The media fad of the moment is to call Barack Obama’s candidacy a media fad. Every day, several more bored journalists who fancy themselves cultural generals speculate from their armchairs that Obama’s bid for the White House is little more than a fleeting feeling and a grand delusion. They level various non-specific complaints pointing to Obama’s substance shortfall and complain that his followers have drunk a particularly poisonous brand of Kool-Aid.
A small dose of cynicism can be healthy in a presidential race. We have lived through a string of either lousy or divisive presidents, each one in some way disappointing a large portion of the electorate and increasing rancor and division between the parties. Lyndon Johnson started a disastrous war that drove the country into bitter cultural and political wars, and then simply abdicated responsibility for his mess in 1968. Richard Nixon, his successor, was a paranoid firebrand who displayed a conspicuous disregard for our Constitution. Ford was competent but lacked visionary flair; Carter had the vision but lacked competence.
And then there was Reagan, who had a penchant for being liked and was the first president since Calvin Coolidge who passed the presidency on to a member of his own party without either dying or resigning. But he also created a foreign policy fiasco in the Middle East and helped to further entrench the bases of each major party. His passion for deregulation led to an economic crisis in the banking industry, prompting his successor to allege he practiced “voodoo economics.” George H.W. Bush, our president’s father, was an unremarkable leader of basic conservative values who spent most of his four years trying to clean up Reagan’s mess.
Bill Clinton was a decent and prudent president who led the country though one of the most sustained periods of economic growth in history. But his self-destructive personal habits – most notably cheating on his wife with a White House intern – eclipsed most of his good policy initiatives. He was also railroaded by an angry legislature dominated by a wing of the Republican Party intent on his demise. But if it weren’t for his personal demons, many of which still shadow him and his wife, we would probably have avoided the nightmare of the past seven years.
Our current president shatters all old records for incompetence, inanity and divisiveness. He reacted to a great national tragedy by attacking the wrong country, issued executive orders that openly ignored Constitutional restrictions on his power and always lacked a sense of the struggles of the middle class. He has failed his party, his country and the world. Historians will record his tenure as a nadir of American history.
Americans have good reasons to be pessimistic. But while it is healthy to be critical of current candidates, cynicism is out of place. The logical result of a perennially cynical mind is a stubborn determination never to improve. The simple belief that we cannot do better is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby our future is defined by our tarnished past.
What was once so, need not be so tomorrow.
What lies at the heart of Barack Obama’s support is not hero-worship, child-like infatuation or naivete. It is not messianism, and it is not false hope. It is the acute feeling many Americans have, young and old, that we have not faced our challenges with the best of ourselves, that time and again we have succumbed to cynicism and the ugliest human passions rather than standing upright and asking ourselves, truly, how we can be better – as individuals, as towns and villages, as states, as regions and as a country. It is a belief not in Obama the man, as handsome as he looks and as pretty as he talks, but in a vision for overcoming our past mistakes and our current excesses. For the first time in a very long time, the American people are looking past our flimsy divisions to a sunnier future.
This is not a cult. It is a working democracy.
