Last week, after a financially and emotionally draining 2-year campaign (children born just before the primaries are toddling and talking now- think about that!), the people of the United States elected their first African-American president.
Jesse Jackson wept. All the major networks broadcast the giant victory celebration in Grant Park. Newspaper headlines the next day shouted "Historic!" in huge type and sold out immediately. Nations from Europe to the Middle East gushed their congratulations.
Two years of tightly wound momentum exploded and spent itself in a single week.
At the end of that week, 3 media figures- Scott Simon, Christopher Hitchens and Joan Didion- gave public assessments of the election and the challenges facing our new President. I'd like to excerpt some of their remarks here.
First, NPR's Scott Simon, speaking on Weekend Edition Saturday, November 8:
Mr. Simon was raised in Chicago, and has a native's understanding of President-Elect Obama's political proving ground:
But as a Chicagoan, I also have a somewhat less starry view of President-elect Obama. Of course he is eloquent and inspirational. But it doesn't diminish those qualities to say that I also see him as a clear-eyed, cool-tempered and occasionally cunning Chicago politician.
Mr. Simon lists some of the shifts in position that candidate Obama made during the campaign:
When he concluded that his liberal positions on gun control and the death penalty might be politically chancy, he rephrased them to fit opinion polls. A Chicago pol doesn't want to lose like some Massachusetts liberal.
When an old family friend like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright became political trouble, he cut off a man he once said that he could no more disown than his own grandmother.
Mr. Simon doesn't speculate on candidate Obama's motivations. Instead, he suggests they might indicate the kind of steely pragmatism a U.S. President needs:
Supporters and opponents can debate if Obama was being disingenuous or merely flexible.
But when a Chicago politician sits across from Vladimir Putin, you don't figure that he's likely to be carried away with airy academic idealism...
And with a steely politician's mind, Obama put who he is and what he symbolizes to use. He arouses inspiration. But he relies on the sweat and elbow grease he learned in Chicago's wards.
I'm a big believer in sweat and elbow grease. They've worked wonders in my life and I think they are precisely what is needed now. What troubles me is not the need for hard work and tough decisions, but the assumption of so many that, by merely crossing the threshold of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, President Obama cancel out all our nation's problems.
The same newspapers and anchors who kept reminding us that this election was historic have also claimed that the not-yet-sworn-in President-Elect Obama has "changed" America. While I admit my country has certainly changed during my lifetime- and I welcome the change that this election symbolizes- those changes were put in motion by thousands of brave souls long before President-Elect Obama was ever born. Some of those souls did not live to see his election because they died horribly long ago, giving their lives for their dream of what America could be.
They smoothed his path and lit his way.
As usual, Christopher Hitchens says it better than me (In Slate, on November 10):
First, the election of Obama is the effect not the cause of the changes. (One of my questioners appeared to think that our president-elect had been responsible for the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) Second, a Republican victory would have had absolutely no effect on the legal or political standing of black Americans, which is a matter of our law and our Constitution and cannot be undone by any ephemeral vote or plebiscite.
Like Scott Simon, Mr. Hitchens cautions us to avoid overheated rhetoric:
The recognition of these obvious points should also alert us to a related danger, which is the cousinhood of euphoria and hysteria. Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves...
...This has happened before, of course, with the high-sounding talk about the "New Frontier," the "Great Society," and "Morning in America." It's just that this time it's more than usually not affordable. There are many causes of the subprime and derivative horror show that has destroyed our trust in the idea of credit, but one way of defining it would be to say that everybody was promised everything, and almost everybody fell for the populist bait.
Joan Didion shares this uneasiness. Ms. Didion spoke on the election at the 45th anniversary celebration of the New York Review of Books. I have not been able to find the complete text of her remarks, but the occaision was covered by Jezebel:
Unlike the other panelists, she'd prepared a written statement. Characteristically, it was detached, even cold. She started by describing the "unexpressable uneasiness" she and some others had felt early on in the campaign. Why? "We were getting what we wanted," she continued, meaning, a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person's candidate, "a generational thing we couldn't understand" and the unthinking embrace of "naivete transformed to hope, partisanism as consumerism." Didion bridled at the wanton use of "transformational" and said she couldn't count the number of times she heard the 60's evoked "by people who apparently had no memory that the 60s" didn't involve decking babies out in political onesies.
Didion was at pains to say that she did not think any of this was Obama's doing, nor to his tastes. He would, she speculated "welcome healthy realism" and achievable expectations. In our frenzy, we are doing him a disservice, expecting miracles "at a time when the nation can least afford easy answers." She recalled, the day after the election, an overexcited newscaster declaring that we now possess "the congratulations of all the nations." She likened this to the naivete of thinking we'd be regarded as beloved saviors in Iraq. But, she ended, "in the irony-free zone that our country has become, this is not what people wanted to hear."
The author ('Sadie') of the online piece sums up the attitude of the other invited guests:
"...the palpable self-congratulation in that room by some very fine minds was worrisome and uncomfortable and lacking in humility, and so Didion's measured caution was more reassuring than all the other rhetoric combined."
I would like to add some final thoughts of my own.
Our nation has elected a man. Just a man. Not a god-made-flesh, not a Monarch, not a Philosopher King. An ordinary man.
That's what we do here. It's what sets us apart. We look around and choose one of us- usually the one who is foolish enough or ruthless enough to want the job of President. All we ask is that the person be a 'natural born citizen' and at least 35 years old.
Then we shake their hand and wish them luck. We know they'll need it.
Burdening President-Elect Obama with Marvel Comics expectations is cruel to him and cruel to our country. It forbids him to make mistakes. It permits the rest of us to be lazy. Who needs sweat and elbow grease during the regime of President Spider/Iron/Superman?
Some pundits have called President-Elect Obama "the black Kennedy." While I respect the service of the Kennedy family and grieve the tragedies that service cost them, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was also just a man. Like every man, he had his strengths and weaknesses. (Some historians claim he was a womanizer on the order of President Clinton, for example.)
The qualities that President-Elect Obama shares with JFK are chiefly human. Like Kennedy, he will discover on January 21 that the Presidency, like parenthood, is a job that no previous experience can prepare you for. Like Kennedy, he will have to balance that job with parenthood- searching for ways to remain a loving husband and a present father.
(Any wife and family that can successfully navigate the campaign trail and emerge with all their marbles intact deserve a standing ovation, in my book- and their candidate's undying gratitude.)
Come January 21, let's regard President Obama with the respect his humanity deserves. Let's abandon outrageous expectations and agree to take on our share of responsibility for tackling our nation's problems. Think of it as you would January 2, when open your eyes after the big New Year's party and realize that your livingroom is full of trash and you're tired and hungover.
Roll out of bed, roll up your sleeves, and break out the elbow grease.
Hat tip: Ann Althouse
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