Well, I finally made the leap.
I have been wavering for months between Edwards and Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, and like many Californians, saw no reason to jump the gun on making that decision before I got a better look at how they campaigned in the early states. I liked Edwards' positions on the economy, poverty, labor and resisting the corporatization of America, and was very impressed with his policy positions on Iraq and global warming. But his campaign just never took off, and truth be told I never really trusted his conversion from moderate Southern senator to populist champion of the little guy. I wanted to, but couldn't bring myself to trust it.
On the other hand, There was and is a lot to like about Obama.
On the other hand, There was and is a lot to like about Obama. He has marched with us against the war in 2002, and for the dignity of immigrants in 2005. His opposition to the Iraq war, which will go down in history as one of the most disastrous strategic mistakes this country has ever made, is very important to me. As someone who has spent some time living and traveling abroad, and who has seen the disparity between the hermetically sealed world that diplomats, politicians and businessmen inhabit abroad compared with the lives of everyday people in those countries, I have a great deal of respect for Obama's experience in Indonesia. His soaring rhetoric moves me to my very core, and frames many (although not all) of liberalism's core tenets in a manner that places them in the very foundation of the American story. As they should be, and as they historically have been.
His policy papers do not go as far as I would like towards bringing back the social democracy of the New Deal, but there are a lot of genuinely good nuts and bolts policy proposals in his Blueprint for Change that are well worth poring over. His healthcare proposal isn't the gold standard single-payer plan that Kuncinich backed, but it is better than Hillary Clinton's proposals, both in '94 and today. His foreign policy looks to be the most internationalist and diplomatic in several generations, but still holds on to this idea of American exceptionalism and imposed global "leadership" that I feel is at the root of a lot of our problems. Obama wants us to be a great country again, while I am really more interested in ending the empire and acting as a good neighbor, one among equals.
As a radical (ie. someone who feels that fundamental change is needed in several areas of our political and economic systems), I still have some misgivings about Obama. He is, after all, a liberal reformer, someone who believes that if the way the government works is reformed and dedicated to better ends using smarter and more effective means, that we can still be that shining city on a hill, light unto the nations. I don't think we can get there with the current set of assumptions that underpin our political and economic system.
And yet, the very campaign that he is running is changing our political reality, right under our feet. I have seen so many people that I know be moved by his words, this campaign. You see it in the tens of thousands of people showing up to his speeches. You can see it in the millions of newly registered voters and the unexpectedly high youth turnouts in the primaries so far. We are at a watershed in American politics, as a younger, more liberal, more diverse generation starts to move into the electorate, and Obama is catching the edge of that wave, and playing to it. As we have seen in South Carolina, where Obama outpolled several Republican candidates put together, the very electoral math in this country could change as a result of the energy he's tapping into and nurturing. Just as how a lot of the laudable changes of the 1960s were spearheaded by people inspired by Kennedy but doing the work at the grassroots (often, ironically enough, with little help or occasional resistance from the not-as-liberal-as-portrayed Kennedy), so too I suspect that if Obama is the Democratic nominee the social movement he's encouraging may well transform this country, quite regardless of what bills he ultimately signs into law.
You see, it is the congregation, not the preacher, where the real potential for change lies. Obama, like Dean and Wellstone before him, knows this. You can hear it in his use of "we" in his speeches, where Hillary's are invariably about "I" or "me." The fact of the matter is, Americans are tired of being asked to be petty and materialistic and cynical. Especially after 9/11, there was this untapped and largely unspoken desire to be asked to be better people, to make the world or the country a better place, to prove to ourselves collectively, unconsciously perhaps, that we were decent people. Instead, we were told by Democrats and Republicans alike that our highest calling was to buy stuff, sit down, shut up, take off our shoes and do what we were told. We were told to be consumers and subjects, not self-respecting citizens.
Obama's campaign, like Dean's in 2004, calls upon us to be better citizens, to serve a higher calling than just as passive consumers of goods or political platitudes. It is also, for the first time in a generation, defining what it means to be American in as broad and inclusive terms as I have ever seen. Much is made of the fact that Obama would be the first non-white president; what is more significant in my opinion is that the America he is championing is a profoundly diverse vision, encompassing people of all ethnicities as well as across the urban-rural divide. It is striking a deep chord, and may well prove transformative over time, depending on how engaged and active those who are moved by it remain after the election is over.
As I wrote a couple of years ago in a different context,
Obama will be a great statesman one day, when he lives in a nation where the popular sentiment, the will of the mob, is raging for change, and forces him at the point of a ballot box or threat of widespread civil disturbance to legislate the liberal agenda that he believes in, deep down inside, in private. Obama will be a great statesman when he is able to act as FDR or JFK once did, and moderate the impassioned cries for progressive change, and stand up to the forces of reaction and oppression, and negotiate a new truce between those two opposing historical forces. But he won't do that without our dialectic force pushing him inexorably in that direction, necessitating the intervention of statesmen such as himself as peacemakers and moderators.
The movement he's building with his campaign could very well grow into that sort of political force. It could end up getting Democrats a big enough majority in Congress (and especially, the Senate) to push him in the right direction. For that reason alone, he'll be getting my vote.
originally at surf putah