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Obama and the Strange Current of Change
By Bruce | June 4, 2008
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed — most peculiar, mama
— Nobody Told Me, John Lennon
The final ‘Tuesday primary’ passed into history yesterday as this most-strange of presidential elections continues to stimulate the mind and move the bowels.
Although Barack Obama last night finally reached that noted, mathematical line in the political sand, Hillary Clinton still persists in being petulant.
Despite the numbers on the board, despite Obama’s now-obvious, phenomenal grasp of a kind of celebrity status, as Rupert Murdoch crowed “rock star,” and has led a rolling-thunder-revue across the America this past 18 months, Clinton continues to hang like a tenacious bulldog.
US politics has rarely fostered any thing close to a “rock star” persona.
One could be stretching the idea a bit with Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. Of course, Jack Kennedy in 1960, Bobby Kennedy in 1968, along maybe with Eugene McCarthy (“Clean for Gene”) — the last year of any real ground-swell-tidal wave of enthusiasm and popular support for any candidate near Obama’s appeal.
The French have a flair for it, sometimes in the Latino countries, but never hardly-ever in the US.
Hillary Clinton can’t see it, or doesn’t want to see it.
In a little speech last night at Baruch College in New York City, Clinton congratulated Obama on “for all that he’s accomplished,” but wouldn’t call it quits.
She was going to wait “24 to 48 hours” to make any kind of public decision, one she had to have known before she crawled up to that podium.
A shame in the face of tsunami reality.
Later in the evening, Obama revealed the curl of the tide.
In a talk before 17,000 or so supporters packed into the very-futuristic-sounding Ecel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn. — appropriately and ironically where John McCain will accept the Republican mantle at its convention in September — Obama became a part of history:
- “And because of what you said — because you decided that change must come to Washington; because you believed that this year must be different than all the rest; because you chose to listen not to your doubts or your fears but to your greatest hopes and highest aspirations, tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another — a journey that will bring a new and better day to America. Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.“
A lot of ground in such a short space. Forty years after Martin Luther King’s death — one simple Biblical generation — and a black man is a major candidate for president.
In 2008, the big issues of race and gender came together and after all didn’t seem to matter.
The major concept here is change.
Not because Obama is black, or Clinton is a woman, but because change is the single most-important topic, especially among the young, who can see beyond the political bullshit.
A case in point: Photo on a political blog site of a white, intelligent-looking young boy at an Obama rally wearing a t-shit proclaiming “I trust Obama with my future.”
And Clinton acted like a spoiled brat.
According to the New York Post, “He (Obama) tried to call her twice following the speech, but got her voicemail. She finally returned the call as his plane was about to fly out of St. Paul to Washington.”
And to Washington and face the strange.
McCain’s speech last night in New Orleans is prime, pure strange.
Universally panned, Rolling Stone called it the “Worst. Speech. Ever,” as McCain tried to tighten down the hatches, but just continued to make matters worse.
Via the Associated Press — McCain tried to strong-arm the atmosphere by a strange, reverse osmosis: “The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again. I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought in to so many failed ideas.”
Failed ideas?
If the past 18 months is any indication, and if the overall, general disgust with the George Bush administration continues, McCain and the GOP will get slaughtered in November.
The big blank space, however, is the modern-era office of the president.
In The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, writer/editor Gene Healy describes the post of chief executive as having way out-grown what the Constitution originally intended.
And the current sitting president has sucked up governmental powers at a rate never before seen in American politics.
Healy warns of those powers and the pressure keep them would be hard to resist “even for a president devoted to the Constitution and respectful of the limited role the office was supposed to play in our system of government.”
- In the current presidential race, none of the major-party candidates comes close to fitting that description.
Aside from the issue of torture, there’s very little daylight between John McCain and George W. Bush on matters of executive power.
For her part, Hillary Clinton claims she played a key role in her husband’s undeclared war against Serbia in 1999. “I urged him to bomb,” she told Talk magazine that year. In 2003 she told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “I’m a strong believer in executive authority. I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority.”
Barack Obama has done more than any candidate in memory to boost expectations for the office, which were extraordinarily high to begin with.
Obama’s stated positions on civil liberties may be preferable to McCain’s, but would it matter?
If and when a car bomb goes off somewhere in America, would a President Obama be able to resist resorting to warrantless wiretapping, undeclared wars, and the Bush theory of unrestrained executive power? As a Democrat without military experience, publicly perceived as weak on national security, he’d have much more to prove.
– Gene Healy, reason.com/news/show/126020, (June 2008)
Change is good.
Strange days indeed, mama.
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