As the results from the National Day of Voter Registration start to come in - the photos, the numbers of people who came, the process laid out, the high energy, the belief - I have been thinking about the power accruing to this inspiring man.
As part of that I have been reading a bio of him by David Mendell, Obama from Promise to Power. Mendell has been covering him since he started to run for state Senate in IL. for the Chicago Trib.
Mendell tries to show as many sides of this person as he's given access to. He shows Obama grumpy, shows him unsuccessful and trying to figure out why, shows him happy, loving, caustic, tender, guarding his privacy, thinking things through. But always from the distance of a newspaper writer without full access.
So for me, an enthusiastic supporter, there's still the question of whether this guy is who he appears to be.
And that has a lot to do with just how much of a liability it could be for him to consolidate so much power.
When I consider what's gone on for the last 5 months since the primary season began and those who really don't pay a lot of attention to politics have started to become aware of Obama, I'm deeply impressed by the things that Matt Stoller has explicated here http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5637
Obama's oratorical skill
his forging of a new path to organizing people (using the new media, finessing Fox News, raising so much money in little amounts, binding his fans together through the site)
his dogged insistance on taking the highest road he can find even in the face of the Clintons' so-called kitchen sink strategy
his distancing himself from the party (so much so that for a long time now it's seemed to me that he is not part of the party at all)
his committment to the 50-state Strategy and campaigning in all the states (reaching out to the mob and the little corner pizza place)
But as these tactics succeed, and the mob gets bigger, it gets harder to control. And those who don't get it resent it.
Control of the entire thing is clearly part of the Obama script. The further some person or group is from being willing to accept his being top dog, the further he wishes to distance himself from them. The blogosphere is too hard to bring under control, cannot be counted on to hew to his party line. Jeremiah Wright was uncontrollable and way too close to keep at arm's length and therefore was a liability.
So the real question is: what will he be with all this power? Just how strong will the Republicans have to be to keep that power from doing something seriously wrong for the country - even defining seriously wrong in progressive terms? Just how strong will we have to be to be part of the control? Will he be able to maintain his mediating skills once it's too easy to get enough to go along? Will he look outside his own box when he's infatuated with his own ideas?
Who will be there to keep him on track?
]]>An open letter to my superdelegates
On this sunny morning just before spring on Cape Cod I am writing to you to ask you to consider my thoughts when you decide who to support in August in Denver.
It has been nearly my entire life, since the middle of the Second World War, that my country has struggled with its posture in the world. As long as I can remember there has been a constant tug between self-aggrandizement on one side and trying to help the wider world on the other. Our history since 1945 reveals an endless struggle between sympathy and greed, fear and trust, defensiveness and self-confidence.
In the ‘40s and ‘50s, while we were rebuilding western Europe we were also persecuting those in our own land who thought and spoke openmindedly of different social arrangements there.
We just barely elected an inspiring and possibly well-intentioned young man as I entered college in 1960, only to resist his attempts to equalize opportunity for the poorest among us and to support his attempts to invade and dominate a tiny, tribal, impoverished land on the other side of the Pacific ocean.
Next, we elected, in reaction to the violence of our politics, a dishonest, reactionary man whose preoccupation with himself and his appearance led to his retirement under threat of impeachment, while we failed to recognize the long-term effects of his policies on the countries upon which we were becoming ever more dependent.
When his successor reaped the harvest of those policies and tried to change our dependencies we sneered, and elected an empty suit with a low-level movie-hack résumé. By accident the empty suit was still President when the peoples on the other side of the Wall finally managed to corner their governments and whip away the curtain, joyously chipping away bits of brick and concrete while we cheered.
From then, guided by the same political and economic policies which failed us in the 1970s, we elected a succession of con men who, pretending to help poor peoples of the wider world, opened the doors for our economic base to move away for ever. All the while we have failed ever more disgracefully to come to terms with our excessive lifestyle based on a limited resource, our excessive population living on a limited piece of land and our excessive use of power to keep others from getting in our way.
It has been time for a complete change in our perspective for many years now but we have refused to consider even the tiniest iota of it, opting instead to accumulate at others’ expense as much stuff as possible, mostly, of junk.
We have opted to lie to ourselves, to our allies, to our opponents, to our rich and to our poor, as a lifestyle choice.
So now I look back at this recital of our incompetence and see before me two possible Democratic candidates for yet another election to the highest position in my country. I see yet another opportunity for my country to try to deal with the messes we have made and I see two distinct ways of dealing being offered.
The first way is more of the same – a candidate who supported the scam that let our manufacturing go offshore without environmental safeguards, without forethought about the impact on our “blue collar” working classes, or about the assumption that we could go on being dependent on oil, without respect for the destruction of the soil and waters from which we feed our population, and without serious consideration of the consequences of our actions upon the rest of the human population.
Logically, it made a lot of sense. The rich would get richer and invent new work for the rest of us. But somehow it wasn’t reasonable to consider those who were disabled and could not learn, those who were too old or sick to change, those who did not want to get richer but just wanted to put in their time and come home to peace and quiet, those who did not want to uproot their families and move somewhere else to a new job, those who just wanted to get richer and didn’t give a damn about the rest of the world, and those who wanted to do something with their lives that society didn’t reward with riches.
Worst of all this first way seems to be a candidate who seems willing to say whatever will get her the nomination, whether it’s true or not.
The second way is less of the same – a candidate who thinks first and speaks afterwards, who straddles the races with a substantive acquaintance with both, who understands and is willing to work for a serious move away from our dependence on oil, whose campaign shows a grasp of organization and leadership, who is committed to bringing our children and grandchildren into our national politics, who is calm under stress, who listens to other perspectives and proposes doing that on an international level, whose attitude towards others he characterizes with the word “empathy”, and who seems to be deeply committed to his spouse and children.
And to me, best of all, a candidate who seems to be committed to being truthful with himself and us, and has been extraordinarily firm in his commitment to running a clean campaign.
So I am writing to you in hopes that you will have the patience to hear me through and consider seriously what I say when you decide which Democratic candidate to endorse in Denver, and which candidate to work for during the next four years.
Thank you.
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