Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (8 page)

There is an echo of Shakespearean archetypes in the American contest, with Barack Obama as an apprentice Prospero uncertainly testing his mesmerizing powers against the sleepless ambition of Hillary Clinton, a twenty-first-century—kinder, gentler, but still remorseless—Lady Macbeth. I can hear Hillary, fully in character, declaiming to her troops, “But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail.” The Clinton machine showed Tuesday night why it holds such esteem in the cold and
calculating hearts of those who follow politics as a profession. Here was Obama coming off a sweep of eleven states in a row, finally brought to ground with a real thumping from Hillary in Ohio and Rhode Island, and beaten as well in the wide, wild state of Texas.

Bill Clinton, uproarious, spotlight-craving, ungovernable Bill, had been tucked away into lesser corners of her campaign. Bill, it was early discovered, had to be administered to the voters of the Democratic primaries in measured doses. His early appearances raised the unsettling spectre of a dual presidency and reawakened images, best forgotten, of the man’s own term in the White House.

Containing Bill, as the tactic was so delightfully called, was the first step toward Hillary’s re-emergence. The second was to reach for whatever was not nailed down and throw it at Obama. This was formally announced as the “kitchen sink” strategy, a homely metaphor to convey an all-out assault, maximum bombardment on every issue and flaw of Obama or his campaign, from his punchlines to his past or present associations.

I don’t know if Mrs. Clinton has a cat these days. There used to be one called Socks. If there is a Socks II, it most likely will be found lying flat, bruised and lifeless on Obama’s doorstep, its last moments on Earth spent as a projectile at the Hillary counterattack. In desperate times, ammo is ammo, even when it purrs.

Next, the Oprah-canonized candidate of charismatic uplift was hauled down from his hitherto-untroubled
flight in the sunny altitudes of Hope and Change by a press shamed by Hillary herself into properly questioning him. In Obama’s words, after Ohio and Texas, she “played the ref.” He said he didn’t think the press would fall for it. Poor, naive Obama.

Most telling for Canadian spectators, Clinton hit him on his NAFTA statements, accusing him of retailing a hard line to Ohio voters and then having some minion run to Canadian diplomats to signal us that it was just noise from a stump speech.

Could such things be? Could the freshest, most inspiring presence in U.S. politics since John F. Kennedy be warbling of the New Jerusalem while on the campaign platform and practising the Old Washington shuffle—politics as it always has been—while off?
Eek!
I say, and I mean it.

Her campaign ratcheted up the rhetoric. Bob Shrum, Democratic consultant par excellence, wailed: “You’ve got a right-wing government in Canada that is trying to help the Republicans and is out there actively interfering in this campaign.” It was as good as a play, as we say back home. The NAFTA story, whatever its dubious provenance, was rocket fuel for Hillary in Ohio and, moreover, was the pebble that hit the windshield of Obama’s “untouchability.” After NAFTAgate, as inevitably and drearily it was named, the American press went after the Illinois senator on his Chicago connections, and the late-night talk shows—the real agents of opinion in American journalism—started dealing with Hillary with something resembling kindness.

It’s all lining up for a grand collision within the Democratic Party. Both camps have supporters that by now have invested their full being into the causes of their candidates. This is not a typical campaign. With the first woman and the first black candidate as champions they see in their respective campaigns the chance to “make history.” One has to lose.

If the Clinton campaign, with all its guile and toughness, does indeed halt the rise of Obama, then surely it cannot escape a penalty for forestalling the arrival of America’s first black president. Nor, given the intensity with which some of Hillary’s supporters look at the prospect of the first woman in the White House, can I see how Barack Obama will escape a like response for impeding her ascension. Identity or cultural politics have very brittle edges. And the Democratic campaign, whether by design or not, has become a contest between the immensely charged and emotive themes of race and gender.

Half of the hopes of this most vivid campaign are bound to be disappointed.

Neither Prospero’s magic nor Lady Macbeth’s steel resolve can avert a painful fracture.

Abraham Lincoln knew the power of biblical quotation. He was a public figure during a time when recourse to scriptural reference by political leaders was neither as contentious nor as rare as it is today. One of Lincoln’s most famous orations, for example, is known by a phrase he borrowed from the gospel of Matthew: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

As I watched Barack Obama on Thursday night, on stage in front of a set designed to suggest the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, a variant of that compelling maxim insistently came to mind: A speech divided against itself cannot persuade.

Mr. Obama’s speech was at war with its setting. His campaign had picked the site (a massive outdoor arena) and set the stage for one type of speech, and their candidate (almost entirely) gave another. There was a second tension or contradiction within this speech as well, possibly even larger and more consequential than the first. The speech was to be given by the first black candidate for president on the forty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s incomparably eloquent “I have a dream” speech. Yet, when Mr. Obama—whose achievement may reasonably be seen as a living realization of Dr. King’s prophetic words—took to the stage, he left all direct linkage to the anniversary, all allusion to Dr. King and his words, to a coda, to a few paragraphs at the end of an otherwise fairly stock political
speech. Until those few concluding paragraphs, Obama’s presentation could have been delivered—and this is a cruel measure of the opportunities missed or declined—by Joe Biden, the campaign’s designated hit man.

Dr. King’s speech, we remember, was given to a massive audience in front of the Lincoln Memorial and carried on television as well. King was wise enough to realize that addressing a huge audience in the shadow of the statue to the Great Emancipator called for a style of address, a nobility of statement, that “belonged” to the occasion and its setting. Mr. Obama, for all his wonderful rhetorical instincts, in his first speech as the Democrats’ officially nominated presidential candidate, missed or declined the parallel connections available to him.

In other words, his speech lacked decorum. It was at odds with—in fact, beneath—its occasion (the King anniversary) and its grand setting. I found this very strange.

Mr. Obama’s candidacy is about nothing if not about his capacity to represent a plateau moment, not just in American politics but in the tormented history of America itself. There is no greater fact in the Obama candidacy than that, should he succeed, a country that began in the terrible self-contradiction of slavery for blacks—while proclaiming the equality of all men—will have awarded its ultimate office to an African American.

The Obama candidacy, in this sense, is immensely symbolic, and that is the major source of its great power. The symbolism does not have to be trumpeted by Mr. Obama
himself, nor should it be. Symbols do their own communicating. Why does anyone think that nearly 80,000 people show up at night to hear a speech from a “politician” except that they have an intuition that some special moment in their country’s history is unfolding, and that the Obama candidacy is its vehicle?

He did not cause this moment. But he is its realization. Dr. King and Lincoln, both of whose presences were meant to be suggested by the setting and the day, were the great historic agents, each in his own way, who moved American history to the point where it may—finally—reconcile the terrible contradiction of racial inequity present at the founding of a constitutionally declared egalitarian society.

But Mr. Obama’s speech seemed tone-deaf to the importance of its moment. Wisecracks about George Bush, sniggering witticisms playing off a useless sitcom of thirty years ago (
Eight Is Enough
), tendentious putdowns of John McCain, stale pseudo-populism (the corporations, the oil companies)—this kind of stuff almost stole the moment of its overwhelming magic. Having reached the mountaintop of which Dr. King spoke so longingly, why was Mr. Obama so determined, rhetorically, to return to the valley?

The crowd came for history, and Mr. Obama gave them talking points. But I said “almost.” When, toward the end of an otherwise disappointing address, Mr. Obama cued his audience to the significance of giving this speech forty-five years to the day of that other speech in front of the real Lincoln Memorial, what this night meant—finally—had a
chance to breathe. And the Obama candidacy shimmered back into its peculiar and commanding magic.

Mr. Obama should be careful, however. If Americans, particularly Democrats, wanted another combat politician, Hillary Clinton would have been on the stage Thursday night. They have opted, instead, for a campaign touched with a sense of nobility. A house divided, or the dream? Which is it to be?

Time
magazine has genuflected to the obvious and named Barack Obama its person of the year. Which is a good thing.
Time
can be spotty in its choices—either gruesomely correct, as when it named the Planet (incense to the Gaia crowd), or unwholesomely sycophantic, as when it stuck You (that’s you, smart reader) on the cover.

Seeing Mr. Obama, I thought:
Could have been worse
. I guess the Chaise Longue will have to wait for a quieter year. But this year, the magazine couldn’t have gone anywhere else. A fair portion of the American press may have jettisoned every pretense of standard reporting on Mr. Obama, hardly distinguishable in the tone of commentary from preteen girls “Oh–my–God–ing” in the presence of the latest boy band.

Time
has gushed with the best of them. In November, in yet another cover story on The One, it rated Mr. Obama above the sons of kings and even, oh my, above Christ himself: “Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope …”

I shed a tear on reading that. Brought back the molasses knobs of my youth, great glucose bombs that would fell a moose with their sheer sweetness. Yet, the excesses of
Time
, and the distinct strain of pure idolatry that has infested great swaths of the North American press, don’t change the consideration that Barack Obama was
the
story of 2008.

He swiped the Democratic nomination from the Clintons, who, until Mr. Obama appeared on the scene, had that trinket so much in their possession that the contest for the top spot was marked down purely as a ritual. It was Hillary’s, and that was all there was to it. And then, from out of the murky backwaters of Chicago politics, came a little-known black politician with the exotic name of Barack Hussein Obama, who glided with balletic insouciance past the shark’s teeth, muscle and cunning of Clinton Inc.

He should be person of the year—of the decade—just for that. But it might also be useful to hold in mind, while the hymns to The One as he approaches Inauguration Day increase in volume and fervour, that that’s all he’s done. His Senate record is an empty suitcase. His national achievement is—outside the nomination—precisely nil. Sarah Palin’s resumé is, objectively, much more substantial.

Hillary was right when she jibed that Mr. Obama was just one speech—the address he gave to the Democratic convention that loosed John Kerry on the American electorate. Off the platform, he’s a great “um-er” and “ah-er” who stumbles with a sentence in a manner that hails to mind the image of George W. Bush on one of the latter’s many desperate safaris to link a cowering subject to its about-to-be mauled predicate.

If Mr. Obama were a standard politician, the empty resumé would have done him in. But this is precisely the point about Mr. Obama, that he has blasted free of that
category. Recall that string of losses he endured toward the end of the eternal primary campaign. Hillary was beating him state after state after state. And, yet, it hardly seemed to matter. Any other politician would have worn that serial trouncing like a wound. Mr. Obama walked on stage after each successive loss as though he’d just woken up from a comforting nap. The composure he sometimes displays, as many have noted, is almost unearthly: he possesses a centred confidence so strong that it almost deflects reality.

The Obama persona confounds politics as we have known it for at least a generation. His person summons the wish that politics be better. There was not a little intuitive genius in founding his campaign on the most frequently abused concept in politics: hope. That there is a profound desire for improvement in the conduct of public life in America is too obvious to need statement. (The same is true in our country. Oh Lord, how true.)

On some days, U.S. politics appears to be a frightful compound of graft, mismanagement, incompetence, cronyism, sexual misconduct, mediocrity, avarice and feral partisanship. The people who love America fear for her, not from apprehension over her enemies, but from despair over her putative leaders.