bargains with his political enemies. He will not be able to satisfy free-traders and protectionists. He will not usher in an era for new socialist man, nor will he make the march of global capitalism any more pleasant to those it displaces or any more hip to those that it enriches. He will not convince his opponents that they were wrong all along. They will not forgive him with a friendly laugh. He won’t trim the illegal powers bestowed on the office by his predecessors. Out of expediency, he will use codewords designed to vilify the opinions of millions of his countrymen. And occasionally, he will just be a boring, incompetent, tired, human. His story is one of a long, tragic, assimilation into our political class.
My only hope for Obama is that his blunders and scandals disabuse my countrymen of their misplaced faith. Let them turn their faces on an ancient verse: Put not your trust in princes. If he ends the war in Iraq, that would be nice too.
--Michael Brendan Dougherty is associate editor at The American Conservative.
(Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy Flickr user tonx.)
3 Comments - add your own
Brick — June 23, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Howard Fineman and Newsweek. Now here represent non-partisan, objective media, cough, cough, gag, gag.
Lets say Obama was elected in 2004. There would have be no surge. he would have had all troops out of Iraq this past March. The Middle East would have imploded. Money and lives would have been lost. The Iraqi people would be exterminated. Gas would be $10 a gallon today. That’s a fact jack. We are winning in Iraq. Too bad the liberal biased media do not report it. We have Ahmedinijad pinned in on both sides of his country, his economy is in the tank, there is a growing threat of being over thrown and sanctions are beginning to work. But wait, Obama is going to sit down with him and talk to him. I would love to send Pelosi and Reid to Gitmo and let them walk into their cage carrying trays with coffee and cake. Maybe they could win them over with the stupid smiles on their silly faces, a Botox gone bad dumbass who couldn’t make it in the kitchen and damned sure couldn’t make it in the bedroom who thinks she can run the world and Old Woman Harry Reid.
M. Brendan adds:
“Bush’s restoration of “honor and dignity to the office of president” came with a disastrous war of choice in Iraq”
END QUOTE
GW’s biggest mistake was going to DC thinking he could get democrats to work with him and he should have fired everyone left over from Willie’s administration especially Tenet.
How about hold the facts that GW or his administration have done anything wrong in your right hand and Keith Olbermann’s pecker length in inches in your left hand and when you open your hands to reveal the facts all we will see is the number two in your left hand and your right hand bare.
“disastrous war of choice in Iraq”?
Really? Says who, you? I doubt there is a single damned war you would agree with. The Iraqi people are free ace. But, I guess you are like many other liberals that say the Iraqi people were better off under Sadam. The fact like Reagan said many years ago is you liberals would rather cow down on your knees to terrorism as appeasers than die on your feet as free men. Good thing great leaders and men in our history didn’t have the same beliefs or we would have been under British rule, France, Germany or Japan. But, like other liberals you like to pick and choose wars you agree and judge history (bwhahahahahahaha).
The war in Iraq could have been ended months ago. Opposition in our own country from home grown terrorist such as Pelosi and Reid strenghtened our enemies. Liberals opposition and the liberal media gave terrorist the will, courage, strength, resolve and at one time a sense they were winning. The blood of soldiers is on their hands as well as the liberal biased media.
Liberals say other countries do not support us because of the Bush administration. The fact is France, Germany and Russia have never supported us. They are selfish and are willing to let us pay the price. They have economies that are tanking. They have all violated UN Resolution 1441 and the Oil for Food Program the liberal media refused to report. Our company hired an engineer a couple of years ago. He is Lebonese. His father brought his family to the US when he was a teen in the 80’s. He has a masters in ME. He brags about the US. He says the US is the best county in the world. He says this is the most beautiful country in the world. He says if it weren’t for the US there would be no world. He says screw what the rest of the world think about us. Who cares. He is right. I guess I don’t thave to say he is very conservative. He says liberals do not have a clue about the Middle East and real hatred. He says “I do, I live in it for years”. He talked about driving around bombed out cars going to school and walking around bomb craters on his neighborhood street.
You liberals get back in your sandboxes. Bob Beckel predicts all these great victories and how blacks and the youth will put Obama in office. He has forgot about the white man. Deer hunters are going to come down out of their deer stands, they are going to put down their hammers, get off their tractors, crawl out from under the car they are working and they are going to come out by the millions and send Obama back to his Senate seat. There are still more of us than there are of you.
Christian — June 27, 2008 at 4:31 pm
You can’t simply ‘end’ the war in Iraq. You can either win or lose it. So which one would you rather occur, Mr. Dougherty?
NightFire — July 4, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Sen. Obama is a product of the Chicago political machine - why is anyone surprised by anything he says or does? Democrats were eager to ignore the Clinton pathologies and history as long as they had the White House, and they’re exhibiting the same symptoms now.