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Obama's Moment - Rolling Stone
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Rolling Stone - Dec 13, 2007
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17652931/obamas_moment
Obama's Moment
Written off by the experts at the start of the campaign, Barack Obama is
now surging in Iowa - proof that some things in politics are still not
rigged
by Matt Taibbi
All love stories are beautiful at the beginning, and what we're
witnessing now is the beginning of a new one: America and Barack Obama.
The story begins with the world spinning off its axis, the country
mired in dark times and the way of the fresh-faced savior seemingly
blocked by a juggernaut agent of the Status Quo. Only in the end, in
the moment that s****tswriters die for and that comes once a generation
in politics if we're lucky, the phenom rises to the occasion, gets the
big hit in the big game and becomes a man before our very eyes. The old
power recedes, and the new era is born.
That's grand language for a forum as vulgar and profane as presidential
politics, but this is the moment that Barack Hussein Obama was born for,
and it really is happening before our very eyes. Like Kennedy or Reagan
or even Bill Clinton, Obama is a politician whose best chance for
success has always been on the level of myth and hero wor****p; to win
the Democratic nomination, he must successfully sell himself not just
as a candidate but as an icon, a symbol of the best possible future for
twenty-first-century multicultural America and an antidote to both the
callous reactionary idiocy of the Bush administration and the shrewd
but soulless cor****atism of the Clinton machine.
With just weeks to go before Iowa, Obama is succeeding at that sales
job, thanks in part to an unexpected avalanche of positive press and in
even greater part to Hillary Clinton's recent performance as a creaky,
suddenly vulnerable establishment villain. In just a few weeks, the
first real votes in this insufferably long process will finally be
cast, and when they are, the Powers That Be may find that they waited
too long to get the real show started that the long wait gave America
just enough time to decide that it's ready to move on to something new.
For most of this campaign season, I doubted that Obama really was that
new something. Now I'm not so sure he isn't. Whoever Barack Obama is,
there's no doubting the genuineness of his phenomenon. And maybe, who
knows, that's all that matters.
After debacles in Iraq and New Orleans and mushrooming scandals that
exposed much of Congress and the Cabinet as a low-rent crime family
hired to collect protection money for the likes of Halliburton and
Pfizer, people simply do not trust the politicians they vote for to be
anything less than an embarrassment. You get the sense they approach
the upcoming election with the enthusiasm of a two-time loser offered a
selection of plea deals.
People hate the mechanized speeches, they hate the negative ads, and
they especially hate venomous news creatures, myself included. It's now
so bad that a poll last month found that fifty-six percent of all
likely voters agreed with the phrase that the presidential race is
"annoying and a waste of time" a shocking number, given that it
excludes the forty to fifty percent of Americans who already don't vote
in presidential races.
People don't want to feel this way, but the attitude everywhere is the
same: What choice do these assholes give us? And it's that grim
prejudice that has pervaded this process for a generation, forcing the
public to choose from an endless succession of lesser evils and second-
raters of the Kerry-Dole genus, stuffed suits who offered nothing like
a solution to the main problem of feeling like **** about the American
civic experiment.
Until now. Emphasizing that this is not necessarily a reflection of who
or what Obama really is, he unmistakably and strikingly attracts crowds
that, to a person, really seem to believe that his election will
fundamentally change the way they feel about their country.
"I just want to see if there's going to be a difference with this cat,"
says Richard Walters, a forty-three-year-old New Yorker, who had come to
hear Obama give a speech at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater. "Because if
there's something different, we need it now."
"At this point, I'd be glad if he recited the alphabet correctly," says
Xiomara Hall, another New Yorker. Laughing, she and her friend add, "We
got hope. Change is goood!"
"I just want to see if he can do something, anything, to change things,"
says ****rley Paulino, another visitor to the Apollo event. "See if he is
what he says he is. We just we need it, you know?"
Normally the sight of prospective voters muttering platitudes about
"hope" and "change" would make any re****ter erupt with derisive
laughter, but at Obama events one hears outbursts of optimism so
desperate and artless that I can't help but check my cynical instinct.
Grown men and women look up at you with puppy-dog eyes and all but beg
you not to **** on their dreams. It's odd to say, but it's actually
moving.
An im****tant component of this phenomenon is that the Obama crowds are
surprisingly free of the usual anti-Republican venom. As much as
anything, his rise is a reflection of the country's increasing boredom
with partisan hatred.
"I'm so tired of the president just talking to one part of the country,
or one group," says Malia Scotch-Marmo. "I was in my twenties with
Reagan, but I felt he talked to me, even though we were all Democrats.
It would be great to have a black president. It would be great for kids
to see. It would be a nice mind ****ft."
It's a mood thing, not an issue thing, and it stems entirely from
Obama's unique personal qualities: his expansive eloquence, his
remarkable biography, his commanding physical presence. I saw this
clearly on display at an event in ****tsmouth, New Hamp****re. It was a
foreign-policy discussion arranged by his campaign that I thought was
going to be a disaster. The candidate's handlers had announced a start
time of 8:30 a.m., but when dozens of re****ters and a hundred or so
audience members arrived, we learned that the candidate wouldn't be
showing up until eleven. Up to then, the room had to listen to a panel
of academic corpses blather about the Middle East.
By 10 a.m., the press section was afire with sarcastic ripostes. "I
slept in the car," said one hack. "I had to. I already checked out of
my hotel in Manchester."
But once Obama showed up, the sarcasm eva****ated. There was nothing
remarkable about Obama's speech and subsequent Q&A session, except that
he delivered every line with the force and confidence of someone who's
already been president for years. Obama's shtick is to sell his future
presidency as one that would recast America as the good guy of the
world, one that would be guided by the principles of basic decency
("This isn't just about drawing contrasts. It's about doing what's
right"), openness ("Not talking [to other countries] doesn't make us
look tough. It makes us look arrogant") and a vision that embraces the
challenges of this century ("The task of the next president is to
convince the American people that global interdependence is here to
stay. Global trade is not going away. The Internet is not going away").
His presentation is deliberately vague on most counts, but the overall
effect is augmented by his emphasis on easily remembered concrete
positions like his promise to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq
within sixteen months.
But mostly, Obama is selling himself. When he talks about "showing a new
face to the world," it's not exactly a mystery that he's talking about
his face. In person, Obama is a dynamic, handsome, virile presence, a
stark contrast to the bloated hairy ****bags we usually elect to
positions of power in this country.
Moreover, he completely lacks that air of grasping, gutter-scraping
ambition sickness that follows most presidential hopefuls around like a
rain cloud the vengeful impatience that hovers over Rudy Giuliani, or
that creepy greediness for media attention that strikes one like an oar
in the face in the presence of Mitt Romney. To use a s****ts clichi,
Obama acts like he's been there before, and his handlers are aware
enough of how well their candidate is wearing his climb to power that
they've consciously chosen to contrast it with that of his rivals.
In particular, the Obama camp harps incessantly, without naming names,
on the sense of entitlement that infects Hillary Clinton's campaign
persona. Poor Hillary: While Obama glows like the chosen one, taking
Kennedy-esque flight on the wings of destiny, next to him Hillary
sometimes comes off like an angry drag queen, enraged that some other
tramp has been allowed to "Danke Schoen" in her Las Vegas. Obama sees
this and isn't above pointing at her Adam's apple. "I'm not running for
president because I think this is somehow owed to me," Obama says. And
people believe it. In ****tsmouth, the same crowd that had to suffer
through a two-and-a-half-hour wait sent Obama back on the road with a
standing ovation. "There's just something about him," says one
middle-aged gentleman. When I suggest that his comment was vague, he
shrugs. "Yeah, but it's good vague."
Of course, underneath the veneer of fresh-faced optimism that Obama is
pu****ng note that the word "idealism" isn't appropriate here, because
Obama isn't selling idealism so much as a kind of reinvigorated,
feel-good pragmatism there operates a massive, well-oiled political
machine no less ruthless and ambitious than that of his establishment
rival, Hillary Clinton. Obama has raised $80 million, and it would be a
grievous mistake to describe his candidacy as a grass-roots affair,
particularly when he counts among his bundlers many of the lobbyists
and political-finance pros who buttress the Clinton run.
Even a cursory glance at Obama's money men is enough to confirm that
fact. The list includes Wall Street hotshots from Lehman Brothers,
Oppenheimer and Co., and Citigroup, a smattering of Hollywood players
and Native American casino interests, representatives of big
pharmaceuticals and the insurance sector in short, all the major food
groups of reviled cor****ate influence-hunters.
Worse still, Obama's financial backing is reflected in some of his
Senate votes and campaign positions, including most notably his sup****t
for expanding NAFTA to Peru, limiting the ability of injured workers and
consumers to sue for damages, and pouring federal funds into E85
corn-based ethanol, an alternative fuel for which the market is
dominated by the Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland Company. More
than once I heard Obama give stirring speeches, only to mar them with
plugs for ethanol.
Obama's massive war chest allows him to compete not merely in the areas
of personal charisma and "hope" but in the trench warfare of local
pavement-pounding staff. He boasts thirty-seven offices in Iowa,
maintaining a presence in towns with populations as low as 1,400.
In Iowa, New Hamp****re and South Carolina, three early-primary states,
Obama has trotted out endorsements from an impressive cast of local
pols sup****t that came under fire when it was learned that many of the
politicians had received campaign contributions from Obama's
cornball-titled political action committee, the "Hopefund." But here's
the funny thing: When the Clinton campaign decided to take aim at Obama
for "using his PAC in a manner that appears to be inconsistent with the
prevailing election laws," the criticisms fell on deaf ears even among
crusaders for campaign-finance reform. "Obama is being held to a higher
standard," says Craig Holman of Public Citizen. "It's hard to criticize
him as long as everyone else is doing it."
Indeed, it's Hillary Clinton who, if not for Obama, would be the story
of historic change in this race, the first woman ever to make a serious
run at the Oval Office who has been left to carry the million-pound
cross of all the ugliest recent sins of the Democratic Party, dragging
to Iowa her Iraq War vote, the Clinton record on NAFTA, and a list of
cor****ate sponsors that could keep Bruce Reed and Al From hard all night
long.
In what may turn out to be the final cruel irony in a career full of
them, Hillary, at the climactic moment of her political life, now sees
herself transformed into a symbol of the corrupt status quo. At
multiple stops on the campaign trail, I've heard Obama voters say they
rejected Hillary because she represents the "old-boys' network." The
irony is doubly cruel because the same cozy coalition of moneyed
insiders that foisted waffling yahoos like John Kerry on the party
rank-and-file and urged Democrats toward cynical moves like sup****t for
the Iraq War, all in the name of "electability," now find their wagons
circled around a candidate Hillary who may be the least electable of
the Democratic contenders. In a stunning Zogby poll whose release
coincided with Obama's recent charge to the top, a survey of
prospective voters showed that Hillary would lose to all the top five
Republicans in the election, while either Obama or John Edwards would
defeat or tie every single one.
As for Edwards, he too lurks as a crucial character in a possible
Hillary death drama, a passionate Cassius to Obama's coolly pragmatic
Brutus. In town hall after town hall, in the remotest corners of states
like Iowa and New Hamp****re, Edwards casts Hillary as an elitist
creature of political privilege bought off by lobbyists and
indistinguishable from George Bush, charging audiences not to "trade
cor****ate Republicans for cor****ate Democrats." Edwards delivers this
argument with a healthy and convincing dose of class resentment he is
flawlessly playing the part of the small-town favorite son returned
from the big city full of devastating tales of aristocratic treachery.
He leaves behind crowds that are jazzed and angry and suddenly wanting
no part of the Hillary-Evrimondes in charge of "their" party. But while
Edwards is running the more revolutionary campaign, it's Obama (whose
"differentness" is more visible on TV) who's getting traction as the
candidate of "change."
All of which adds to the whiff of destiny that lately seems to surround
Obama. At the outset of the campaign season, he was treated as a
not-ready-for-prime-time sideshow, with media pundits all in one voice
*****ing about his "rookie mistakes" and "lack of aggressiveness." But
now that he's got the numbers and the momentum, even the most hardened
political cynic has to ask why not this guy? Would it be such a
terrible thing for America to show that it's big enough to elect a
black president? Wouldn't that be something all by itself? The very
fact that the public, mostly on its own, has lifted Obama past an
arrogant establishment consensus adds to his appeal as a symbol of the
idea that not everything in our politics is rigged, that not everything
that they tell us is impossible really is.
So maybe it's OK to let the grandiose things that an Obama presidency
could represent overwhelm the less-stirring reality i.e., Obama as more
or less a typical middle-of-the-road Democrat with a lot of money and a
well-run campaign. Maybe it's OK because it's not always about the
candidates; sometimes it's about us, what we want and what we want to
believe. And if Barack Obama can carry that burden for us, why not let
him? Seriously, why not? The happy ending doesn't always have to ring
false.
*
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