We have a tendency to see politicians as fixed.
Especially once they’re running for President. They’re mature, they’re settled, they are what the are. No surprises.
Everybody knew Reagan was lazy. Everybody knew Clinton was horny. It’s part of the vetting process that we don’t assume they can get better.
This is dramatically not true in the case of Barack Obama.
It does remind me of Jordan. Not Michael, Barbara. She was something. Ever hear her? Wow.
What was most amazing about Barbara Jordan, please remember, was not her genius, or her speaking style. It was the way she grew, constantly improving in insight, in wisdom, in her ability to draw disparate people to her. By the time she died, too young, of cancer, she was a giant and it was the loss of Jordan, as much as anything else, which drove a stake through the Texas Democratic Party’s heart. That party has yet to recover.
I think all this talk of John F. Kennedy is based partly on the establishment’s acknowledging Obama’s personal growth through this campaign. Although Kennedy was never as great as he seemed in memory. He was a Bob Cousy among politicians. Obama is more like Jordan. Not Barbara this time. Michael.
And that’s what we need. We need a Lincoln or a Roosevelt, not a Nixon, certainly not a William McKinley. People are looking at these candidates, for the first time in ages, and asking, "who has the potential to be that giant figure who can lead us out of the darkness, to inspire the better angels of our nature, to make us the country we must become to survive?
Anyone seeing Obama at the Los Angeles debate would not have believed
they were looking at the same guy we saw in the campaign’s early days.
He had gone to school on Hillary Clinton. He had studied his opponent, learned her strengths and weaknesses, and learned his own. Hillary, note, is
a master debater, having learned the skill from her husband, but Obama
was truly, at worst, her equal on that night. And since then he’s been superior to her in every way.
Conservatives don’t want to admit this.
They would rather pretend we’re all wedded to the same old approaches,
the same old interest groups. The names change — NASCAR Dads become Wal-Mart Democrats
— but something real is happening. The
ground is shifting, under both parties’ feet.
What is shifting the ground is the growing understanding that Barack
Obama is a natural political talent the likes of which we have never
seen before. I’ve talked about what he got from his mother and father,
but let’s not underestimate the lessons he learned on the South Side
of Chicago, the lessons of Michelle Obama’s people, if you will.
You can see
those lessons in his cadences now, in his repetition of phrases
reminiscent of Jesse Jackson, but more Jackson missed with Reagan somehow. The passion, which was
so much a part of the Democratic Party AntiThesis even before the
Clintons showed up to re-make liberalism as moderation, it’s there now. It’s on stage, no longer hidden.
A Clinton campaign rally is Linda Ronstadt. An Obama rally is Bruce Springsteen. Even Ronstadt knows the Boss is better in the big arenas.
Might Obama "blow up" as President, become a fool, make stupid
mistakes? I really don’t think so, because it’s obvious he listens to
moderate voices, and generally makes moderate choices. Give him a Vice
President like Mrs. Clinton — detailed, driven, organized — and
you’ve got something pretty amazing.
Americans are smarter than their leaders, and much smarter than their
pundits. The movement toward Obama began with the Los Angeles debate,
and continues. He lost California because half the vote was in before
Election Day, and he hasn’t lost a big race since. I don’t think he’s
going to.
Obama has more money than Clinton, his campaign is smarter than hers,
he has positioned himself to Clinton’s right on many issues, and he has
become more electable. Then there’s that inspiration, that unique
ability to straw words into goals, ideas into platforms, and platforms
into a consensus.
Hillary Clinton might be a good President. Barack Obama can be a great
President. Most Democrats seem to understand that. And they are now
responding based on that understanding.
The 2008 Presidential election is just about over. Generational elections are never close, as much as the media might like them to be. (Nixon + Wallace, FDR, McKinley vs. Bryan, Lincoln’s Electoral College Sweep, the 1928 Jackson landslide.)
But the change this new era represents has not even begun. This is the easy part. Right now we’re still heading over the cliff. This election is about changing drivers.
Only then can the wheel turn.
