Barack Obama and the illusion of change

Illinois Senator Barack Obama (AP/Jim Cole, File)

If he is elected president, Barack Obama says he's going to make changes. He's the agent of change. The chalice of change.

And not just mundane, wonkish change, but change at the most fundamental level. Transformational change. Change — and this is crucial to his pitch — that will transcend ideology itself.

"We are sending a powerful message that change is coming to America,'' the candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination tells audience after audience. Then he names the force he'll unleash to accomplish it.

"We are choosing hope," he proclaims. "Hope is the bedrock of this nation."

Hope, he tells his rapt listeners, "is not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside of us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that there is something greater inside of us."

When he utters these lines, the crowds often vault to their feet, applauding, if not quite understanding how this hope business will actually work.

Even some of the journalists assigned to the candidate have trouble containing their enthusiasm. They seem caught up in what is almost a national swoon.

Obama, the charismatic mixed-race senator from Illinois, is going to change things. People can just feel it.

Hang the Boomers

In a piece of hagiography in the current issue of Atlantic magazine, the right-leaning writer Andrew Sullivan argues that "Obama — and Obama alone — offers the possibility of a truce … in the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us."

By that, Sullivan means the degenerative hatred between the political right and left in this country. Suffused by religion and those uniquely American notions of national destiny and righteousness, this family quarrel has often turned the American conversation into a vulgar, deafening slanging match.

Conservatives, egged on by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, use the word "liberal" as a smear, meaning something close to traitor. For their part, liberals, often affecting an air of stern intellectual superiority, dismiss Republicans as something akin to Bible-waving fascists.

Obama promises to put an end to all that: "Republicans, Democrats and independents," he told an audience recently. "We are one nation."

In return, to paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel, a nation turns its weary eyes to him.

But few, so far at least, have looked past Obama's eloquence for the specifics of what he means by change.

Not that Obama isn't open about his plans. They're right on the official campaign website. They just don't contain much that can be reasonably described as radical or different. In fact, taken as a whole, they are more like a big, carefully worded bowl of Democrat-flavoured porridge.

Need to hear

The candidate who advertises himself as the one who "tells people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear," has made sure to craft positions that should jar no one in the Democratic party base, whether they be left-leaning or moderate.

On Iraq, he would get out, but in a cautiously calibrated, phased withdrawal over roughly a year and a half. (His main opponent, Hillary Clinton, also advocates a phased withdrawal, though over a longer time frame, perhaps as much as five years.)

On health care, he favors universal coverage, but not all of it government-run, and not all of it obligatory.

For gays and lesbians, he approves of civil unions but not marriage. And when it comes to illegal immigration, he wants tougher border enforcement and a crackdown on those who hire illegal immigrants, while at the same time finding some way to confer citizenship on the 12 million who are already here.

And so on.

Not only is none of it radical. But, as American commentators have begun to point out, none of it is very different from the solutions offered by Clinton, whom Obama paints as a charter member of the status quo that so badly needs changing.

"There's not a dime's worth of difference between them," says fellow Democrat and political scientist Allan Lichtman of American University in Washington, D.C. Moreover, according to Lichtman, Obama isn't particularly trying to present any bold or different proposals. So much for challenging the establishment.

Identity politics

The other question, of course, is how any of Obama's proposals would end the ideology wars and win over Republicans, many of whom emphasize social conservatism, small government and a militaristic foreign policy. It is a puzzle the candidate has chosen not to address with anything other than platitudes.

But then, he may not have to. Because this election, like so much else in the television age, is about identity politics — the notion that a person's leadership abilities derive chiefly from his or her cultural background.

Change is taken to be in the person, not the ideas. And in the identity department, Obama is a colossus.

In his magazine essay, Andrew Sullivan argues that the mere sight of Obama's handsome, beaming, biracial face will melt the world's current anti-American heart and restore goodwill towards the U.S. and its ideals.

"If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology," writes Sullivan, "Obama's face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."

That, of course, assumes the Islamic world will be so besotted with a black man in the White House it will have failed to notice his threatening to bomb Pakistan if necessary to root out al-Qaeda.

Sullivan, at least, is willing to make that leap. And he seems to think that if Americans can look past substance for form, so will the Third World.

New York Senator Hillary Clinton (AP/Ed Reinke)

Motherhood

Hillary Clinton found out in Iowa how widespread the Sullivan view is today in Middle America.

She had campaigned for months under the impression that years of experience in the Senate and, yes, the White House, would trump impressionistic politics. Then the polls started breaking for Obama.

Clinton saw it, and twisted her message, arguing that she, too, is a reformer, but that only she has the inside experience to enact real change.

It seemed like an internal contradiction. So she tried another tack.

"Words are not action," she began telling audiences, referring to Obama's uplifting pitch. "And as beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are, they are not action."

By the time she said that, she probably knew she was doomed, at least in Iowa where Obama triumphed in the first important vote of the race. A few days later, in New Hampshire, you could hear the desperation in Clinton's voice.

"I've already made change," she snapped during an all-candidates debate three nights before the primary, "and I will continue to make change. I'm not just running on a promise of change! I'm running on 35 years of change!"

Then she had that on-camera "emo moment," as the teens say, choking up when a woman in the crowd asked her how she manages the stress of the road. Whether Clinton's answer was authentic or staged hardly mattered.

For an instant, she was a mother struggling gamely under all the weight of household and job, and that realization seems to have been what turned the tide in her favour. After all her speeches about experience and all her public mastery of the issues, it was the change implicit in being a mother headed for the White House that shoved her over the top.

Don't stop thinking

Obama has Republicans as well in contortions.

Men like Mitt Romney, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, whose careers have been the very embodiment of the status quo, are now fighting over who among them can best be seen as an agent of change.

It verges on the ridiculous, given the intrinsic meaning of the word conservative. But of course other candidates in other elections have deployed change, too, as a political weapon, often with great success.

John F. Kennedy came to offer the ideal of Camelot. Ronald Reagan promised "Morning in America." And Bill Clinton presented himself as "the man from Hope," rocking and jiving to Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)."

The interesting thing about this race is that there actually are candidates who are offering specific, concrete change. John Edwards, the Democrat currently running third, would quit Iraq immediately and impose enough new taxes to pay down at least some of America's stupendous debts. Ron Paul, the libertarian running close to last in the Republican pack, also offers some similarly radical prescriptions.

But that assumes people really want change, as opposed to what looks like change. And there is a difference.

Letters

Good article. The increasing possibility that Mr. Obama is going to win the Whitehouse - you can just feel it! - is an excellent reason to poke holes into him. It's like testing to see how much is really in that bag of chips.

I wonder if people even want change at all, but simply relief from eight years with Mr. Bush. Americans thought (TWICE), "Bush is the answer!" Then came the painful side effects. Now we need Obama to relieve those side effects. (Wash, rinse, repeat.)

Change is like saying you want to lose weight, so someone gives you a bowl of salad and a skipping rope. "Thanks, but what I really want to look like those actors on TV!" So you buy a bunch protein bars, energy drinks and Adonomizers instead.

"Thanks! Another box of these protein bars and I'll be as thin as a rail." Go Obama; you can't lose.

– Keith Sutton | Winnipeg