Obama's American Dream

Barack Obama has achieved what would have seemedimprobable to even the most ardent admirers of America two years ago:  hehas been elected the 44^th President of the United States of America. Many, not least of them Obama himself, see in the ascendancy of a black man tothe highest office of the world’s hegemon, a supremely historic moment inAmerican, if not world, affairs. Ever since Obama declared his candidacyfor the American presidency, he has never doubted that this would be an‘historic’ election, whatever its outcome.  Obama’s victoryspeech at Chicago’s Grant Park a few hours ago underscores his own senseof history being made with his affirmation that ‘a new dawn of Americanleadership is at hand.’  It is only in the mid-1960s that the US passedthe Voting Rights Act, enabling most African Americans to cast a vote that inprinciple was always their birthright, and it remains an indubitable fact ofAmerican life that tens of thousands of African Americans, as well as other poorpeople, continue to remain disenfranchised.  Even if the word‘historic’ is maddeningly ubiquitous, the enormity of Obama’s personalachievement can scarcely be overstated. 

During the course of the election campaign, Obama became a phenomenon. That other ubiquitous word of politics, ‘charisma’, appears to have beeninvented for him.  Obama writes reasonably well, and has even been laudedfor his skills as an orator; he is suave, good-looking, mentally alert, and akeen observer of world affairs.  The ‘unflappable’ senator, as he hascome to be described in the American press, exudes a sense of masculine strengthand confidence that seems comforting to an ailing nation.  Obama attractedcrowds larger than any customarily seen in the US, except at football --American football, not what the rest of the world understands by football --games and nearly the whole world was rooting for him.  Kenya, which claimsObama as its native son, has now declared a national holiday in honor ofObama’s triumph.  Such is the incalculable hold of the US, in timesbetter or worse, on the imagination of people worldwide that many are moreheavily invested in the politics and future of the US than they are in thepolitics of their own nation.   

There are, of course, perfectly good reasons, other than those summoned bythe notion of America as the heaven on earth, why much of the rest of the worldshould find the American elections of interest.  Iraqis, Afghanis,Iranians, Sudanese, and Pakistanis, among many others, known and unknown, thetarget at some point of the military wrath and moral unctuousness of America,may want to reason if their chances of being bombed back into the stone ageincrease or decrease with the election of one or the other candidate.  TheFrench, perhaps best known for the haughty pride in their own culture, were somoved by the events of  September 11, 2001, which the Americans haveattempted to install as a new era in world history, rendering 9/11 as somethingakin to BC or AD, that Le Monde famously declared, ‘Nous sommes tousAmericains’ (‘We are all Americans’).   One doubts that, had itbeen Beijing, Delhi, or Dakar that had been so bombed, the French would havedeclared, We are All Chinese, Indians, or Senegalese.  That old imperialisthabit of presuming the royal We, thinking that the French or American we is theuniversal We, has evidently not disappeared.   

There can be little question that Obama's presidencywill be much preferable to that of McCain. If nothing else, his presidency isnot calculated to be an insult to human intelligence or a complete affront tosimple norms of human decency.  After eight years of George W. Bush, itseemed all but improbable that America could throw up another candidate who is,if not in absolutely identical ways, at least as much of an embarrassment to theUS as the incumbent of the White House.   But one should neverunderestimate the genius of America in throwing up crooks, clowns and charlatansinto the cauldron of politics.  

It is likely that McCain has a slightly less convoluted -- or should I say'jejune'? -- view of world history and geography than Bush, nor is hisvocabulary wholly impoverished, but he would not have struck anyone with adiscerning mind as possessed of a robust intelligence.  Though McCaininsistently faulted the ‘junior senator’ from Illinois, as President-ElectObama was known in official lingo, for his lack of experience, his pick of SarahPalin, a small town mayor who had recently risen to the office of the Governorof Alaska, for the position of Vice President betrayed an enormous lack ofjudgment.   

McCain committed numerous gaffes, accusing (to take one example) Iran oftraining al-Qaeda extremists, though of course if one thinks of George W. Bushit is manifestly clear that such displays of ignorance have seldom if ever inAmerican politics cost a man the White House.  In America, it is enough tohave a candidate who understands that Iraq and Iran are not only spelleddifferently but constitute two separate nations.  Obama seems so far aheadof the decorated Vietnam War veteran in these respects that it seems pointlessto waste any more words on McCain.   

Far too many American elections have offered scenarios where a candidate hasbeen voted into office not on the strength of his intelligence, sound policies,or moral judgment, but because the candidate has appeared to be ‘the lesser oftwo evils’.  The iconoclast Paul Goodman, writing in the 1960s, gave itas his considered opinion that American elections were an exercise in helpingAmericans distinguish between undistinguishable Democrats and Republicans, andthere are, notwithstanding Obama’s appeal to liberals and apparentlyintelligent people, genuine questions to be asked about whether this electionhas been anything more than a choice between Tweedledee or Tweedledum.  

Candidates with wholly distinct views have always been described as‘spoilers’ in the American system, and anyone who do not subscribe to therigidly corporatist outlook of the two major parties can only expect ridicule,opprobrium, and at best colossal neglect. One has only to recall the virulencewith which supposedly liberal Americans spoke of the consumer advocate RalphNader, who justly described George Bush as ‘the giant corporation in the WhiteHouse masquerading as a human being’, for having gifted Bush the White Houseby drawing votes away from Al Gore in the tightly contested election of 2000.  

To this extent, whatever America’s pretensions at being a model democracyfor the rest of the world, one can marvel at the ease and brilliance with whichdissenters are marginalized in the US.  The singularity of Americandemocracy resides in the fact that it is, insofar as democracies are inquestion, at once both perversely primitive and advanced.  In itstotalitarian sweep over the political landscape, the one-party system, whichthrough the fiction of two parties has swept all dissent -- indeed, I should sayall thought -- under the rug, has shown itself utterly incapable ofaccommodating political views outside its fold; and precisely for this reasonAmerican democracy displays nearly all the visible signs of stability,accountability, and public engagement, retaining in its rudiments the samefeatures it has had over the last two centuries.   

Obama’s most ardent defenders adopted the predictablydisingenuous view that Candidate Obama has had to repress most of his mostliberal sentiments to appeal to a wide electorate, and that President Obama willbe much less ‘centrist’ in his execution of domestic and foreign policies. (The US is one country where most hawks, particularly if they are distinguishedsenior statesmen, can easily pass themselves off as ‘centrists’,  theword ‘hawk’ being reserved for certifiable lunatics such as Bill O’Reillyand Rush Limbaugh, or blatantly aggressive policy-makers such as Paul Wolfowitz. No one would describe Colin Powell, who shares as much responsibility as anyoneelse for waging a criminal war on Iraq, as a hawk.)  Of course much thesame view was advanced apropos Bill Clinton, who then went on to wreck the labormovement, cut food stamps, initiate welfare ‘reform’ that further eroded theentitlements of the poor, and launch aggressive military strikes in Afghanistan,Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo, and a host of other places.   

Moreover, unless one is to take the view that Obama thought of his candidacyovernight, it is equally reasonable to argue that, knowing how much he wouldhave to appeal to the rank-and-file of not only Democrats but the large numberof ‘undecided’ voters as a candidate who would be markedly different fromboth the incumbent and the Republicans running for the presidency, Obama hasbeen projecting himself as far more liberal than either his political record orviews would give warrant to believe.  Indeed, as a close perusal of hiswritings, speeches, and voting record suggests, Obama is as consummate apolitician as any in the US, and he has been priming himself as a presidentialcandidate for many years. 

Obama’s 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope (New York, CrownPublishers), furnishes as good an entry point into his worldview as any. Itssubtitle, ‘Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream’, provides the link toObama’s memoir of 1995, Dreams of My Father (1995).  Peopleeverywhere have dreams, no doubt, but there is nothing quite as magisterial as‘the American dream’:  the precise substance of the American dream -- ahome with a backyard, mom’s apple pie, kids riding their bikes without a carein the world, a cute dog running around in circles after the kids, ice tea, aChevrolet or SUV; or, if you wish, something loftier, freedom, prosperity, andequal opportunity for all -- matters less than the fact that ‘the Americandream’ signifies something grand and unique in the affairs of humankind. ‘Oh Yeah The American Dream, / American Dream / the American Dream’, sangthe reggae star Jimmy Cliff,

‘so You Want To Get American Visa
go To Where They Say The Living Is Easier
since You Were Young You Been Told
you Can Get Anything There
but The Soul.’

A politician who does not profess belief in the American dream is doomed, butthere is no insincerity on Obama’s part in this respect.  Leaving asidemomentarily the question of how the American dream has been a nightmare to manyof the most thoughtful Americans themselves, from Henry David Thoreau to JamesBaldwin, not to mention tens of millions of people elsewhere, Obama’s fondnessfor what Americans call ‘feel-good’ language is palpably evident.  Justwhat does the audacity of hope mean?  Need one be audacious to hope? Obama’s pronouncements are littered with the language of hope, change, values,dreams-- all only a slight improvement on chicken soup for dummies or chocolatefor the soul. 

The chapter entitled ‘The World Beyond OurBorders’, some will object, is illustrative of Obama’s engagement withsubstantive issues, and in this case suggestive of his grasp over foreignaffairs.  One of the stories that circulated widely about Bush upon hiselection to the presidency in 2000 was that he carried an expired passport; avariant of the story says that Bush did at that time own a US passport.  Itis immaterial whether the story is apocryphal:  so colossal was Bush’signorance of the world that it is entirely plausible that he had never traveledbeyond Canada and Mexico, though I am tempted to say that illegal aliens and menborn to power, transgressors of borders alike, share more than we commonlyimagine.  Obama, by contrast, came to know of the wider world in hischildhood:  his white American mother was married to a Kenyan before hersecond marriage to an Indonesian. Obama is an uncommon African American in thisrespect, since the vast majority of African Americans have no living connectionwith Africa; moreover, though the precise importance of this cannot be unraveledat this juncture, his whiteness does not stem, as it does with most mixedAfrican Americans, from his father.  To what extent Obama can share thepain of a history, where hybridity was forged from the acts of whiteslave-owning men raping their black women slaves at will, is an open question. 

Obama lived in Jakarta as a young boy, and the chapter offers a discussion ofthe purges under Suharto that led to the extermination of close to a millioncommunists and their sympathizers.  Obama is brave enough to acknowledgethat many of the Indonesian military leaders had been trained in the US, andthat the CIA provided ‘covert support’ to the insurrectionists who sought toremove the nationalist Sukarno and place Indonesia squarely in the American camp(pp. 272-73).  He charts Indonesia’s spectacular economic progress, butalso concedes that ‘Suharto’s rule was harshly repressive.’  Thepress was stifled, elections were a ‘mere formality’, prisons were filled upwith political dissidents, and in areas wracked by secessionist movements rebelsand civilians alike faced swift and merciless retribution -- ‘and all this wasdone with the knowledge, if not outright approval, of U.S. administrations’(p. 276).   

It is doubtful that most American politicians would have made even as mild anadmission of American complicity in atrocities as has Obama.  But asupremely realist framework allows for evasion as much as confession:  thusObama merely arrives at the reading that the American record overseas is a‘mixed’ one ‘across the globe’, often characterized by farsightednessand altruism even if American policies have at times been ‘misguided, based onfalse assumptions’ that have undermined American credibility and the genuineaspirations of others (p. 280).  

There is, in plain language, both good and bad in this world; and Obama aversthat the US, with all its limitations, has largely been a force for good. And since America remains the standard by which phenomena are to be evaluated,Obama betrays his own parochialism.  The war in Vietnam, writes Obama,bequeathed ‘disastrous consequences’:  American credibility andprestige took a dive, the armed forces experienced a loss of morale, theAmerican soldier needlessly suffered, and above all ‘the bond of trust betweenthe American people and their government’ was broken.  Though two millionor more Vietnamese were killed, and fertile land was rendered toxic forgenerations, no mention is made of this genocide:  always the focus is onwhat the war did to America (p. 287).  The war in Vietnam chastenedAmericans, who ‘began to realize that the best and the brightest in Washingtondidn’t always know what they were doing -- and didn’t always tell thetruth’ (p. 287).   

One wonders why, then, an overwhelming majority of Americans supported theGulf war of 1991 and the attack on Afghanistan, and why even the invasion ofIraq in 2002 had far more popular support in the US than it did in Europe orelsewhere around the world.  The suggestion that the American people wereonce led astray but are fundamentally sound in their judgment ignores theconsideration that elected officials are only as good as the people to whom theyrespond, besides hastening to exculpate ordinary Americans from their share ofthe responsibility for the egregious crimes that the US has committed overseasand against some of its own people. 

Obama has on more than one occasion said, ‘I’m notagainst all wars, I’m just against dumb wars.’  More elegant thinkersthan Obama, living in perhaps more thoughtful times, have used differentlanguage to justify war:  there is the Christian doctrine of a just war,and similarly 20^th century politicians and theorists, watchingGermany under Hitler rearm itself and set the stage for the extermination of theJewish people, reasoned that one could make a legitimate distinction between‘good’ and ‘bad’ wars. Obama has something like the latter in mind: he was an early critic of the invasion of Iraq, though here again almostentirely on pragmatic grounds rather than from any sense of moral anguish, butlike most liberals he gave his whole-hearted support to the bombing ofAfghanistan in the hope, to use Bush’s language, that Osama bin Laden could besmoked out and the Taliban reduced to smithereens.  

Does a ‘dumb war’ become ‘dumb’ only when Americans have been unableto clinch victory?  Was the Iraq war not really a dumb war at the moment,less than a month into it, when Bush unfurled a large sign reading ‘MissionAccomplished’ on the deck of an aircraft carrier?  Would Vietnam havebeen less of a dumb war if the Vietcong had been vanquished and Vietnam hadbecome another outpost of American capitalism?  How dumb does one have tobe to understand that whether wars are ‘dumb’ or otherwise, the entire worldhas become captive to the ideology of the free market -- not least of allVietnam, which in its eagerness to attract foreign capital and turn the countryinto yet another Dubai-like zone has zealously been beckoning Americaninvestors?