In my last post I talked about clinging to entrenched positions vs. Ben Zander’s “telling the WE story.” Today I’m going to try to tie it all up in a pretty bow so you’ll understand why I picked the title I did.
I caucused for Barack Obama on February 5, but I wouldn’t let the overzealous precinct captain cover me with Obama 08 stickers; I was still reluctant about voting for an “establishment” candidate. Somewhere in the back of my mind I could hear one of my more adamant political comrades shouting that Obama had continuously voted to fund the war in Iraq, that he had taken dirty lobbyist and PAC money, and that furthermore he was a liar and a fraud.
But I did (and do) believe there’s something different going on here.
Much has been said about Obama’s gift for speechifying, and cynics are quick to mock his “hope” and “change” sloganeering, including the Democratic Candidate Who Would Not Die, Hillary Clinton. (Click here for an audio excerpt from one of her more derisive speeches accompanied by subversive animation from Scott Bateman.) Both she and McCain can easily jackhammer home the point that Obama is only a freshman Senator, too naïve to understand the hard decisions one has to make in our threat-filled world.
He displays a fundamental misunderstanding of history and how we’ve maintained national security, and what we need to do in the future to maintain our security in the face of the transcendent challenge of radical Islamic extremism. — John McCain, as reported by ABC News
There’s a big difference between delivering a speech at an anti-war rally as a state senator and picking up that phone in the White House at 3 a.m. in the morning to deal with an international crisis. — Hillary Clinton, as reported by the PBS Online News Hour
In using this approach, however, they both (unwittingly or not) frame the state of the globe with the smallest and darkest box possible: terrifying danger is everywhere, violence is inescapable, endless struggle inevitable. A conclusion with which any one of us might agree after years of reading the newspaper. And in agreeing, we become anxious, and start to look for someone tough, someone who’s been around the block a few times, to protect us.
Now listen to what Gary Hart, the 1980s-punchline presidential candidate who would grow up to be the stately and patrician Cassandra of 9/11, had to say in endorsing Obama on The Huffington Post:
The rare leader capable of transforming threat to opportunity is one who welcomes transformation and sees it as a chance to abandon tradition and convention, to transcend that which is stale, unprofitable, and ineffective…
In an age of great transformation, experience of the past is worthless because it is a barrier to the breakthrough gesture, the instant response in crisis, the instinctive bold decision in the face of totally new circumstances.
This dude is actually talking evolution. As if there were a dynamic quality to the times we live in, as if there were more to leadership than just the same old offensive and defensive positions. As if we were actually free to create something new. It is this sense of possibility that pervades Obama’s (frequently electrifying) way of speaking. I believe this is why his appeal crosses party lines, racial lines, class lines, religious lines, gender lines, and so many of the other lines we draw in the sand. He knows how to evoke the in-between, to tell the story of WE — we as Americans, but also as citizens of the world.
In his March 18 speech on race, Obama projected that the path to a “more perfect union”
…requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams (emphasis mine); that investing in the health, welfare and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
That there is some WE talk.
We could continue to engage in the politics of division and conflict and cynicism, he continues (providing illustrations which I will omit), or we could say “not this time” –
This time, we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time, we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not ‘those’ kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
Our kids. Four years ago Obama received a great deal of attention for his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention in which he said
It is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.
E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
His moving closing story in his “race” speech, about a young white girl named Ashley who had tried, as a child, to help her unemployed mother cope with cancer and poverty by feeding her mustard and relish sandwiches, evokes this sense of co-belonging beautifully. Ashley and almost everyone in the room have given their reasons, their personal stories, for working on Obama’s campaign. When they get to an elderly African-American man who has been sitting and listening quietly, he simply states “I’m here because of Ashley.”
“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.
But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.
I certainly may be in for a rude awakening, if he’s elected — there’s no way for me, at this point, to dispute that — but I must admit that Obama seems to be calling on the best in us, our “central selves,” which seek to contribute in relationship with one another. It’s not every politician who recognizes that, as Mother Theresa famously put it, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
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