Now, in 2006, we have two political parties in disarray. The
Republicans are hemorrhaging legitimacy in an unsuccessful military
adventure and a sewer spill of scandal. The Democrats are going
Whiggish -- sinking in a bog of equivocation. And now along comes a
first-term senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, as the most appealing
figure of authority in a looming presidential contest.
Like Lincoln, Obama is not completely formed politically. His
lean face, like Lincoln's face pre-beard, needs filling out, as do his
ideas and prescriptions for leadership. What he has in common with
Lincoln is a gift for plain and convincing rhetoric. After decades of
spin, PC euphemizing, neocon proxy speech, and similar bullshit, the
public sees Obama as capable of straight talk. He told the last
Democratic convention that there were no Blue or Red states but only a
United States -- and after the crowd heard that they wanted to trade in
John Kerry like a bad wedding present.
Obama, who is not up for re-election this fall, has cut a swath
through the heartland to boost other candidates and has generated huge
admiring crowds. Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein said on
NBC's Meet the Press show this week that the crowds of mainly
Midwestern white people seem to feel tremendous gratitude to Obama for
not being Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson -- a seemingly odd point worth
examining.
Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. He
grew up mostly in Hawaii, with a four-year side-trip in Indonesia. He
had a distinguished academic career at Columbia and Harvard. Though he
is half-African he carries none of the baggage of stereotypical
American black culture. He doesn't speak in the patois of the ghetto
(or pretend to), and he appears not to possess a sense of implacable
grievance for being who he is.
Since the 1960s Civil Rights project climaxed in the federal
legislation of 1964-65, and then dissolved after the murder of Martin
Luther King into a kind of voluntary apartheid of grievance, there have
been no African-American leaders who represent unequivocally the
prospect of real assimilation into mainstream American culture. Among
the lies we tell ourselves is that America has become a happy
multicultural kindergarten. In fact, black culture has never been so
overtly and self-consciously separate -- and that separation has
tragically been promoted by the white yuppie progressive
establishment pandering to implacable black grievance. Below the
uppermost classes of both races, there has probably never been so much
mistrust seething below the surface.
The convulsion that a President Obama might be elected into
would be one first of economics. Our industrial economy is going to
fall on its knees when global energy scarcities gets traction. There is
going to be a scramble for resources world-wide and here in North
America, and we are all set up to fracture along ethnic and regional
lines as that occurs. The presence of a suddenly overwhelming,
non-assimilated Hispanic population will only make things more
difficult.
A President Obama would also very probably face a geopolitical
crisis as the United States, China, Russia, Japan, Europe, and the Islamic nations
jockey desperately over energy resources while their own populations
grow restive, desperate, angry, and possibly aggressive. In other
words, a President Obama would possibly face a world war, a civil war,
and a great depression all at once. This is not a happy fate for any
leader, and so perhaps in the public perception of Barack Obama, in the
rising of his star, so to speak, the public apprehends the outlines of
tragedy, just as the historical Lincoln is an incomplete picture
without the tragedy of his murder a few days after the resolution of
the terrible war he presided over.
Remember, history rhymes but does not necessarily repeat
itself. I am not saying that a President Barack Obama would be
assassinated. But he would certainly have a rough passage through a sea
of troubles. This nation, and the familiar patterns of everyday life in
it, might not survive the kind of convulsion I describe. Whatever
happens, an Obama presidency would probably have to be improvisational,
on-the-fly, as Lincoln's had to be amid the uncertainties of war.
Someone on Meet the Press said Obama's wife would pressure
him not to run. Well, Mary Lincoln was nervous, too, and with good
reason, it turned out. But Abe did not shrink from his call. Destiny is
a stranger mistress. And maybe more compelling.
LINK: Clusterfuck Nation
{mos_sb_discuss:2}