Obama’s comparison of himself with Reagan has raised a few eyebrows, but Sullivan explains the logic of such a comparison well here in a post he wrote almost a year ago. Key idea:
The overwhelming first impression that you get – from the exhausted but vibrant stump speech, the diverse nature of the crowd, the swell of the various applause lines – is that this is the candidate for real change. He has what Reagan had in 1980 and Clinton had in 1992: the wind at his back. Sometimes, elections really do come down to a simple choice: change or more of the same?
Look at the polls and forget ideology for a moment. What do Americans really want right now? Change. Who best offers them a chance to turn the page cleanly on an era most want to forget? It isn’t Clinton, God help us. Edwards is so 2004. McCain is a throwback. Romney makes plastic look real. Rudy does offer something new for Republicans – the abortion-friendly, cross-dressing Jack Bauer. But no one captures the sheer, pent-up desire for a new start more effectively than Obama.
But as much as this race for the nomination seems to be about the individuals–and it is–it’s also about the people behind them. I think that it’s easy for people to be seduced by Clinton–she’s smart, tough, competent. But what bothers me most about her is the crowd within the Democratic Party that are her backers and advisers. It’s the 90s DLC crowd, the McAuliffes, Carvilles, Emmanuels, Reids, and Pelosis, the capitulators and collaborationsists, the corporate, triangulating Democrats who see politics as a game and play it with a cynicism cut from the same cloth as Karl Rove’s.
Americans don’t want that kind of cynicism anymore, whether it’s in a Democrat or a Republican. In the Democrats it creates the kind of unprincipled "smart politics" that rolls over when it comes to habeas corpus, war appropriations, telecom immunity, and the refusal in general to push back against overweening executive power. It thinks it’s smart to vote for things like Kyle Lieberman.
In 2004 I was a Dean supporter, not because I thought he was a great candidate, but because he represented a NO to all of that. This year we have two candidates who say No to all of that, and though both are flawed, both are better candidates than Dean, and one, Obama, is better than the other, Edwards.
I don’t want the 90s Democratic establishment running things again
next year–those Democrats make me queasy, which is better than the
complete nausea the Republicans stimulate. Is Obama really that different from Clinton? Is he, as has been often suggested, just a blank screen onto which we project our hopes and dreams? To a degree I’d have to say he is. He is more potentiality than actuality. I think he is deliberately making himself into this screen. I think in this respect he is, indeed, similar Reagan, who was a screen onto which nostalgic Americans projected (and still project) their simplistic fantasy of what America is or should be.
And so if Reagan more than anything else was the symbol of the conservative backlash against the social unraveling of the sixties and seventies that made so many Americans uncomfortable, maybe now we need a symbol of a backlash against the cynicism, greed, and partisan power games that have taken over in Washington as the reality behind the Reagan fantasy–the cynicism of Iran Contra, American complicity in Operation Condor in Latin America, the ascendancy of Gingrich, Delay, Dobson, and Robertson; the absurdity of the Clinton impeachment and the disaster that is the current Bush administration are all the reality behind the Reagan fantasy. The more optimistic part of me believes that this chapter in our history will be regarded as a dark interlude, a period of adjustment as an anxious, confused American society in need of a breather sought a temporary respite before once again moving forward into greater complexity in a globalizing world.
Most, I hope, Americans are ready to say No to all of that, and Clinton–a 90s throwback–represents most among the Democratic candidates more of the same. That’s what her claim to experience means: she knows how to operate in that world. When she says Obama represents false hope, she means that no real change is possible, there is only more of the same, and that tinkering within a corrupted system is the only possibility, and she’s best qualified to tinker. Maybe she’s right about that. I’ve written enough here to suggest that we’ve past the point of no return. But I’m willing to give somebody a shot who says "No" to all of that and who wants to do more than just tinker.
A vote for Clinton is a vote for the devil you know; for Obama perhaps the devil we don’t. But I think there’s good reason to think he could be much better than that. It might be that a vote for Obama does say more about us and our fantasies than it says about Obama, but what’s the matter with that? It’s the quality of the fantasy that matters, not that there is one. And isn’t that the idea of democracy, that the person we elect is "us" and embodies our hopes in some way. And won’t he be, if elected, beholden to those who elected him to realize our hopes? Maybe Obama is the blank slate, but one on which the best among us will write the next chapter of American history. It’s the very open-endedness of his candidacy that makes him risky and intriguing. He maybe the devil we don’t know, but he cannot be any worse than the ones we are already so familiar with. I might be blind to it, but I don’t see that there’s much downside risk.
That being said, I’m certain that if he’s elected there will be more disappointment than jubilation. But I want to give the guy with the best shot of breaking us out of this impasse a shot. A vote for a Republican at this point is just plain nuts. A vote for Clinton is a vote of resignation that tinkering is the only possibility. A vote for Obama is to say in the short run "No" to the past 28 years, but also to have hope that there might be the possibility of saying "Yes". If the reality behind the Reagan fantasy was a regression, a movement backward, maybe a new movement forward will the the reality behind the Obama fantasy. That’s by no means a certainty, but at least with Obama there’s a chance.
UPDATE: Eric Zorn in the Chicago Tribune captures the point I’m trying to make. Key idea:
Obama’s no Abe Lincoln.
But, as I observed last February when Obama all but donned a stovepipe hat when announcing his candidacy in Springfield, Abe Lincoln was no Abe Lincoln at this stage of the game either.
I point this out simply as a reminder that Lincoln and history went on to make fools of those whose obsession with his shortcomings and failures blinded them to the singular promise of his gifts.
It’s a risk. But what’s the downside vs. what’s the upside. Read Zorn’s entire article.
Leave a Reply