لمــاذا هيلاري... وماذا تـريد أمريــكا..

Quote: Why Obama matters Kevin Mattson December 19, 2007 7:00 PM http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/kevin_mattson/2007/...y_obama_matters.html At the heart of senator Barack Obama's campaign lies a tension - a conflict between the politics of celebrity and a politics of vision and idealism wedded to his biography. Recently, celebrity has spoken loudest. Oprah Winfrey riles up fans in South Carolina football stadiums and blessed the senator with the "Oprah brand". And so Obama clinches the "rock star" standing that defined his candidacy from its beginning. But beneath that smiling visage stands a candidate whose biography illuminates an important historical and generational moment that Oprah-fication should not allow us to ignore, especially not now that the Democratic primary horserace is upon us. Allow me to begin with one of the advantages of my professional life: I talk to a lot of college kids. If I hear one name mentioned in regard to the Democratic primary, it's usually Obama's. For sure, some of this is due to the candidate's rock star appeal. But these college students also see something more in him, like coolness, intellect and, most important of all, idealism. They admire his acumen and ability to speak about uniting "red" and "blue" America. It goes without saying that these are young people normally cynical and alienated about politics. Generations matter in politics. There are certain moments when a generation coming into maturity must push forward. Now seems such a time as we prepare to move beyond the age of W. In this light, Obama often receives the Kennedy tag, and for good reason, since Kennedy stood at the end of the conservative 1950s and called for a new era to dawn (this in no way should suggest a direct historical analogy with that very different period). For the last 10 years, Generations X and Y have witnessed the Rove-isation of politics, the carving up of the nation into separate clusters and then playing to their basest (pun intended) elements. We've witnessed the right transforming politics into war - by pillorying their enemies as traitorous, weak and snivelling. And, most obvious of all, we've witnessed what happens when the desire to overcome the "Vietnam legacy" produces a risky war that turns into a mess and that divides Americans even more than Vietnam. Obama seems the candidate most likely to pull the country back from this situation and seek the unity ruined by Bush's presidency. Of course, to think that Obama could change politics as we know it is absurd. The claim is destined to collapse. Still, Obama maintains that his personal biography and character provide an ample recipe for political change. As he told Time magazine recently, the next election for him comes down to "character", "judgment" and "vision". Since the presidency of Bill Clinton, discussing a politician's personality has usually degenerated into gossipy nonsense. That's been underlined by the recent resignation of Bill Shaheen from Hillary Clinton's team for trashing - on the basis of no evidence - Obama's honesty about his past drug use. It turned comical when the Clinton team rifled through Obama's kindergarten papers to show that he salivated for the presidency from day one. This kind of personalising of politics is stupid, but it also shouldn't prevent us from recognising the more relevant intersections between a candidate's biography and history. When the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote about why he supported John F Kennedy for the presidency back in 1960, he didn't discuss specific policies his candidate stood for but rather how Kennedy was his own man, an existential creator of his own self - an "inner directed" candidate against Richard Nixon's "other-directedness" and craven search for political power. That sort of characterisation might sound weird to our jaded ears. But it can help highlight a central difference between Obama and Clinton. Obama's biography - his quirky family background, experience in community organising on Chicago's South Side and rise to the Senate at an early age - clearly delineate him as his own person. Hillary, on the other hand, trumpets her role as first lady (more than her own Senate experience, weirdly enough) to highlight her "experience". One of the strangest and most disheartening debates recently centred on Clinton's position on the Iraq war. But this time, the press and punditocracy debated Bill's position rather than his wife's. The whole debate turned absurd, especially considering that Hillary's votes in the Senate make clear that she supported the war from the get-go (what would knowing Bill's position do to change that?). The confusion this elicited - are we electing Hillary or her husband? - highlighted how Obama is free from the webs of association that define his major opponent. We don't need to ask what his wife's position is, now, do we? Some see independence in Obama's disdain for the day-to-day elements of campaigning. He often gets tired on the campaign trail, recoiling at its stump speeches and handshaking. In The Audacity of Hope, we hear him complain about fundraising. Obama appears as a politician who stands above politics. This image is confirmed by his obvious intelligence, his fond memories of teaching in law school (also recounted in The Audacity of Hope) and his accomplishments as a writer before entering politics. Obama doesn't hide his intelligence. He doesn't go slumming, as some would say. And why should he? After all, we've seen what a lack of intellectual curiosity can do when it captures the presidency. Obama provides our last best hope that intelligence and politics need not be divorced. Of course, this characterisation of Obama elicits criticism as much as praise. For it prompts a comparison to another candidate the historian Arthur Schlesinger supported prior to Kennedy - Adlai Stevenson. Indeed, the historian David Greenberg made this damning comparison most recently. Damning because Stevenson was the two-time Democratic party loser who personified the aloof "egghead" standing above the soiled terrain of politics. The man who had holes in the soles of his shoes and talked of waiting for the cup of opportunity to come to his lips rather than seizing it. It is why some have portrayed Obama as the "wine track" candidate, too elitist win the hearts of Americans. But there's a key difference that Greenberg and other critics often forget. And it brings us to the most important element in Obama's biography - his experience as a community organiser. Indeed, Obama himself often says that he learned more on Chicago's streets than he did in college or law school. He learned to communicate on the streets, to talk about politics in a way that reached and mobilised ordinary citizens. There's nothing Stevenson-esque about that. And it highlights the generational connection again. If one thing defines the politics of Generations X and Y, it's a commitment to community service and volunteerism, and often the substitution of good deeds for the messy world of politics. Young people have embraced volunteerism as an alternative to electoral politics. Think of Jenna Bush's recent work on behalf of Aids victims and Karenna Gore-Schiff's work with the Association to Benefit Children. Mine is a generation whose idealism has benefited from the proliferation of volunteer and civic organisations like Teach for America, Public Allies, City Year and, of course, President Clinton's own AmeriCorps program. Obama too worked in a volunteer program before hitting the streets of Chicago. And he had the distinct advantage of joining up with a community organisation that descended from the ideas of Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was no believer in do-goodism. Instead, his model of community organising tried to change power relations by having community members identify their self-interest and then raise hell to improve it, often setting up confrontational meetings with local politicians and aldermen to get a traffic light at an intersection or a road improved or better trash collection. The tradition of Alinskyism is about the furthest thing from elitism, for it forces community organisers to mobilise ordinary citizens around daily (and sometimes mundane) issues. As much as community organising taught Obama about transformational politics, it also rubbed him the wrong way. Especially the emphasis on self-interest and conflict. Obama saw the limits in that model of political organising and found himself desiring to speak a language of hope and unity as much as conflict and power. He also recognised the parochialism of local activism and the need to enter national politics. After all, you can't get people healthcare by doing neighbourhood organising. You can't stop a protracted war by knocking on people's doors. You can't solve problems like global warming by organising solely at the local level. Obama's decision to enter politics - while trying to preserve the lessons community organising taught him - goes to the core of his identity. It's what makes him who he is today. And I think it's that element that explains his appeal. Unlike the phony populism all politicians seem to embrace today, Obama's biography suggests that he recognises the ability of people to organise at the local level for change while also seeing the need for larger power structures to help them in that pursuit. And this returns us to Obama's talk about unifying the country - to what Michael Tomasky a year ago called his "civic republicanism". Some suggest it's not surprising that it takes an African-American to talk this language of American unity. But I think it has more to do with Obama's experience as a community organiser. He understands the need for building unity from the bottom up, the need to unite people around a civic vision that weds local and national power. This substantive vision for American civic renewal clearly has little to do with Oprah-fication of Obama's campaign. The tactic of celebrity endorsement might better be understood a necessary evil of postmodern politics, like raising gobs of money, kissing babies and making mind-numbing stump speeches. But it doesn't empty his candidacy of his larger vision and its relation to a generation's historical moment. On that count, Oprah says nothing, and Obama's biography says it all.