Paris, April 30, 2008 – The thing that from the beginning of the presidential campaign I found most striking about Barack Obama is that he seemed to be grown-up.
Politicians, I suppose, mostly start out as normal human beings, but as they approach the heights of the political ladder something terrible usually happens and they turn into robotic constructions of cynicism, pandering, claptrap patriotism and false sentiment. Ten years ago Hillary Clinton was a smart woman you could have a conversation with. Possibly ten years from now she will again be that woman. She and we are now trapped in the terrible meantime.
Some survive. Adlai Stevenson remained human, but then he was a loser. John Kennedy as president remained wise-cracking, intelligent and unpompous during the 34 months he had to live. Jimmy Carter seems a nice and good man, but he too was a loser. If Ronald Reagan was a phony (playing “his greatest role,” as Gore Vidal said) he never showed any evidence of being other than what he presented himself as being. Bill Clinton may like to present himself as ol’ dawg, but in person always struck me as closer to a neurotic fox terrier in quest of affection.
Obama is cool, and not in the fashionable sense. He displays common sense and less than total patience in responding to the inanities of the primary debates and infantile harassment by those Washington reporters who think not wearing an American flag pin is a big story. He prefers finishing the waffle.
Now he has an uncool enemy who seems more anxious to take him down than Hillary Clinton. When a video of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. seemingly damning America was unearthed and polemically edited by Fox Television, Obama replied to the frenzy with a serious speech on American race relations.
He undoubtedly realized that his words would be wasted on many, but was speaking to the American people, paying them the tribute of an intelligent and deeply-felt response to an episode that might reasonably have disturbed them.
The Rev. Mr. Wright, slighted by Obama’s distancing himself from Wright’s words, retaliated on public television and in public appearances in Washington last weekend, embellishing his criticisms of white America and its government, and denying that Obama could think any differently.
The press reaction was scandalized and sanctimonious when it was not vicious, as when the columnist George Will called Wright’s statements “paranoia” and insinuatingly asked, in the light of his relationship with Wright, “what remains to be explored” about Obama?
My first reaction was to ask what country these people live in. Have
they never heard white people, possibly even cynical journalists, say such things about the contemporary United States as Wright said? Maybe they have never been to a black church; but have they never heard a black preacher on the radio or television? Have they never read black intellectuals or black novelists on the black experience in America?
Have they never heard of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin? They were saying things about America a half-century ago that when said today cause white editors and journalists to pretend are shocking and unpatriotic.
In a way it is as if these people had never listened to Obama’s Philadelphia speech, when he soberly explained where all of this comes from. But Wright was not elaborating on the meaning of the black experience but apparently trying to do Obama in, and he quite possibly has succeeded. Obama, the man who was white enough for the whites and black enough for the blacks, looked a lot blacker after Wright’s performance.
More damaging is that, as an anonymous campaign observer has already suggested, the main danger to Obama is not that he is black but that he is too exotic. “He’s not like us.” This once seemed an asset – he wasn’t like the Clintons, the Bushes, the corporate fat-cats, the Washington power players. But it could also prove a liability with a much larger group of potential voters than the much-stigmatized working-class Catholics. It might include such people as his white grandmother, about whose inhibitions he already has told us.
Part of the press is already saying that his Winston-Salem press conference was not “tough enough” on Wright, renewing doubt about how he would handle that 3 A.M. telephone call from the Strategic Air Command. But what is he supposed to do about Wright? Hire someone to push him down a flight of stairs?
He’s tough enough to have dismissed the half-century-old American foreign policy principle of never talking with enemies until they have preemptively surrendered. That’s real toughness, in today’s Washington. He has said that he won’t sign on to the plan to give American drivers a gasoline tax holiday during the pre-electoral summer season, which McCain proposed and Clinton supports.
To the shock-horror of the policy establishment he says that he would talk to Iran. Who knows, he might even talk to Hamas or Hezbollah, or the Cubans, or sign off on the new Pakistani government’s talking with the Taliban and the tribes in Waziristan, whom we are incessantly told harbor mortal threat to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Europe, Israel and even Winston-Salem. That’s toughness.
It would be a novelty to have a government that instead of just killing them, might talk with some of those people “who hate us so” -- as George Bush wonderingly put it back in 2001. One can never tell, but a grown-up with common sense might try to change other things in America that many Americans agree are broken. We may never know.
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