Recently, I've been forced to deal with my own rank hypocrisy concerning the Obama administration. I find myself flying off the handle in all directions, attacking the new team in Washington one minute and defending it the next, praising its critics and then assaulting them for being unreasonable and expecting too much, too soon. The end result is that I'm far more confused about the future of Barack Obama's presidency than I was with Bush's. When George was in office, it was clear that things were bad and going to get worse. It was simply matter of holding on for dear life until the wretched, dark days were over. But with Obama, I find myself hopefully disappointed, waiting for Barack to prove to me that he isn't the man I didn't think he was during the campaign, but now think he might be (maybe).
Today provided a perfect forum for the muddled analysis that such a frame of mind produces. Frank Rich, who I believe to be the most eyes-wide-open political commentator around, had this to say about the Tom Daschle fiasco:
In reality, Daschle's tax shortfall, an apparently honest mistake, was only a red flag for the larger syndrome that much of Washington still doesn't get. It was the source, not the amount, of his unreported income that did him in. The car and driver advertised his post-Senate immersion in the greedy bipartisan culture of entitlement and crony capitalism that both helped create our economic meltdown (on Wall Street) and failed to police it (in Washington). Daschle might well have been the best choice to lead health-care reform. But his honorable public record was instantly vaporized by tales of his cozy, lucrative relationships with the very companies he'd have to adjudicate as health czar.
I ended up agreeing with Rich's point and then immediately attacking him. "I don't know why everyone is acting surprised," I said. "We all knew who Obama was before he took office." I was, in essence, mad at Rich for writing an article I agreed with because it criticized an aspect of the President I thought everybody should be familiar with, even though Obama did whatever he could to present an opposing image during the campaign. It's always an interesting feeling to recognize the degree to which your current sentence is contradicting your last one even before you finish saying it. It's rather unnerving, to say the least.
While I was on the campaign, I basically held two opposing visions of who Barack Obama was. When talking to a voter, I argued using the same language I now put forth - we know who this guy really is - but to opposite effect: he's with us. I argued that because I believed it. And I believed it for two reasons. The first was that there were indeed some genuine differences between what Obama's policies called for and what other candidates had put forth. The Iraq war was the major one, with Obama being the only candidate who could honestly say that he had opposed the war from the start. I thought that was reflective of a different world view at a time when a new vision of US foreign policy was critical.
There was also an entire component of Obama's "power-to-the-people" message, an idea perpetually heard from both Democratic and Republican candidates alike, that simply appeared more honest. On that score, he seemed to be the first mainstream American politician who was systematically linking rhetoric with infrastructure. His campaign was holding training sessions led by actual community organizers - people far too blunt to be political professionals - that featured lessons that nearly knocked me out of my chair. I remember sitting in a Chicago classroom in September of 2007 at "Camp Obama" while life-long organizer Mike Kruglic, who had known the then-candidate decades before he was a blip on the radar screen, spoke about how mad it made him when the poor and bedraggled masses passively accepted their fate, unable to even imagine taking action to change their lives for the better. "Power is good," he said as if speaking to these men and women alone. "Powerlessness is evil."
I was shocked. I had gotten behind Obama because I thought he was the most likely candidate to promote progressive policies from the top down. But now, I thought something else entirely was at work. "So that's what this campaign is about," I remember saying to myself. I don't write this flippantly. It was a paradigm-shifting moment that stuck with me every day I was on the campaign, and which always quelled any emerging fears that Obama was a wolf in the people's clothing.
But ultimately, my true faith was in the man himself. He is different, I thought. He's had a unique upbringing. He's worldly and uncharacteristically educated. And I simply could not imagine that a black man in America would ever be able to fall in line with the same old group of people and policies. His personal experiences would be too different to allow that to happen. In its own way, that was a prejudiced viewpoint to have - Alan Keyes and Michael Steele don't seem to mind the status quo club at all - but it's what I thought.
At the same time, I felt as though Obama was basically pushing the same mainstream Democratic platform that I agreed with sometimes - making universal healthcare coverage a priority, for example - and disagreed with at other times - unquestioning military and political support for Israel being one such issue. My concerns were confirmed at different times on the campaign trail. At that same September 2007 meeting, I asked a visiting foreign policy staffer if Obama would rethink the idea of using the "war on terrorism" language and intellectual framework that equated terrorists groups with monolithic armies massing at the border. "Well, we are at war," he said. When Obama had spoken earlier that year about the suffering of the Palestinian people - an objective reality that any honest person should be able to admit without being accused of bias against Israel - he was criticized, and quickly blamed Hamas for that suffering. In the fall, I listened to him justify not supporting a single-payer healthcare system because it wouldn't be practical to implement right now, and heard him say that calling for an elimination of coal power plants would be a "fight that we would loose politically." He supported increasing the size of the military, not shrinking it. He wouldn't support gay marriage, arguing for civil unions instead.
But through it all, I didn't have any doubts that the country needed him. The fundamental issue in my mind was that he himself was a different kind of politician, and as a result, his policies couldn't help but produce real change, which was what the campaign was supposed to be all about. If he wasn't always pushing the envelope, it was because he was savvy, not spineless. He had a plan to get us to the mountaintop. We just needed to believe, both in ourselves and in our leader.
Matt Taibbi is a journalist for Rolling Stone. His obscenity-laced, vitriolic language has always had the sad effect of marginalizing both him and his insights. But it has also freed him from the confines of conventional publications, and hence conventional thought. Covering Obama's campaign, he found himself unimpressed by the message, but having a hard time not believing the messenger. Here is what he wrote about Obama in July of 2008:
We've become trained to look for the man behind the mask...But I'm not sure there is a mask when it comes to Barack Obama. It sounds crazy, but he might actually be this guy, this couldn't-possibly-exist guy, inside and out. I heard Joe Lieberman talk about his middle-class dad, I heard Hillary plaster every corner of Pennsylvania with talk about her grandfather's sojourn in the lace factory, I heard John Edwards tell everyone who would listen, and even some who wouldn't, about what being the son of a millworker meant to him, and in every case I could feel the cold hand of political calculation crawling up my shirt as they spoke.
Then I hear Obama tell audiences about his grandmother and her time working on a bomber assembly line during World War II. Intellectually I know it's the same thing -- but when you actually watch him in person, you get this crazy sense that these schlock ready-for-paperback patriotic tales really are a big part of his emotional makeup. You listen to him talking about his grandfather waving a little American flag on the Hawaiian beach as he watched the astronauts come in to shore, and you can almost see that these moments actually have some kind of poetic meaning for him, and that he views his own already-historic run as a continuation of that pat-but-inspirational childhood story -- putting a man on the moon then, putting a black man in the White House now...
... When those other guys took this act on the campaign trail, it was obvious they were just reading lines in a bad script. But maybe it sounds different coming from Obama because he actually means what he says, as weird as that would be. The American Dream, after all, is dying. We do need something new. That much is painfully obvious.
What's confusing about Obama is that he's so successful at projecting an air of genuineness and honesty, even as he navigates the veritable Mount Everest of fakery... that is our modern electoral system. And the reason it's confusing is that we've grown so used to presidential candidates who fall short of the images they present in public, we don't even know anymore what a man worth the office would look like. Is this him? Or is this just a guy with a gift for concealing the ugliness of the system he represents? As I watch Obama on the campaign trail, I know I'm listening to the Same Old [Stuff], delivered by a candidate who could cross the Atlantic on a bridge constructed entirely from Wall Street cash culled for him by party hacks and insiders. But I suddenly don't care. It's not just that the alternative is four years of the madman John McCain. It's that, if Obama wins, it will be interesting to find out, at long last, if there really can be something truly different about someone who sounds so much the same.
Now, here is Taibbi again writing just over two months ago, reacting to the nomination of Tom Daschle to head HHS and get right what the Clintons tried to do 16 years ago, before anybody knew about the tax problem and the chauffeured limousine:
But in picking Daschle -- who as an adviser to the K Street law firm Alston and Bird has spent the last four years burning up the sheets with the nation's fattest insurance and pharmaceutical interests -- Obama is essentially announcing that he has no intention of seriously reforming the health care industry. And I know that lots of public policy people are hailing this pick, saying Daschle is perfect for the job ("His new leadership position confirms that the incoming Obama administration has made health care reform a top and early priority for action in 2009," Ron Pollack, the director of Families USA, told reporters), but when they say that I think they mean the following: "Out of all the bought-off Washington whores who could have been given this job, Daschle is the best one. His fake reform will go the farthest in its approximation of actual action than the fake reform of any other possible whore-candidate." Actually that probably sums up the ideological profile of Obama quite well generally -- but that's another story.
Here was my reaction to that pick: silence. I knew absolutely nothing about Daschle, except for two unrelated pieces of information. The first was that he was a Senate Majority Leader who lost his seat. This seemed to indicate a lack of fortitude. On the other hand, I had watched him at a campaign stop talking to some local Obama supporters, and he seemed to be a really nice guy. He's probably too nice for Congress, I thought to myself. Honestly. That was what I thought.
It turns out that I was 180 degrees off. Tom Daschle loved Congress, and Congress loved him back - or at least, the business of Congress did. Was Taibbi being too hard on him? Perhaps. Would Daschle he have promoted healthcare legislation that was better for America than what George Bush would give us? Almost certainly. Would it have fixed the problem from the bottom up? Well, on second thought, probably not.
But why was I so angry at Frank Rich this morning? I was accusing him of being behind the story, of writing about Daschle's problems - and what they said about Obama's inner circle - months after Daschle's nomination had been announced. I was essentially blaming Rich for failing to inform me sooner that this was a bad pick, even though I could have easily found that out for myself. In retrospect, it was probably because I didn't want to look.
Which makes me feel like my real motivation was an attempt to hide my own embarrassment about the decision to pick Daschle to begin with. I tell friends these days that I'll never be angry at Obama, only disappointed. The difference between him and Bush is that Bush never even knew enough to make good decisions. But Obama does. And so when he makes bad ones, it isn't because he's ignorant. It's because he's failing to do the one intangible yet crucial thing he said he could do better than Hillary Clinton: lead. In a political wasteland dominated by false choices and deliberately deceptive paradigms, Obama held the potential to reshape the debate both in Washington and in people's minds. His campaign might have spent a lot of time talking up the ability of the American people to bring change to Washington, but, while sincere, it's also a long-term goal. For right now, Obama's message is clear. He said it himself when criticized during the transition for surrounding himself with so many old Washington hands: "The change comes from me."
So when the change doesn't come from him, it's disappointing and embarrassing, especially to those of us who promised exactly that for so long: that the change would come from him. When Obama makes a good decision, I use it to justify that narrative. And when he makes a bad one, I try to give myself an out by saying, "Well, we knew who he really was all along." But perhaps that was always the point: we didn't know who he was. We knew who we wanted him to be. And faced with choosing between a group of known-quantity candidates like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards whose potential seemed acceptable but limited, we were willing to take the chance that this guy would blow through the rafters and, to quaintly co-opt a phrase from the campaign, "change the world."Such a hope sustained us through the campaign, and through other questionable transition appointments as well. ("Hillary's going to answer to Obama at State, not the other way around.")
"The new president who vowed to change Washington's culture will have to fight much harder to keep from being co-opted by it instead," Rich wrote today. "There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble's insiders' club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe."
The fundamental concern expresed by sentences like these - that you can't take the tiller of the ship of state without consigning yourself to the course being charted, regardless of how much we need a change of course - is being heard around the world. The New York Times also published an Egyptian editorial today which had this to say:
We saw Mr. Obama as a symbol of...justice. We welcomed him with almost total enthusiasm until he underwent his first real test: Gaza. Even before he officially took office, we expected him to take a stand against Israel's war on Gaza. We still hope that he will condemn, if only with simple words, this massacre that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, many of them civilians...But Mr. Obama has been silent. So his brilliantly written Inaugural Speech did not leave a big impression on Egyptians. We had already begun to tune out... Have Egyptians irreversibly gone off Mr. Obama? No. Egyptians still think that this one-of-a-kind American president can do great things. Young Egyptians' admiration for America is offset by frustration with American foreign policy. Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this came from one Egyptian blogger: "I love America. It's the country of dreams ... but I wonder if I will ever be able someday to declare my love."
It's amazing to recognize the same feeling in my own mind: a desperate desire to, as Michelle Obama meant to say, be proud of my country again, proud not just of its professed ideals but of the way its government works and the politicies and actions that work produces.
It is as if the world over, people believe in Obama. And just like anyone who believes in anyone else, when they let us down, we jump through hoops to explain why our faith is still justified.
And yet, even understanding this, I still have that faith, and that hope.
