A Long Strange Trip
One of my early memories is of being six years old, getting ready to go to school early one morning. My mother had turned on our small black and white TV, and on it I saw a long, solemn procession moving slowly down a street, with many people bearing a raised casket in the middle of the crowd (or was it a long hearse?). The sight filled me with an intense grief that I didn’t understand, and I had to start wailing and running around the house. My mother was startled and tried to shush me, and my father herded me out the door to school with my sister, without another word about it.
Years later I was able to piece back together the scene, and realized that it was Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral ceremony I had seen on television that morning. My parents, never big Kennedy fans, had not been paying attention to the broadcast at all, but it affected me deeply. The scene came up again in a major recurring dream I had when I was nine, and to some extent has remained with me throughout my life.
I believe what I was feeling was collective grief, the sense shared by so many that a great hope had been lost. It is impossible to view our current election season—or any presidential race, for that matter—without hearing that cultural overtone ring loudly again when things heat up. As they are doing now, with or without help from the upcoming anniversary of RFK’s assassination on June 5, 1968.
My first civic post was in second grade, when I was elected secretary of our class council. I thought secretary was a modest position to start with, but my true ambition was to be President of the United States. Not the first woman president, just president. By fifth grade I had rethought that career plan, and decided it would be nice to be on the Newbery Award Committee instead, as I would get to read all the best children’s fiction each year.
In ninth grade, my last year of junior high, I ran for president of the student body. Twice. To this day, I do not know what possessed me to run again the second semester after having been defeated the first. All I can come up with is that I genuinely thought I would do a great job, and felt that I was a better candidate than the others. I don’t remember any adult trying to dissuade me from running, but I remember all too well the hurt that came from defeat. My sole consolation was that, according to the vice principal, I had picked up 200 more votes the second time around.
The first time I ran, my chief opponent was my friend and classmate Jacques Hébert. Everyone loved Jacques. He came from a well-respected African American family, he was tall, good-looking, athletic, smart, and kind. Of course Jacques won, and I didn’t really begrudge him the loss. The second time around I lost to another of the most popular boys in school, but he didn’t have nearly the character or intelligence of Jacques. That one hurt.
All this came back to me this morning, as I puzzled over the dream I had just before waking. In the dream, I see Barack Obama drinking coffee in a café. I greet him, he is an old friend on the lecture/writing/traveling circuit, like several people I know. He looks absolutely exhausted, so I invite him over to my house for dinner and a rest before moving on to his next gig. He accepts gladly.
We drive over in my car, and when he comes into the kitchen I introduce him to my two daughters who are seated at the counter. I tell them, “Say hello to Barack Obama,” and then it occurs to me that this will be a huge deal for them, because they might be meeting the next president of the United States. But to me there is no glamour, he’s just an old friend.
This dream was surprising to me, mostly because I have not been a big Obama supporter. I never trusted his rhetoric about a “new type of politics.” It has always seemed to me that anyone with the ambition to be President must have an astute grasp of politics in general, and “new” or “old” is just a marketing term. His health care proposal, compared to that of Edwards and Clinton, was disappointing, and combined with his inexperience and conciliatory stance toward the right wing of Congress, I feared that the net effect of an Obama presidency would be a profound disillusionment among his ardent followers.
That to me has been the most worrisome aspect of his candidacy: the inevitable popping of the hope bubble, and the damage it will do to the young people who are now engaged in our political system because of his campaign of hope and change. I fundamentally do not want to see another generation become as apathetic and cynical about the process of democracy as my generation has been. And too, I don’t think I can bear to go through more years of political disappointment myself, either.
Yet my dream felt like an admission that he would in fact be the Democratic nominee, something that until today I had not really come to terms with. Obama’s anointing by the Kennedy clan is just another unsettling tone added to the cacaphony of hopes, dreams, fears, and projections already swirling around the country. That cultural harmonic of hope betrayed is ringing loud and clear, and I dread the coming months.
I am not one of those Clinton supporters who would vote for McCain—Gods forbid he ever enters the White House again except by invitation to tea. At least if I do vote for Obama, as seems inevitable at the moment, my dream reminds me that it will be a strategic choice, not a romantic one.
And the fact that Obama looks a lot like my old friend Jacques—I will just try to put that out of my mind. Of course the qualified woman loses to the cute guy in the class. I was really hoping that dynamic would change before my daughters were of voting age, but it looks like we will have to wait another several years before a woman has a chance to just be elected president.
May 30th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
In this country we gave black men the vote before we gave it to a woman of any color. Men before women every time. I’m convinced that the same dynamic is going on here and that we will do it the same way for much the same reasons. I’m not happy about it, not at all, but it does seem to be the way of the US when it comes to progress.
May 30th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Hilary Clinton voted for the Iraq war. And then said “they lied to us!” As if we didn’t already see the lies. That behavior is not good enough for someone who will be Commander in Chief. Because of this, I was never pro Hilary Clinton. Now that Obama has grown more backbone, I’ve turned into a supporter.
Do you really think the US can become any more cynical than it already is? I think a dose of hope (even knowing it is likely to fail. Because frankly, anyone who gets elected inherits a huge mess they’re going to get more blame for) is a good thing.
May 30th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
We shall see whether Obama’s backbone holds up. I’m not exactly sure what events you are referring to, but he got more interesting to me as a candidate when he started being revealed as another politician who has made some compromises to get ahead.
I think the art of national politics is knowing which lies will work for you and which against you. I don’t think that’s cynical though; it’s pretty realistic. The cynicism comes in when our expectations are dashed and we use our hurt and anger as an excuse to declare the whole show meaningless and disengage.
In answer to your question, never say never. OTOH, I hope you’re right about hope.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
“And the fact that Obama looks a lot like my old friend Jacques—I will just try to put that out of my mind. Of course the qualified woman loses to the cute guy in the class. I was really hoping that dynamic would change before my daughters were of voting age, but it looks like we will have to wait another several years before a woman has a chance to just be elected president.”
What’s interesting to me is how the various media/editorial folks seem to plain ole miss the above dynamic.
Talk about racism being the reason Clinton gets votes etc. Talk about a blind eye.
(and yes, it’s moot in one sense. But not in the fact of just not Seeing this pattern and/or not being willing to articulate it)
June 7th, 2008 at 1:24 am
I come from a different country altogether–one I have since left for better pastures: Belgium. I deeply relate to your Kennedy-memory, though. Like you, I vividly remember seeing images of his assassination on black-and-white TV. I must have been about six years old. Vaguely, I remember my mother reacting to the news; even in Belgium, this was big. But I really was too young to understand anything at all, and yet this seemed to be enormously important. Somehow, in spite of the distance of time, space and medium, this seemed realer than real.
From the beginning, I have known that Obama would win. The whole thing is unfortunate, as I had just as much hoped for a woman to win the presidency of the United States. If only one of them had had the sense of running at a different time…
Thank you very much for your contribution.
June 7th, 2008 at 7:36 am
Anne,
Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because she was a woman. She lost because she voted for the war.
There really are reasons to feel good about Obama because his victory is a victory for the relatively progressive wing of the Democratic Party over the comparatively conservative corporate types. People outside of New York just don’t realize how conservative HRC really is.
It’s not just that Clinton voted for the war, it’s that she refused to even talk to the anti-war movement and treated us with disdain. Indeed, the reason Hillary lost has nothing to do with her gender, it’s because she supported the war and did nothing to challenge Bush’s lies about it and then labeled us the naifs while she just repeated Republican bullshit.
And, there is the matter of process. Hillary also lost because her campaign was a deeply hierarchical one, run by Washington media consultants. Obama is a former community organizer and it is that grassroots experience that is so discounted in the media. But isn’t that precisely the kind of political experience we value.
Finally, health care. I’ve read some persuasive arguments that by eliminating the mandate requirement, Obama is also eliminating what was the biggest point of fear for most ordinary people about the Clinton plan both in 1993 and now. I realize there are good reasons for a mandate, but also remember back in 1993 that even I thought that the Clinton plan would leave me and many other peopel worse off rather than better off. Finally, I would note that FDR ran on a platform that promised none of the things that he eventually did to save the US in the emergency of the Depression. He advocated a balanced budget, for example in 1932. So you can’t take these campaign plans as the final word.
I think Obama may be the first really progressive president we have had since LBJ (Don’t get me startted on Carter). Carpe Diem!
June 7th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Hi Jonathan,
I think Hillary lost the nomination mostly because Obama ran a much better, smarter campaign. Some of that is for the reasons you mention: hiring entrenched Washington consultants vs. creative thinkers capitalizing on the zeitgeist. For some people it was her vote on Iraq which made a difference. But I don’t think you can argue that sexism—indeed, blatant misogyny at times—didn’t also play a role.
I value Obama’s community organizer experience, but that wasn’t what got him elected to the Illinois State Senate. It was ambition, and an astute grasp of party power dynamics which governed his strategic alliances. And he made it to the U.S. Senate with help from his Republican opponent, who self-destructed before the election. That makes Obama a politician, albeit a gifted one; hence he has my strategic, rather than idealistic, support.
The guy is a great campaigner, and he may just catapult himself to the rarefied position of president, even with all the negatives about him that are gaining traction in the electorate. But as you point out, campaigning is not governing. I would love nothing better than for him to have the chutzpah to save the US from collapse, à la FDR. But we really have no way of knowing whether that is going to happen until (or unless) it actually does.
At the very least, I desperately hope that he is able to reinstate sanity to the Supreme Court, which may well go completely off the deep end in the next term. For a conciliator such as Obama, just as with a centrist like Clinton, so much will also depend on the fighting spirit of Congressional Democrats. We shall see.
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