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By allowing voters to both vent their anger and overcome it, while embodying the transcendence of America's racial wound, Barack Obama offers not just hope, but alchemy.
By Gary Kamiya
Read more: George W. Bush, Racial Issues, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, John Edwards, Barack Obama, 2008 election
Salon photo composite/Reuters image
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama
Jan. 8, 2008 |
Barack Obama's stunning victory in Iowa was a moment of national alchemy. It represented an outpouring of righteous Democratic anger, and its simultaneous transformation into hope. That double process -- the cathartic expression of rage, and its purification -- is exactly what Democrats have needed after seven nightmarish years of Bush. It is politics both as payback and as spiritual transcendence. And the fact that it is a black man who is serving as America's philosopher's stone, turning the base metal of bitterness into the gold of forgiveness, is extraordinarily moving. The possibility that our nation's deepest wound, and the source of our political divisions, could also be the agent of our redemption is like a banner appearing in a darkened sky."Redemption" is a big word, perhaps too big for the profane world of politics. It is important to remember that the idea of Barack Obama and the reality of the man are not necessarily the same thing. If the senator from Illinois becomes president, he may or may not do a better job than his two worthy Democratic rivals. But there are times when the symbolic aspect of politics is inescapable -- and creates its own reality. Obama offers something neither Hillary Clinton nor John Edwards does: The chance to decisively slam the door on the Bush era, the Bush war and its Democratic enablers, while simultaneously forgetting them. It is a politics of therapeutic forgetting. And after the Bush years, both anger and creative oblivion are necessary.
In November 2004, American voters reelected the worst president in modern history. That election did more than blight the political hopes of half the people in this country, it raised serious questions about America's very identity. What kind of country could possibly reelect a president as manifestly unfit for office as George W. Bush? Why would millions of Americans again endorse an ignorant, incompetent leader who launched a disastrous and pointless war, presided over an administration based on secrets and lies, trampled the Constitution, ran up a ruinous debt, ignored the global environmental crisis, approved torture and secret prisons, and destroyed America's moral standing in the world?
Of course, not all Americans share the same political views; of course, post-9/11 hysteria played a major role. But even making due allowance for those factors, Bush's reelection was shocking. Like an unidentified tumor that suddenly shows up on an X-ray, it cast a malaise over the whole nation. For many Americans, it revealed a foreign entity within the country itself, one even more frightening in some ways than the one outside. We can fight terrorists. But what do you do about your own country when you no longer recognize it?
The Democratic Party should have represented that half of the country that was appalled by Bushism. But the Democrats abjectly failed. Cowed by patriotic fervor and Beltway thinking, the Democrats fell in line behind Bush and his demented war. Only when it was clear to all but the most benighted neoconservative ideologues that Iraq was an unmitigated disaster did mainstream Democrats like Clinton and Edwards speak out.
A price had to be paid for this collapse, and the price was anger -- anger not just at Bush and his policies, but at the timid Democrats who went along with those policies. This anger is cleansing. Those establishment pundits who sanctimoniously tut-tutted about how Democratic voters were "unhinged" by "Bush hatred" failed to recognize that when a cancerous entity invades your body, the healthy response is to attack it. Anger is a patriotic response to Bush's profoundly un-American policies, and to the Democrats who failed to oppose them. It is the white blood cells coming to rescue an endangered organism.
Yet as anyone who spends too much time reading political blogs knows, anger can itself become a toxin, self-perpetuating and self-destructive. It must be expressed -- but then it must be overcome. To fall into a state of permanent anger, of righteous indignation, is to become the very enemy you are fighting. This is the error that George W. Bush made when he launched his Manichean "war on terror," and turned America into a country far more like its fundamentalist enemies than it had ever been before.
Barack Obama's unique appeal is that he allows voters -- Democrats, independents and fed-up Republicans alike -- to simultaneously express their anger and transcend it. As a political outsider, as a black man, as someone who was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning, Obama is the antithesis of both Bushism and the mainstream Bush-lite Democratic stance on Iraq. Yet Obama's entire message is one of reconciliation and unity, the belief that even the most implacable foes can come together. And it's his race that seals the deal. As a mixed-race black man appealing to whites without using traditional racial guilt codes, he is the living proof of his own credo. By voting for a black man, whites are voting for hope and change in the future -- but they are simultaneously making a statement that hope and change are happening right now, within their own minds, hearts and souls. They are leaping across the racial divide without a safety net.
Christopher Hitchens has correctly pointed out that there is something sentimental in this act of white racial self-absolution. He also makes another valid point: that Obama is of mixed-race descent, and that automatically calling him "black" reinforces the pernicious one-drop rule. But paradoxically, the fact that Obama is seen as black is precisely what will help America to get beyond rigid racial categories like the racist one-drop rule. As for white sentimentality, Hitchens is too hard on it: The fact is that sentimentality not only can accompany real change but can help facilitate it. Anyone who can contemplate the idea that America could elect a black president without feeling a sense of national pride is cynical indeed.
Obama's Iowa victory was one of those rare moments when an abstraction becomes real. In "Areopagitica," John Milton wrote, "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks." In Iowa, we witnessed the shaking of those locks. Like one of those miraculous reversals in one of Shakespeare's late plays, when a statue suddenly comes to life after standing motionless for years, Obama's victory seemed almost otherworldly -- as if the laws of space and time had been suspended, and a quality as evanescent and fragile as hope had suddenly become real. I am not a religious person, but it was hard not to feel that his triumph vindicated the essence of what I think of as the secular essence of religion, something even nonbelievers can believe in: the possibility of inner transformation. A transformation at once personal and national.
