Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick told the Boston Globe the other day, "I think the country is so hungry for leadership -- uplifting, visionary leadership -- that a lot of our traditional differences don't matter."
Well, maybe. But I have been around politics long enough to be a bit cynical about the vision thing. JFK offered a vision, a generational change and a New Frontier. But he also had Dick Daley in Chicago counting votes and his dad, old Joe, who said, ""We're going to sell Jack like soap flakes."
Yes, I love Barack's soaring rhetoric and his ideas about a new politics of hope. I was at the march on Washington where Martin Luther King made his " I Have a Dream" speech, I though then that a new day had arrived in America, that the soaring power of his words would change everything.
It was not to be. He was murdered, and many American cities burned, Robert Kennedy was killed, the Vietnam War split the nation and Richard Nixon was elected president.
I backed Hillary Clinton because the other great cause of my life was the women's movement, and I thought Hillary was tough enough to take everything the Republican attack machine could throw at her, and then some. I figured she's get her teeth into McCain's ankles (or any other spot on his anatomy) and not let go.
I worried that Obama was more Harvard law than Chicago street fighter, that he might not have the stomach for all the GOP 527's flak. But after a few stumbles, he seems to be getting the hang of hardball politics, and that's good. At the AIPAC conference (the major Jewish lobby) , he sounded and looked, except for the blue eyes, more like Paul Newman in Exodus than like the electoral choice of Hamas. (If you don't remember Exodus, rent it. It's the Jews-as-Good-guys narrative with no shades of grey in full Hollywood swing, including a theme song that would make Israeli doves of today blanch: "This land is Mine, God gave this land to me." )
But I worry that some of the Obamanauts who want the rock star, the pure visionary who will change everything with a few drops of political fairy dust, will be disenchanted when he gets into the real nitty gritty of politics, as he must.
Early on, he made a big mistake by not wearing the flag pin. Sure, he was exactly right about it as an empty gesture of pseudo patriots, but America a loves the flag and loves even ersatz patriotism. He should clip on a really big flag pin and wear it everywhere. Is this cynical politics? You bet. But it's a winner.
Barack needs to get his story out in any medium available, and not let the GOP brand him as a radical who hates America, hangs out with very strange men of the cloth and has a Muslim middle name.
That's what the 527s will be peddling, but Obama's true story is really much more compelling--and much more American. Before 2008, if you wrote a novel about a young man with a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, who graduated from Harvard law and instead of grabbing a big-bucks job, went into community organizing in a black neighborhood, got elected to the senate and became the Democratic nominee for president, you'd be laughed at. Even Horatio Alger couldn't dream up a story that improbable.
It's a story that could indeed be sold like soap flakes. George Lukas is an Obama supporter, maybe he could do a nifty ad spot with Luke, Han Solo and Obama saving the universe, and casting John McCain as Darth Vader, an ally of George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, all inhabitants of the death star.
(When you think of all the casualties in Iraq that image does get a bit too close for comfort.)
John McCain will try to present Obama as young and inexperienced. Obama will have to picture McCain as old and out of touch. He has to harp on all of McCain's flip-flops, as the straight talk express became the double-talk express.
Even McCain's war hero status can have its downside. Republican senator Chuck Hagel notes that McCain is more prone to see the military as always right than other Vietnam war vets in the congress. McCain, because he spent his years as a POW, never experienced the disillusion of many combat soldiers who saw first-hand how the war went sour and how the generals made so many mistakes.
Don't hold Barack to too high a standard of civility. Yes, all Americans claim to want a more, humane, more uplifting brand of political discourse, but in the end, they are full of s---. They always fall hard for the politics of personal destruction. Negative politicking works - -that's why there's so much of it. Willie Horton, and the Swift Boaters may sound like an 80s band, but their tunes are seductive.
In fact, I was covering the Congress when everyone was quite civil. But the price of that was, "to get along you go along" and powerful Southern senators bottled up any talk of civil rights. All in all, in many ways I prefer today's cantankerous politics to the civility of conformity.
And today's media is tailor-made for the nasty sound bite. Can we in fact even have a civil discourse when advocates on every side are putting stuff up on the internet every hour of the day, the political talk shows need red meat for the hungry maw and high-paid consultants use their grey matter 24-7 to think of something horrible to say about the other guy--or gal? In a just-released report, the Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that the most covered story of the entire primary season was the Reverend Wright episode. (So much for the notion that the liberal media always ensure good stories for their faves.) Bad news sells, that's the simple fact. Just as the swiftboaters turned war hero John Kerry into an alleged liar and coward, so too will the attack squads portray Obama as an anti-American radical whose best buddies are a pastor who spews hate, a priest who cozies up to Farrakhan and a former sixties' Weatherman. Will people believe it? You bet, if the purveyors of the message aren't hit hard and often.
So Obama should keep up with the Vision Thing. Words do count, and good ones are often remembered long after the political season is over.
But to get elected, you have to play politics, and in hardball, that sometimes means sliding into second with your cleats up. Because make no mistake, the other guys are going to do it to you.
Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the author of "Selling Anxiety,: How the News Media Scare Women (University Press of New England.)
"I worried that Obama was more Harvard law than Chicago street fighter. He seems to be getting the hang of hardball politics."
Just we don't see him sweat doesn't mean he hasn't mixing it up.
"He should clip on a really big flag pin and wear it everywhere."
When was the last time you saw him without a flagpin? Last Tuesday, McCain spoke, then Hillary, then Obama. Only one of them wore a flagpin. Guess which?
"Barack needs to get his story out in any medium available."
Barack's primary campaign has redefined for ever just what media are available to politicians.
"George Lukas is an Obama supporter, maybe he could do a nifty ad spot ."
Obama has far more talented people than Lucas creating such videos for free and posting them on YouTube. Where have you been?
"Don't hold Barack to too high a standard of civility." " Negative politicking works."
Most of Obamas supporters want him at times to be less civil. He has kept to his standards and won with them, so I will not question that decision. He beat the Clintons playing his way. My money's on him in the general.
You're right ... sometimes.
But sometimes, the right answer is to reject the politics and do what is right just because it is right. Maybe if enough people stopped kowtowing to empty gestures (e.g., the flag pin) we as a people could get beyond it. And if 20% of the population still sees fit to throw an aploplectic fit ... well, we wouldn't have had them with us, anyway.
We spend so much time paying attention to the empty politics that little gets done. Sometimes, what is needed is to risk not playing the game -- but to forge ones' own rules.
If and when John McCain appears down in this election, Obama needs to step on his neck and finish him off. If it takes Chicago style thuggery to win in a closely contested state, then so be it. It worked for JFK.
Life is misery! Screw everything!
I'm going to go kick a puppy now.
George Lukas....
GEORGE LUKAS...
I KNOW you were around when Star Wars came out. Come on!
/endnerdrant
Also, "wookiee". It wasn't in the article, but people always get that wrong too.
There are good ways to do things and bad ways to do things. Either way gets perpetuated when we reward it. After so many years of rewarding the bad ways, I think it is about time we reward the good ways.
Responding is not being divisive or negative, it's standing up for ourselves.
I know these things can be confusing. I hope that this explanation has helped you understand the situation better.
Voters may not be quite as dumb as you think. McCain's dopey "gas tax holiday" bandwagon, which Clinton enthusiastically jumped on, didn't get very far. (Perhaps if Clinton hadn't compromised her principles with that blatant pander, she'd have done so well in IN/NC that she'd now be the nominee.)
And failure to mount a "kitchen-sink" attack against opponents in the primaries doesn't indicate unwillingnes to mount tough (but fair) attacks in the General Election. Once Obama had clinched a majority of PLEDGED delegates, he pretty much stopped criticizing Clinton at all.
In the final primaries, some of Obama's relative "weakness" occurred because he was being attacked by both McCain and Clinton, while he was directing his fire only at McCain. And he campaigned in critical general-election states, rather than squandering money and time competing for meaningless "popular votes" in places with ZERO Electoral Votes (e.g. Puerto Rico). Is it really "weak" to concede a few short-term battles to resources for the long-term war?
What's new about Obama isn't soaring oratory about "change". It's nitty-gritty organizing by a candidate who genuinely understand that it's NOT all about him, as this June-6-2008 off-the-cuff talk to his HQ staff demonstrates:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnhmByYxEIo
River’s “fighter" is suggestive of someone who engages in the politics of destruction, purporting that the "vision thing" suggests some ethereal realm where dialogue, truthfulness, ethics and integrity are trophies on a shelf to be viewed but never used.
Obama’s fighting words suggest the "vision thing" is not a realm from another planet, but right here in your midst, crying out for completion - for that perfect union spoken of ages ago, begging for fulfillment in the human lives of those who would dare consecrate in their hearts, their words, and in their deeds in these words spoken long ago:
"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” (Abraham Lincoln)