Emily Dickinson famously wrote, "hope is the thing with feathers." It's a beautiful homily, three stanzas of metaphors that reveal truths about the human heart and the indomitable nature of the spirit. It also mostly rhymes. Barack Obama, our next likely president -- disregarding morbid Doris Lessing-esque poo-pooers, or a jittery electorate overcome with a necrophilic hunger only a bespotted failed war "hero" can slake -- is full of it. Hope, I mean. He's audacious with the stuff. This, to my mind, is noble, uplifting, and about as useful in a leader as the "p" in the word "receipt." Hope does not get things done, in a political era where money talks and ideology sits in a corner until it understands what it's done wrong. Hope has never accomplished anything. When Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon, that wasn't just about hope. Kennedy understood that trumping the Russians in the space-race was vital to a nation chilled to the bone with cold war. He understood that putting a man on the moon was the ultimate expression of a heavenly mandate for our nation under god. He was also tired of banging Barbra Eden, and when his buddy Sherwood Schwartz slipped him a copy of the pilot script for I dream of Jeannie, Kennedy knew that without the Astronaut angle, the show didn't have a hook, and that Eden would pester him for the rest of his life. (Yeah, I know, but hindsight is 20/20). It takes more than hope, is all I'm saying.
It's not that I don't think Obama's eminently qualified. He seems like a nice guy. Genuine. Brilliant. Principled. The kind of guy you'd want running the greatest nation on earth. But Denmark already has a leader.
My worry is that Obama, who appeals to the best of our nature, and to the transformative power of government, lives in a fantasy world, disconnected from the peccant realities of what it takes to get things done in Washington. The median age in the house and the senate is around 60. The racial makeup of the house is around 90 percent white; in the senate, around 99 percent. I'm not counting Hispanics in this calculus, because a) Obama hasn't exactly mamboed away with the Latino vote, and b) I can research every last niggling bicameral demographic, or I can watch Hell's Kitchen: I can't do both. As to why I haven't counted Asians or other minorities, see B.
So this old, white, mostly male body of representatives, as far as I can tell, by -- oh, I don't know, their voting records over the last twenty years -- is not exactly clamoring for "change." They like things the way they are. War. Kids left behind. Twelve mile per gallon Escalades with dubs. Leaving aside the war, which is always good for a chuckle -- especially when slapping down your passport in any other nation on earth save Dubai -- very little can get accomplished inside the beltway without the aid and abetment of special interest groups, lobbyists, and heavy, cream-based sauces from Galileo restaurant on M street. Does anyone really believe that after a couple hundred years, the entrenched quo wants anything other than the status? Things are the way they are, and the way they have been, because that's how things are supposed to be. Politics does not attract the best and the brightest. It attracts the best and brightest megalomaniacs three of our finest universities can pump out.
Some good can come from government, if one knows how to play the angles. Lyndon Johnson was slimier than a greased weasel, but managed to sign the civil rights act of 1964 into law, albeit with the wistful lament, "we [white democrats] have lost the south for a generation," which for some reason he considered a bad thing. But Johnson's legacy wasn't all gravy. This is the same president who signed the Public Television Act of 1967, which guaranteed that radio could no longer be considered the most boring media outlet. Johnson knew how to double-deal, how to work both sides of the aisle. Bill Clinton was masterful at this. He managed to enact draconian welfare reforms, pleasing white, ex-Reagan democrats (an oxymoron on par with "lipstick lesbians") who were incensed that poor, often black families were squandering taxpayer's money on the pre-sweetened Kool-Aid, rather than the more economical kind where you have to add the sugar later. Clinton also adopted Bush the elder's race-baiting by equating Sister Souljah with David Duke, when her only crime was being a really, really crappy rapper. But that's the kind of maneuvering it takes to win, and to be an effective leader. You don't hear mafia Dons walking up to the Capo del Tutti Capo and announcing, "we're gonna have a whole new mafia!" Well, Paul Castellano tried it in 1985 at Sparks Steakhouse, but it ended badly.
Me, I want my leaders the way nature intended: Corrupt. Duplicitous. Slick. This however should in no way be taken as my ex post facto endorsement of Hillary Clinton.
Can Obama do the beltway hustle? With a 30 seat democratic majority in the house of representatives, and a dead split in the senate, it's possible that he could affect real change. Bipartisan change. But oh the deals. He'll have to make them. But how will he be able to satisfy his rabid fan, er, voting base, when he necessarily dances with the devil in the pale moonlight? Will all his talk of change stall into a bipartisan vortex? Will he, in other words, become just another politician? Perhaps one man can inspire the senate and the house to abandon the hoary squabbling and vested interests that have defined it for the last couple hundred years. I, for one, would love to see it, and Obama has my vote. (Well, not my actual vote, because at the end of the day, what with elections decided not by votes but by hanging chads, and wars which don't require congressional approval, and a taxpaying base too cheap to pay for the -- gasp! -- socialist necessity of universal health care, and a population too thick to get the incongruity of nonsensical statements like "support the troops, but not the war, " I think I'll just sit this one out.)
I'm -- paraphrasing Woody Allen's paraphrasing of Emily Dickinson -- "without feathers." Although I do need the eggs.