April 20, 2008
Few quirks of modern politics aggravate me quite as much as idolatry: the wrongheaded and ultimately self-defeating tendency of ordinary people to put popular politicians up on a pedestal. The disappointment that ensues when these figures inevitably succumb to the cynicism and dishonesty of politics would be comic, were its implications for citizens’ engagement in the democratic process not so tragic.
A couple of months ago, I noted with satisfaction the apparent end of many African-American voters’ infatuation with former President Bill Clinton and, by extension, current (and irritatingly persistent) Democratic presidential contender Senator Hillary Clinton. I have for some time derided both the glandhanding, pseudo-liberal triangulation that kept the former in power for eight years and the latter’s smug sense that she is entitled both to her party’s nomination and to the presidency. I have long been frustrated with so many African Americans’ loyalty to the Clintons regardless of whether they could readily name any Clinton policies that had directly and substantially improved their lives. And I was frankly disgusted with Toni Morrison’s claim that Bill Clinton’s origins in poverty and a broken home made him America’s “first black president”. Steve Harvey’s standup comedy be damned; this was a degrading conflation of African-American culture with a slew of crippling social pathologies that would make legions of quite authentically black people—myself included—as white as the driven snow.
As pleased as I was—and remain—with the twilight of Clinton worship in the black community, I was annoyed that it was catalyzed by the tendentious misconstruction of a number of the Clintons’ public statements last winter. Senator Clinton in no way denigrated Martin Luther King’s legacy by acknowledging the crucial role President Lyndon Johnson’s support played in bringing the civil rights movement’s goals to fruition. Even if Bill Clinton had called Barack Obama’s career a “fairy tale”—which he didn’t; he called Obama’s unfavorable comparison of Hillary’s Iraq war voting record with his own a “fairy tale”—there would have been nothing intrinsically racial, let alone racist, about the comment. And what was so racist about Mark Penn’s suspicion that unscrupulous Republican strategists might use Obama’s past drug use against him in the general election?
Still, if these teapot tempests prompted black voters to look at the Clintons more skeptically, I was and am willing to live with it. Bill and Hillary have always struck me as political opportunists who seek the presidency for its own sake, rather than to actually solve America’s problems—soulless machine politicians with little principled vision of where they want to take the country. So I was pleased to see the Clinton brand take a beating not only in the black community but also among those Democrats who used to reflexively close ranks around Slick Willie whenever he stood in the Republicans’ crosshairs. I watched with glee as liberals looked aghast at the Clintons’ arrogance in this campaign and asked themselves, “You mean Bill and Hill really are a couple of slick, power-hungry politicians after all? Could the Republicans have been right about them all along?”
I thus fêted Barack Obama’s meteoric rise from total obscurity just four years ago to the brink of the Democratic nomination for president today. I am delighted to see an African-American candidate have a realistic shot at the presidency, due in large part to his transcendence of fruitless racial grievance-mongering—à la Sharpton or Jackson—and his resulting ability to unite Americans of disparate backgrounds behind him. And the underdog-lover in me could not help but cheer as he pulled ahead of Hillary to sit within striking distance of sewing up his party’s nomination.
Alas, with political viability seems to have come the almost inevitable corruption in political character. It was not long before my other instincts—including the aforementioned abhorrence of idolatry and my hatred of cheesy cant—began to kick in. As the winter of 2008 wore on and Obama won caucus after primary, his boyish, big-ear-to-big-ear grin began to smack of smugness, and his gaseous, meaningless mantras—“We are the change we’ve been waiting for”; “Yes we can!”—increasingly grated on my ears. His doctrinaire liberalism squares poorly with my right-leaning centrism. His deification by googols of college kids frankly unnerves me, given my contempt for the snotty, jejune gauchisme that passes for “progressive” thought on most college campuses these days. And I actually have nightmares about that embarrassingly obsequious portrait of Obama with a halo behind his head—seriously!—with which the groupies at Rolling Stone magazine recently disgraced their cover.
Yet none of Obama’s flaws disappoints me more than his capitulation to the same Clintonian hypocrisy to which he claims to be immune.
The illusion of that immunity crumbled in the face of the news that an economic advisor to Obama’s campaign had assured a Canadian TV news network that his candidate’s denunciations of NAFTA—and promises to renegotiate or abrogate the treaty—were mere election-year posturing. Not that I was terribly surprised at the news. I had never figured Obama to have the cojones to screw America’s closest neighbors and trading partners so egregiously. For that matter, I always wondered how he planned to reconcile such a move with his stated goal of restoring America’s image in the world. Now it was exposed as the same old mendacious pandering we’ve come to expect from politicians. “So much for Obama’s new style of politics,” I remember thinking to myself.
So much, indeed. In his recent Philadelphia debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama denied ever having supported a total ban on handgun possession—a denial that flies in the face of his filing of a questionnaire with a liberal advocacy group in 1996 that called for just such a ban. And his promises to begin to withdraw American troops from Iraq immediately upon coming to office did not stop him from claiming, at General David Petraeus’ recent testimony before the Senate, that “no one’s asking for a complete pullout without regard to conditions on the ground” (to paraphrase his words as reported in the New York Times). I will say just this: if you seriously believe President Obama will keep his promise to bug out of Iraq even in the face of the bloodbath that is likely to ensue, I’ve got a subprime mortgage loan to sell you.
I recently had a spirited argument with an acquaintance of mine on this very subject. A committed Obama disciple, my friend conceded the scant difference between Obama’s and Hillary’s policy proposals but put his faith in the former’s ability to “inspire” the American people. Stifling a groan, I asked the obvious question: “Inspire” them to do what? And how is one of the hardest-core liberals in the Senate supposed to particularly inspire more than about half the electorate? And how easily could he inspire them after they are let down, as they are sure to be, by the inevitable compromises of his presidency? I am still waiting on his answer.
Not that any of this will necessarily take much of the bloom off Obama’s rose. The peculiar stubbornness of political idolaters can endure long after the objects of their affection have taken their final bow. John F. Kennedy’s image of bold vision and youthful vigor has been only minimally afflicted by the taint of his foot-dragging on civil rights or the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan’s image as a paragon of fiscal discipline has suffered relatively little—among his fans at least—from the mountainous federal deficits he left in his wake. Ah, well—what does it matter? They inspired people. And thanks largely to that inspiration, I see little hope of persuading people to treat politicians—all politicians—with the skepticism they so richly deserve.
A couple of months ago, I noted with satisfaction the apparent end of many African-American voters’ infatuation with former President Bill Clinton and, by extension, current (and irritatingly persistent) Democratic presidential contender Senator Hillary Clinton. I have for some time derided both the glandhanding, pseudo-liberal triangulation that kept the former in power for eight years and the latter’s smug sense that she is entitled both to her party’s nomination and to the presidency. I have long been frustrated with so many African Americans’ loyalty to the Clintons regardless of whether they could readily name any Clinton policies that had directly and substantially improved their lives. And I was frankly disgusted with Toni Morrison’s claim that Bill Clinton’s origins in poverty and a broken home made him America’s “first black president”. Steve Harvey’s standup comedy be damned; this was a degrading conflation of African-American culture with a slew of crippling social pathologies that would make legions of quite authentically black people—myself included—as white as the driven snow.
As pleased as I was—and remain—with the twilight of Clinton worship in the black community, I was annoyed that it was catalyzed by the tendentious misconstruction of a number of the Clintons’ public statements last winter. Senator Clinton in no way denigrated Martin Luther King’s legacy by acknowledging the crucial role President Lyndon Johnson’s support played in bringing the civil rights movement’s goals to fruition. Even if Bill Clinton had called Barack Obama’s career a “fairy tale”—which he didn’t; he called Obama’s unfavorable comparison of Hillary’s Iraq war voting record with his own a “fairy tale”—there would have been nothing intrinsically racial, let alone racist, about the comment. And what was so racist about Mark Penn’s suspicion that unscrupulous Republican strategists might use Obama’s past drug use against him in the general election?
Still, if these teapot tempests prompted black voters to look at the Clintons more skeptically, I was and am willing to live with it. Bill and Hillary have always struck me as political opportunists who seek the presidency for its own sake, rather than to actually solve America’s problems—soulless machine politicians with little principled vision of where they want to take the country. So I was pleased to see the Clinton brand take a beating not only in the black community but also among those Democrats who used to reflexively close ranks around Slick Willie whenever he stood in the Republicans’ crosshairs. I watched with glee as liberals looked aghast at the Clintons’ arrogance in this campaign and asked themselves, “You mean Bill and Hill really are a couple of slick, power-hungry politicians after all? Could the Republicans have been right about them all along?”
I thus fêted Barack Obama’s meteoric rise from total obscurity just four years ago to the brink of the Democratic nomination for president today. I am delighted to see an African-American candidate have a realistic shot at the presidency, due in large part to his transcendence of fruitless racial grievance-mongering—à la Sharpton or Jackson—and his resulting ability to unite Americans of disparate backgrounds behind him. And the underdog-lover in me could not help but cheer as he pulled ahead of Hillary to sit within striking distance of sewing up his party’s nomination.
Alas, with political viability seems to have come the almost inevitable corruption in political character. It was not long before my other instincts—including the aforementioned abhorrence of idolatry and my hatred of cheesy cant—began to kick in. As the winter of 2008 wore on and Obama won caucus after primary, his boyish, big-ear-to-big-ear grin began to smack of smugness, and his gaseous, meaningless mantras—“We are the change we’ve been waiting for”; “Yes we can!”—increasingly grated on my ears. His doctrinaire liberalism squares poorly with my right-leaning centrism. His deification by googols of college kids frankly unnerves me, given my contempt for the snotty, jejune gauchisme that passes for “progressive” thought on most college campuses these days. And I actually have nightmares about that embarrassingly obsequious portrait of Obama with a halo behind his head—seriously!—with which the groupies at Rolling Stone magazine recently disgraced their cover.
Yet none of Obama’s flaws disappoints me more than his capitulation to the same Clintonian hypocrisy to which he claims to be immune.
The illusion of that immunity crumbled in the face of the news that an economic advisor to Obama’s campaign had assured a Canadian TV news network that his candidate’s denunciations of NAFTA—and promises to renegotiate or abrogate the treaty—were mere election-year posturing. Not that I was terribly surprised at the news. I had never figured Obama to have the cojones to screw America’s closest neighbors and trading partners so egregiously. For that matter, I always wondered how he planned to reconcile such a move with his stated goal of restoring America’s image in the world. Now it was exposed as the same old mendacious pandering we’ve come to expect from politicians. “So much for Obama’s new style of politics,” I remember thinking to myself.
So much, indeed. In his recent Philadelphia debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama denied ever having supported a total ban on handgun possession—a denial that flies in the face of his filing of a questionnaire with a liberal advocacy group in 1996 that called for just such a ban. And his promises to begin to withdraw American troops from Iraq immediately upon coming to office did not stop him from claiming, at General David Petraeus’ recent testimony before the Senate, that “no one’s asking for a complete pullout without regard to conditions on the ground” (to paraphrase his words as reported in the New York Times). I will say just this: if you seriously believe President Obama will keep his promise to bug out of Iraq even in the face of the bloodbath that is likely to ensue, I’ve got a subprime mortgage loan to sell you.
I recently had a spirited argument with an acquaintance of mine on this very subject. A committed Obama disciple, my friend conceded the scant difference between Obama’s and Hillary’s policy proposals but put his faith in the former’s ability to “inspire” the American people. Stifling a groan, I asked the obvious question: “Inspire” them to do what? And how is one of the hardest-core liberals in the Senate supposed to particularly inspire more than about half the electorate? And how easily could he inspire them after they are let down, as they are sure to be, by the inevitable compromises of his presidency? I am still waiting on his answer.
Not that any of this will necessarily take much of the bloom off Obama’s rose. The peculiar stubbornness of political idolaters can endure long after the objects of their affection have taken their final bow. John F. Kennedy’s image of bold vision and youthful vigor has been only minimally afflicted by the taint of his foot-dragging on civil rights or the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan’s image as a paragon of fiscal discipline has suffered relatively little—among his fans at least—from the mountainous federal deficits he left in his wake. Ah, well—what does it matter? They inspired people. And thanks largely to that inspiration, I see little hope of persuading people to treat politicians—all politicians—with the skepticism they so richly deserve.
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