There’s a really funny series of scenes in the 1994 movie Reality Bites where Winona Ryder‘s character Lelaina sabotages her TV host boss by writing off-color lines on his cue cards, including one that prompts him to blurt out: “Personally, I’ve always had an odd preference…for very, very young girls.” Lelaina, of course gets fired and goes through a comical series of interviews that ends at a newspaper. The editor interviewing her asks her to define irony, a task Lelaina – and circa-1994 me – just wasn’t up to. When she returns home, dejected and worse-for-the-wear, the final insult is delivered by Ethan Hawke‘s couch-surfing Troy who smugly defines irony as “when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning.” Ten years later, members of the Democratic party gathered in Boston for their quadrennial convention. By then, I knew how to define irony, but what I didn’t know was how ironic that convention would prove to be.
Prime time speaking opportunities at national political conventions are short on supply and long on demand. As up-and-comers vie with party stalwarts for the shrinking number of televised slots, a tenuous balance is often struck between proven leaders with long lists of accomplishments and those light on experience who are seen as the future. In Boston, this dynamic was most visible in the two men who gave that convention’s defining speeches. Bill Clinton played the role of elder statesman, while Barack Obama was anointed the rising star and given the prestigious keynote address.
As they arrived in Boston, Democrats were kind of shell-shocked. John Kerry‘s early strategy of “just don’t make any mistakes” came crumbling down via his “I voted for the $80 billion before I voted against it” nonsense as well as an unchecked attack by the Swift Boat Liars. Defeating a President running for reelection is never easy, but with Iraq smoldering and a jobless economic “recovery,” what seemed like a better-than-average chance to send George W. Bush into retirement looked as if it was slipping away. But something happened during the convention: unbound by the straitjacket Kerry had fitted for himself, the Democrats selected to speak at the convention one by one made stark cases in favor of the party itself and the urgent need for change.
Howard Dean, (Never again will we be ashamed to call ourselves Democrats — never, never, never) Wes Clark, (My fellow Americans, Democrats are leaders and Democrats are fighters) Al Sharpton (We got the Civil Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the Voting Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the right to organize under Democrats…the reason we are fighting so hard, the reason we took Florida so seriously, is our right to vote wasn’t gained because of our age. Our vote was soaked in the blood of martyrs, soaked in the blood of good men, soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham. This vote is sacred to us.) and Bill Clinton (the whole damn speech) and others, passionately made their respective cases in favor of Kerry, against Bush, but more importantly in support of the Democratic party. They were Democrats, addressing Democrats, promoting Democratic ideals, and saying, in the words of Clinton himself, “Our way works better.”
When Barack Obama took the podium to give the keynote address, the vast majority of Americans had never even heard his name. He was a relatively obscure Illinois state senator who had been given the gift of a lifetime when, after winning a crowed Democratic primary with the support of progressive organizations after the favorite dropped out due to sex scandal, he saw his formidable Republican opponent Jack Ryan drop out of the race amid disclosures related to sex clubs and his former wife. Obama, in contrast to almost all of the other speakers, (including the nominees Kerry and John Edwards themselves) used his time under the bright lights to talk about…Obama. It wasn’t as if he was in a tight race after Ryan gave way to Republican crackpot Alan Keyes, but it was clear that this speech was the first step in Obama’s inevitable run for the White House. Of course there’s nothing wrong with politicians aspiring to higher office, but then again, Obama’s audience shouldn’t have had to wade through half of his speech before they heard him say the name of the Presidential nominee, and the whole speech without his take on why being a Democrat is important to him.
I had a nagging suspicion at the time that this wasn’t just some high-road introduction, but rather a signal of things to come. I suppressed that feeling because Obama can give one hell of a speech, even when he’s saying nothing, or worse, the wrong things. His keynote speech, like the book that followed it, was entitled “The Audacity of Hope.” And its theme (after the lengthy and entirely selfish part about his background) was a somewhat sappy, but convincing at the time, ode to faith, kindness and crossing party lines.
At a party convention. In the middle of one of the closest elections in history.
No one realized at the time just how much of a problem this would become. And thus, the irony. During a week when Bill Clinton reminded Democrats that “Our way works better,” Obama was just starting a bizarre campaign to unite everyone behind…himself. And like Winona, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. That is until Obama joined the Senate and decided to embrace bipartisanship over the ideals of those groups and voters who sent him to Washington, and that, contrary to the old adage, hope is a plan.
Usually when it comes time to evaluate the performance of elected officials, I head over to Vote View and just let the numbers speak for themselves. Obama is about average when it comes to voting with other Democrats, probably the most accurate way to quantify party loyalty/ideology. And if you get past his votes to confirm Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte and a few others including supporting Bush’s class action/tort “reform” bill, he measures up pretty well. But a closer look at his public statements and his general outlook shows that he is much more willing to criticize his own party and hamper its progress than many Democrats (some of whom come from deep red states) who rank below him in vote loyalty. So while he is putting together a decent voting record, he’s all too willing to triangulate against his own party, often setting up absurd straw-man arguments in the process.
It shouldn’t be unfolding like this. Obama is a freshman Senator who has yet to complete his second year in the Senate. Since he first took office, he has on several occasions, categorically ruled out a run for the White House, and promised to serve out the term to which he was elected. Yet the reason that he continues to backhand his own party is that running for President is more important to him than serving those who fought to get him elected. So the same man who made himself known to voters just days after Clinton made one of the best cases for being a Democrat, has turned around and decided that Obama’s Way Works Better.
Now I’m not one of the voices who claims that a man of 45 with two years of US Senate experience is too green for the White House. But I am one of the few who knows that Obama’s Way may just give him a shot at the Presidency, but will certainly endanger the thin Democratic majorities in the Congress. What is Obama’s Way? Judging from his public rhetoric, it is made up of equal parts of hope, faith, prayer, reflexive bipartisanship, and triangulation. Need it be said that you can’t hope a bill through congress, you can’t wish a program to success, and you can’t effectively govern the world’s most powerful nation and its 300 million citizens on faith? It isn’t against the rules to talk about faith and hope and even religion, no matter how much some of us would like that to be the case. But Obama is really pushing the envelope by going past discussing his own views on faith every time a reporter is present to bashing other Democrats for not doing the same. And in the bargain, he ends up perpetuating the myth that all Democrats are secular and hostile to religion. Not only is he unfairly smearing members of his own party – never named, of course – his courting of religious voters is horrible strategy. The same white, evangelical, suburban and rural voters who respond to the dog whistle of religion-in-politics are the absolute least likely demographic to vote for a Democrat. And let’s not play games here: the majority of this type of voter is largely southern, a region not exactly in the vanguard of racial tolerance.
But it’s Obama’s brand of triangulation, partly on display in the religion example, that is most disturbing. Of course Bill Clinton brought the word to the political parlance, but Obama’s version is like a Xerox copy made on a machine with dirty glass and half of its scanning bulb out of commission. Clinton looked at ascendant conservatism and did everything possible to staunch its gains. Did he err on the side of giving away too much on occasion? Of course, not too many Democrats are very happy with the proliferation of one-sided “free” trade agreements or welfare “reform” set in motion during the Clinton years. But Obama stepped up his triangulation even after Democrats made historic gains in November’s elections. It’s funny, but I never really understood what Bush meant when he said that he wouldn’t “negotiate with himself,” but it turns out to be one of the precious few things he got right. Obama is out there trying to define himself (and drag the Democratic party along) by starting with the assumption that traditional Democratic ideals are unacceptable, and the only way to get to the (political?) promised land is by setting up false straw men representing anonymous Democrats who stand for something supposedly abhorrent, bashing them, and then proposing a policy that somehow splits the difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Thus the Democratic position is shifted to the right even before any real negotiations have occurred. Bad for Democrats who believe in their principles, good for Obama who gets to play knight in shining armor, unfortunately “leading” by the “kick down” method. On issues like religion and national security, the story is the same:
Sen. Barack Obama chastised fellow Democrats on Wednesday for failing to “acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people,” and said the party must compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans.
and
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., warned Democratic activists Sunday that the party must take a tougher stance on national security if it wants to succeed in the November elections.
“What Democrats have to do is to close the deal. We have got to show we have a serious agenda for change.”
If you want Democrats to do something, don’t talk about it, do it. If your ideas and leadership attract a following, presto! If they don’t, see you later. Obama cheats the game by failing to lead, instead appearing bipartisan due to his tendency to castigate his own. It’s a dynamic I covered after Harold Ford lost his Senate race in Tennessee. Some candidates want all of the benefits of political parties (ballot access, fundraising, databases, volunteers, echos of past heros) while keeping as much distance from their party’s rank and file as possible. It’s fundamentally lazy in that if they valued independence so highly, logic dictates that they’d be better off as independents. That Ford did it in deep red Tennessee is one thing; Obama needs to remember that he represents deep blue Illinois, and hopes to carry the torch for the whole party.
Two years out from the next Presidential election there is plenty of time for Obama to wake up and actually earn the Democratic nomination. This post is even premature because Obama hasn’t officially declared his intention to run. But the wall-to-wall press coverage is prompting extra email from family, friends and readers who are unanimously shocked when I tell them that I don’t want Obama to run, win the nomination or become President. In some cases, shock doesn’t even cover it.
My take on 2008 is that it’s pretty damn easy, too easy actually, to choose who I’ll support for the Democratic nomination. While Obama engages in serial fratricide, Hillary focuses on protecting kids from video games, PMRC-style, and other Dems with no compelling reason to run fluff themselves with dreams of the media attention that accompanies a White House run, only one Democrat is acting like a Democrat. John Edwards has spent the last two years talking to and about the poor and middle classes. He’s organized with labor unions, and voiced consistent opposition to Bush administration policies. And he’s planning to announce next week, from New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, another issue on which he has been vocal.
Things could change, of course. Al Gore and Wes Clark could surprise me and run. Both have been as good as Edwards over the last two years, especially when it was time to campaign for candidates in the mid-term elections. But unfortunately I don’t see either of them running. Edwards, Gore and Clark are proud Democrats, and I will be proud to vote for any one of them. I’ll be damned if I’ll vote for someone who thinks that demonizing people like me is the way forward.