My Hope for Obama

Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish is the first blog I ever started to read on any regular basis. I can no longer remember why, but I presume it is because I often buy The Atlantic Monthly when I travel. Something in the magazine must have motivated me to seek out the website, and as Andrew is the first blogger (from left-to-right in the navigation bar) on the site, The Daily Dish is where I landed.

I still haven't made it down to Barbara Wallraff on the right hand edge of the navigation. Maybe she should petition to re-order the bloggers alphabetically by first name (though Andrew would still beat her out for the alpha spot).

But, now that I have a blog of my own, I guess I can cite Sullivan as my blogging godfather in a way.

One of the things about reading someone for a long period of time is you get a real sense for the cadence of their written voice, the pattern of their thoughts, and even the texture of their personality as it leaks through on the screen. Sullivan can be overly-emotional at times (at least for my taste) and given to hyperbole. But, it may simply come with the form.

Given that he blogs so prodigiously, there is less time for real-time editing and considered reflection. Inflamed commentary is "walked back" in future posts if needbe, but what you get most of the time is the immediate gut reaction.

So, taking that grain of salt, I can't help but post this item from Sullivan today in its entirety. I can't say that I feel the claims he makes therein are uncontestable. It may be a matter of heart and hope coloring his eyes (and mine) at this very early stage.

What I can say is that this is what I wanted to see from Obama more than anything else he could do policy-wise as President. But, I believe it is more than simply wishful thinking and projection, as so many have claimed that Obama's campaign was built around -- people casting their own idealized notions of Obama the myth onto the tabula rasa of Obama the actual candidate.

What Sullivan describes is what I thought I saw revealed in Obama under the kleig light glare of the campaign spotlight. It was the measure of the man, not his platform.

And, if he can actually govern in accordance with the spirit that Sullivan identifies below, then I will be one very proud American:

One impression from Obama's interactions with the Republicans and Democrats in Congress: Obama clearly sees the presidency as a different institution than his immediate predecessor. This is a good thing, it seems to me. Bush had imbibed a monarchical sense of the office from his father and his godfather (Cheney). The monarch decided. If you were lucky, you'd get an explanation later, usually dolled up in propaganda. But the president had one accountability moment - the election of 2004 - and the rest of the time he saw the presidency as a form of power that should be used with total boldness and declarative clarity.

At times, Bush's indifference to the system around him bordered on a kind of political autism. And so one of the oddest aspects of Bush's presidency was his tendency to declare things as if merely saying them as president could make them so. The model was clear and dramatically intensified by wartime: the president pronounced; Congress anemically responded; the base rallied. At the start, it felt like magic, but as reality slipped through the fast-eroding firewall of reckless spending and military misadventure, Bush's authority disappeared all the more quickly - because his so-certain predictions were so obviously wrong. The Decider had no response to this. He just had to keep deciding and asserting, to less and less effect, that he was right all along. Hence the excruciating final months. Within a democratic system, we had replicated all the comedy and tragedy of cocooned authoritarianism.

Now look at Obama. What the critics misread in his Inaugural was its classical structure. He was not running any more. He was presiding. His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Hence the obvious shock of some Republican Congressman at debating with a president who seemed interested in actual conversation, as opposed to pure politics. Last Tuesday, there were none of the bold declarative predictions of the Second Bush Inaugural - and none of the slightly creepy Decider idolatry. Yes, Obama set some very clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window of invitation. The invitation is to the other co-equal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order - not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order. And it is rooted in a traditional, small-c conservative understanding of the presidency.

If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. It's fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realize itself in public actions. Somewhere the Founders are smiling. The system is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. But it took the self-restraint of one man to do it.

Let the people say Amen.

A Six-Foot Black Woman Who Says What She Means

For those not familiar with Ta-Nehisi Coates, blogger and writer for the Atlantic Monthly, I can recommend you to his blog.

And, additionally, to his recent profile of the soon-to-be First Lady, Michelle Obama, from the magazine itself:

In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timberlands for the weekend, and our jokes for the cats in the mail room. Some of us give ourselves up completely and become the mask, while others overcompensate and turn every dustup into the Montgomery bus boycott.

But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road--being ourselves. Implicit in the notion of code-switching is a belief in the illegitimacy of blacks as Americans, as well as a disbelief in the ability of our white peers to understand us. But if you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity--not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience--then you understand that the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country.

Pop culture has laid the groundwork for that recognition. Barack Obama's coalition--the young, the black, the urban, the hip--was originally assembled by hip-hop. Jay-Z and Nas may be problematic ambassadors, but their ilk are why those who thought Barack and Michelle were giving each other a "terrorist fist jab" were laughed off the stage. We are as physically segregated as ever, yet the changes in media have drawn black idiom into the broader American narrative.

[snip]

When I saw Obama in Chicago and took her for white, it was not because of her cadences, mannerisms, or dress, but because of the radical proposition she put forth--a black community fully vested, no DuBoisian veil, in the country at large. A buddy of mine once remarked that Michelle "makes Barack black." But that understates things. She doesn't simply make Barack black--she makes him American.

[snip]

These heralds offer a deeper understanding of African American life, a greater appreciation of the bourgeois ordinariness of our experience. “People have never met a Michelle Obama,” the soon-to-be first lady said toward the end of our interview. “But what they’ll come to learn is that there are thousands and thousands of Michelle and Barack Obamas across America. You just don’t live next door to them, or there isn’t a TV show about them.”

There is now.

There was some discussion during the primaries that Barack should find the opportunity for a Sister Souljah moment in order to distance himself from "blackness" or racial identity-based politics. There was also a certain mythology that merely the act of electing a black President would somehow magically heal certain lingering racial wounds in our society (allowing blacks to shed racial grievance, eliminate lingering white guilt).

One frequent suggestion was that Obama should campaign on a pledge to shift from race to class-based affirmative action policies. The thinking being (a la Nixon goes to China) that it will take a black Democrat to drive such changes through, since he will not be open to cheap charges of racism, given his personal identity.

For my money, I doubt that Obama will do any such thing, and moreover, I would hope that he would not. Any symbolic benefit to be obtained from him being our first black President is only going to be realized by his being an effective American President first and foremost, outside of simplistic racial classification. And, this is not because he must explicitly reject or negate any black identity, but rather that he simply needs to implicitly live it, as Coates notes, such that the "particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country."

Any move he might make as President that reeks specifically as a self-conscious performance of his blackness, of using his racial identity (even if for presumed positive ends) as a political tool, will by definition retard any such objectives. At this stage, basic competence within the White House would be a massive step forward for the country in completely non-racial terms.

Or, as Chris Rock noted on Larry King Live:

KING: You must be … proud that at this stage in our history a black man is running for president on a major ticket.

ROCK: I’m proud Barack Obama [is] running for president... If it was Flavor Flav, would I be proud? No. I don’t support Barack Obama because he’s black.

KING: I said just as a proud feeling. That’s normal.

ROCK: There’s a proud feeling because of the character of the man.

I sincerely hope Rock is right, because with everything that is going to be on Obama's plate, we are going to need it.

On a side note, any of you who have seen me spend time with my own niece, Mahlia, will know that I have a soft spot for elementary-school and middle-school aged kids (like Miss Mahlia herself). I am not as naturally drawn to babies and teenagers, but I like kids a lot.

So, I am all in favor of the coming Cuteness Stimulus, as Yglesias has termed it:

Obama transition team acts to counter national cuteness deficit by posting photos of Sasha and Malia getting ready for their first day at school

On Obama and Women

See comment below from Daily Kos regarding President-Elect Obama's morning weekly address:

Aside from the commitment to what sounds like a great progressive stimulus plan, one sentence struck me: Will your job or your husband’s job or your daughter’s job be the next one cut?.

Read that closely.

In a speech about universal fears and hardship, he is addressing his primary listeners as women. Never have I heard sentence construction like that from a president -- women addressed directly in a non-"women's issues" setting as legitimate, fully fledged and very concerned and invested breadwinners. The effect is stunning.

On the one hand, it means nothing. It's just rhetoric. On the other hand, it means everything since it isn't something he needed to do. But, it shifts the ground for future Presidents by doing it. Wow.

Revenge is a dish best served cold

I never felt that the McCain campaign was intentionally playing the race-card in its attacks against Barack Obama during the election season.

It was simply running the same tired Republican playbook of characterizing him as a snobbish, limp-wristed, liberal, proto-socialist boogeyman who doesn't share or appreciate the values of "real Americans." This was exactly the same way they sought to frame John Kerry, though obviously to much greater effect.

However, in the attempt to "other" Obama, it made it seem as if they were subtly trying to point out (wink wink nudge nudge) that, well, he's a black guy. And, so the typical campaign playbook routine had a boomerang effect by implicating the campaign itself for stirring up some of the racial epithets that were heard at the rallies and made such big national news.

But, I don't think this was the intent. If they had wanted to play pure racial politics, there would have been a 24x7 Jermeiah Wright channel on my cable network. From what I understand, it was McCain himself who said that Wright was essentially off-limits as a campaign topic.

Witness this priceless display by Michael Goldfarb, McCain Campaign Spokesman, who simply won't bring himself to say Wright's name even when practically ordered to do so by the CNN interviewer.

CNN: "Well, say it!!"
Goldfarb: "We all know who we are talking about here."




Now, it's not to say that there wasn't some ugly reactions by a few McCain supporters towards Obama that were clearly racially motivated. It's just that those people weren't going to vote for Obama anyway.

And, the massive news storm that followed some of the incidents could have only hurt the Republicans with the swing voters they would have needed to win. How many sub-urban soccer moms find the prospect of lynch mobs to be appealing?

So, while I don't blame McCain personally (and in some ways I laud him for trying to take the issue off the table), obviously one can't have any sympathy for those of his supporters who eagerly DID attempt to trade in racial or religious prejudice as a way ginning up fears of Obama and votes for McCain.

And, it is to those reprobates that I gleefully dedicate the following:

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, President-elect Obama said that "when he takes the oath of office Jan. 20, he plans to be sworn in like other presidents, using his full name: Barack Hussein Obama."

While most presidents use their full names, there have been recent exceptions: In 1977, James Earl Carter was sworn in as president as Jimmy Carter. And in 1981, Ronald Wilson Reagan simply went by Ronald Reagan.

While awaiting the inauguration, I myself am going to be reading up on my Sharia-law statutes, just to ensure I've got all my bases covered.