Wednesday 6 February 2008
Guy Rundle
The search for a feelgood president
...When policy differences narrow, the primary system encourages an identification with the personality of the candidate. Energy is poured into intra-party competition, rather than a focus on battling the other party. Nowhere has this been clearer than at the ‘stand for change’ rallies that Barack Obama has been barnstorming all over the country. Big events, often in university auditorimums, indoor sports arenas and the like, they draw an overwhelmingly black crowd – at one I attended in South Carolina, there wouldn’t have been three white people in a crowd of 2,000. Obama puts on a hell of a show, with gospel choirs, actors and rappers such as Chris Tucker and Usher, local fire-breathing activists, before the man himself, surrounded by a phalanx of secret service agents, moves through the crowd. The events are expertly designed, but they don’t need to be – the energy is there already. When rapper Usher appeared, the predominantly young crowd in the upper tiers rushed forward to the edge of the balcony; when Obama finally appeared, they almost threatened to tip over it. There seemed almost a desire to touch his hem.
There’s no doubt that a lot of the appeal to Obama’s supporters comes from his physicality, his youthful popstar looks, his physical ease. His sheer comportment communicates generational change, especially in comparison to the civil rights veterans in their fifties, sixties and seventies, who tend to be powerful, heavy-set men. Obama dresses in a high style but – unlike Huckabee – preserves all the oracular and prophetic power of distance and call to duty. It’s in the context of this bearing and rhetoric – a relentless call to sacrifice and struggle – that Obama’s relentless insistence on ‘hope’ and ‘change’, and the occasional Ghandian message of ‘being the change you want to be in the world’, strikes such a chord. To anyone with memories of the 1980s, this tone is redolent of the rhetoric of anti-nuclear social movements and the like, which sought to energise people by calling on their inner goodness and sense of duty rather than their external sense of a collective process. This taps into the deepest Protestant traditions of American self-conception, but it also has a therapeutic dimension. It’s a strategy designed to address in part the doubly beaten-down feel of much black politics: beaten down by the continued existence of widespread black poverty, but also by the somewhat deadened rhetoric of much of the previous generation of black leaders, who tend to focus on an old model of simple racist oppression, a problem that has long since yielded to more complex and less visible dilemmas.
There’s nothing wrong with inspiring people, but as numerous commentators have noted, Obama’s rhetoric never goes beyond that. ‘We are in a historic moment of transformation’, he tells the South Carolina crowd, hanging on to his every word, ‘and the time has come when we will stand up and make a difference’. And? Yes? What? The actual difference we would or should make never arrives. Obama studiously avoids anything more than vague references to the health system, to housing, to education. What’s lacking is not so much a shopping list of reforms, as a material account of how the world works. This used to be the stock in trade of the political leader – to connect the ethical to the actual in a way that allowed people to make sense of the world such that they can act in it. Without that, the encounter necessarily remains passive, a spectacle, part of a tour.
Though Obama’s crew – many of them young white professional activists from his home state of Illinois – were assiduous in signing up volunteers for phone-banking during the campaign, those who I spoke to had no real idea of what they might do once Obama left town. Join the Democrats, a remote machine party? No chance. ‘I just support Obama – he’s the hope’, said one, on-message. ‘I think he’s the one who can make the change’, said another. What was overwhelming was the degree to which people’s account of their support was impressionistic, partial, grasping for something, and finding an expression of subjective feeling....[Open in new window]
Guy Rundle
The search for a feelgood president
...When policy differences narrow, the primary system encourages an identification with the personality of the candidate. Energy is poured into intra-party competition, rather than a focus on battling the other party. Nowhere has this been clearer than at the ‘stand for change’ rallies that Barack Obama has been barnstorming all over the country. Big events, often in university auditorimums, indoor sports arenas and the like, they draw an overwhelmingly black crowd – at one I attended in South Carolina, there wouldn’t have been three white people in a crowd of 2,000. Obama puts on a hell of a show, with gospel choirs, actors and rappers such as Chris Tucker and Usher, local fire-breathing activists, before the man himself, surrounded by a phalanx of secret service agents, moves through the crowd. The events are expertly designed, but they don’t need to be – the energy is there already. When rapper Usher appeared, the predominantly young crowd in the upper tiers rushed forward to the edge of the balcony; when Obama finally appeared, they almost threatened to tip over it. There seemed almost a desire to touch his hem.
There’s no doubt that a lot of the appeal to Obama’s supporters comes from his physicality, his youthful popstar looks, his physical ease. His sheer comportment communicates generational change, especially in comparison to the civil rights veterans in their fifties, sixties and seventies, who tend to be powerful, heavy-set men. Obama dresses in a high style but – unlike Huckabee – preserves all the oracular and prophetic power of distance and call to duty. It’s in the context of this bearing and rhetoric – a relentless call to sacrifice and struggle – that Obama’s relentless insistence on ‘hope’ and ‘change’, and the occasional Ghandian message of ‘being the change you want to be in the world’, strikes such a chord. To anyone with memories of the 1980s, this tone is redolent of the rhetoric of anti-nuclear social movements and the like, which sought to energise people by calling on their inner goodness and sense of duty rather than their external sense of a collective process. This taps into the deepest Protestant traditions of American self-conception, but it also has a therapeutic dimension. It’s a strategy designed to address in part the doubly beaten-down feel of much black politics: beaten down by the continued existence of widespread black poverty, but also by the somewhat deadened rhetoric of much of the previous generation of black leaders, who tend to focus on an old model of simple racist oppression, a problem that has long since yielded to more complex and less visible dilemmas.
There’s nothing wrong with inspiring people, but as numerous commentators have noted, Obama’s rhetoric never goes beyond that. ‘We are in a historic moment of transformation’, he tells the South Carolina crowd, hanging on to his every word, ‘and the time has come when we will stand up and make a difference’. And? Yes? What? The actual difference we would or should make never arrives. Obama studiously avoids anything more than vague references to the health system, to housing, to education. What’s lacking is not so much a shopping list of reforms, as a material account of how the world works. This used to be the stock in trade of the political leader – to connect the ethical to the actual in a way that allowed people to make sense of the world such that they can act in it. Without that, the encounter necessarily remains passive, a spectacle, part of a tour.
Though Obama’s crew – many of them young white professional activists from his home state of Illinois – were assiduous in signing up volunteers for phone-banking during the campaign, those who I spoke to had no real idea of what they might do once Obama left town. Join the Democrats, a remote machine party? No chance. ‘I just support Obama – he’s the hope’, said one, on-message. ‘I think he’s the one who can make the change’, said another. What was overwhelming was the degree to which people’s account of their support was impressionistic, partial, grasping for something, and finding an expression of subjective feeling....[Open in new window]
posted by Dan at 12:15 AM
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