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.”

Well, as sure as I have ever been about anything. I thought I knew which were the correct platforms and the best policies, what specific actions our elected leaders should take, whose values were valid — and anyone who disagreed was ignorant, unenlightened, or else driven by some form of fundamentalism or crass self-interest. And they didn’t even have to be my ideological opposites, i.e. conservatives. So-called “moderates” were bad enough. I was proud to be identified with the Green-est progressives, the Out-of-Iraq-Now, Universal-Single-Payer-Health-Care, Repeal-NAFTA, Department-of-Peace-niks, the “far left,” the Labor liberals, the socialists in spirit or in word. I went as far as the state convention as a delegate for Dennis Kucinich.

I sympathized with the Naderites, who made sense when they voted to demonstrate that they were sick of a corrupt and mercenary two-party system. Nader was not the “spoiler.” The Democratic Party, they said, was the “spoiler,” since the party couldn’t or wouldn’t break the stranglehold of the corporations and represent the real concerns of the people. Why not vote for what you really want? If enough people did it, so the argument went, it would (if not effect significant change) at least “send a message.”

Still, after the debacle of 2000, I wasn’t sure what message could have been more important than choosing a vocal environmentalist over a John Wayne wannabee looking for an excuse to draw the national pistol. I had to disagree with Nader’s third-party fundamentalism when he insisted that there was “no difference” between the two parties’ candidates. Even the fraction of a difference (as another argument goes) could easily have made the difference between life and death to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, not to mention 4000 American soldiers. (In the immortal words of the Talking Heads, this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around.)

Of course if we had a more democratic election system that utilized something like Instant Runoff Voting, voting would cease to be a zero-sum game, and there could be no such thing as a spoiler.

Maybe Ralph could be pouring some more money and time into election reform.

But I digress. When I run into my former political cohorts now, I am aware of a certain stuck quality in many of their well-intentioned but absolutist positions. As if it were a total capitulation to give any opponent the benefit of a doubt, or to forgive even somewhat sympathetic pols for any ideological transgression whatsoever. I recognize that rejecting rigidity that digs in its heels and generally gets nowhere (beyond the smallest picture), and I remember how I identifed with it completely. As if continually stoked resentment could change the world. Maybe it has in the past, but not without significant bloodletting. Is that what we really want? Almost everyone I know in these circles claims to “love peace!”

It seems to me that the peaceful resisters who effected real change — Gandhi, King, Mandela — didn’t whip up the people into a righteously angry mob, even if righteous anger was warranted. They recognized on a deep level (like the Dalai Lama regarding the Chinese in Tibet) that “them” was “us.” There is only we.

In the wonderful book “The Art of Possibility,” Ben Zander talks about telling the WE story, and what is required of us in order to be able to tell it. Here I will quote liberally and directly from that chapter, simply because I can’t imagine being able to paraphrase it better.

The WE story defines a human being in a specific way: it says we are our central selves seeking to contribute, naturally engaged, forever in a dance with each other. It points to relationship rather than to individuals, to communication patterns, gestures, and movement rather than to discrete objects and identities. It attests to the in-between. Like the particle-and-wave nature of light, the WE is both a living entity and a long line of development unfolding. This new being, the WE of us, comes into view as we look for it — the vital entity of our company, or community, or group of two. Then the protagonist of our story, the entity called WE, steps forward and takes on a life of its own…

Usually what we mean by the pronoun “we” is “you-plus-I,” and so the questions “What shall we do?” or “What will work for us?” generally refer to a compromise between what you want and what I want. The assumption is that people are singular, constant beings whose stated desires are for all time. So it follows that some will win and some will lose, and neither are likely to get all they want. The resulting competition structures us in two ways: it encourages us to exaggerate our positions and keep back some of the truth, and it pushes us into offensive and defensive positions, so that we are all too soon handling out ultimatums and guarding our turf. (emphasis mine)

The practice of the WE offers an approach to conflict based on a different premise. It assumes there are no fixed wants nor static desires, while everything each of us thinks and feels has a place in the dialogue.

Don’t you feel more expansive and optimistic already? Zander somehow opens a window in the stuffy room of our minds. Note the italicized part. Can you acknowledge the truth of it? He’s saying be honest. Are we static, or dynamic?

Which would you rather be?