Thursday, June 12, 2008
Will Obama's silver tongue be enough?
From the RoundTable blog
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Sen. Barack Obama has won the Democratic nomination as a champion of change. The theme of his campaign can be lifted from his book "The Audacity of Hope," where he dismisses the Capitol Hill slugfest of the 1990s as "the psychodrama of the baby boom generation," a display of all the "grudges and revenge plots" sprung during the youth upheavals of the '60s.
Obama promises something new, described as "post-partisan politics." Yet everything new is old again. The youthful candidate invokes the Kennedys, trades barbs over the relative merits of President Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. He campaigns on charisma, but is embarrassed by mentors with their own psychodramas. Dismissing the Clintons' legacy, he has embraced '60s-style methods and manias.
It is worth pondering why. When an equally young Bill Clinton arrived on the scene in 1992, the electorate was in turmoil. In the waning days of the Cold War, paternal guardians like Reagan and Bush made sense: the country wanted protection from foes abroad. Yet when the economy languished, even victory in the Gulf War couldn't ensure Bush Senior's re-election.
In the '92 campaign, Bill and Hillary's vitality made the patrician Bush seem out of touch. They reached the White House thanks in large part to their idealistic Boomer appeal. The negative side of Bill's rock and roll energy became clear later on: even the presidential workload couldn't keep him out of trouble. But the economy boomed and so voters forgave him.
Despite the charges of radicalism laid at the couple's feet by conservative pundits, the public accepted them as moderate pragmatists. They channeled the energies of the Baby Boomers into (politically) responsible action.
The calamities of the new millennium have deeply scarred the political landscape, and Democrats are guilty of mistaking the new terrain. Fatigue with the second President Bush should not obscure the fact that, in a time of war and recession, voters may demand leaders of proven resolve and experience.
I would argue that Hillary Clinton, despite the many missteps of her campaign, was apt in updating the "peace and prosperity" legacy of her husband's administration with an emphasis on fortitude and experience to deal with the harsher trials America suffers today. Yet this appeal fell on deaf ears in the "upscale" lots of the Democratic fold.
The Clintons, once revered as rock stars, are reviled as sellouts. Obama offers the promise of a new Camelot, green with idealism. The problem is that the best achievements of Kennedy and Johnson required remarkable toughness, even meanness, to achieve. Obama's movement is reared on something different, the promise of a kind of policy love-in.
As Bill Clinton proved in 1993, sending out a charismatic newbie to do the job of an experienced statesman can lead to trouble. Clinton was a good pupil, but he had an expanding economy at his back and faced relatively minor challenges abroad.
If a President Obama were to do no worse, still, the challenges he would face are vastly greater. Soaring rhetoric, even of the JFK standard, cannot talk us out of recession or into peace and security.
Obama, alas, shows a smug confidence in the powers of his silver tongue to banish all foes, foreign or domestic. He also seems easily beguiled by the dangerous rhetoric of others.
I cannot help but credit the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger for the flamboyance of their pulpit performances; unfortunately, their showmanship is placed in service of some lousy ideas. Why was Obama so slow to respect the public's dismay with their effusions?
I suspect he was drawn in by the Hendrix-like virtuosity of Wright's verbal outrages. A naturally gifted writer and speaker, Obama has a taste for oratory. But that is not the most crucial gift for a leader, though the young sometimes believe it to be.
Thus does Obama come to resemble George McGovern, the last candidate so conspicuously anointed by a movement of the young. Once-cool Hillary has been relegated to the refreshment table with all the moms while Barack, political teen sensation, takes to the dance floor with his best moves.
Yet Obama's enthusiastic coalition of the willing, starry-eyed with a '60s sense of possibility, is conspicuously short on the hard-fought realism of the Clinton era that brought the Democrats out of their post-'60s wilderness. If Obama can't pick up some of Hillary's moves -- and make nice with her folks standing by the wall -- then John McCain may send them all packing back to the desert.
Jason Wilkins of Roanoke is a student of political science in the graduate program at Hollins University.
