Covering Obama
A year ago, his saying that in ‘hot pursuit’ he would breach Pakistan’s sovereignty to attack bin Laden is snatched up by Hillary Clinton as a ‘gotcha’ moment. Then the Bush administration, likewise in hot pursuit of the Taliban, bombs that sovereign nation’s tribal lands.
When he says he’ll talk to Iran without preconditions, howls of ‘Naivety!’ and ‘Surrender’ go up from the Clinton camp and the neoconservative Republican right. Two weeks ago, the Bush administration suddenly abandons six years of policy and sends a high-ranking State Department official to Iran.
His campaign promise to withdraw US combat troops from Iraq within 16 months is denounced by all his political enemies. But days before he leaves on his pre-election victory lap abroad, the Bush administration, scrabbling for some formulation that will allow it legally to keep troops in Iraq beyond December, concedes the goal of — a phrase it must have choked upon — “a time horizon” for America’s departure from Iraq.
Then Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki volunteers that he agrees with Mr Obama’s 16 months’ timeline for US withdrawal from Iraq.
The Bush administration — and the McCain camp — are still twisting in the death grip to their imperial designs that is Maliki’s remark when a Maliki spokesman reaffirms that “the end of 2010 is the appropriate time for the withdrawal” of US troops.
He is in Iraq, perhaps, solely because the ‘warrior’ McCain has long been taunting him to visit there. Now the screen shows him riding over Baghdad in a military helicopter with (gasp!) General Petraeus!— immediately before cutting to a clip of John McCain and Bush Senior riding in a golf cart: two old men on their evening outing — or so the visuals imply — in the pleasant pastures of some upscale retirement home.
At his first news conference of the trip, he responds to a question about (gasp!) General Petraeus’ opposition to his timetable for withdrawal from Iraq by saying calmly that as commander-in-chief he would have to weigh the Iraq war effort against other considerations: Afghanistan, an American economy in crisis. And with that single, simple sentence pulls the rug from under a Bush administration hiding behind the general’s skirts and reaffirms a central tenet of the US Constitution: Civilian control of the military.
Leaving Jordan, he’s personally driven to the airport by the King.
In Israel — politically, such a perilous place for a presidential candidate with his worldview to be! — he is seen off by President Peres with “God bless you!” And Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Dick Cheney, emerges from a meeting with him sounding satisfied and encouraging.
In Berlin, he holds the only public rally of his trip, and 200,000 Berliners, many waving American flags — this, in a city where, for most of the tenure of Bush-Cheney, American tourists often resorted to telling people they weren’t American but Canadian! — hang on his every word, cheering.
Even the gods of chance approve him. In a Kuwaiti gym he bounces a basketball four times, five times; freezes; shoots — and sinks the three-pointer from 40 feet out. In Berlin, a city normally damp and grey in summertime, the occasion of his rally is (as the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson marvels) “alive with bright sunshine.”
What’s all this, but the world — yes, even his political enemies — falling in line behind Barack Obama?
On paper he’s just another visiting American senator. But in the eyes — and hearts — of much of the world he is a messiah figure, the incarnation of their hopes, Pied Piper to their dreams, and his is the resplendently smiling figure that greets them on their awaking from the long nightmare of an America gone mad, the America of Bush-Cheney, of Guantanamo and Iraq, of massive wire-tapping and Abu Ghraib. Even comedian Jon Stewart’s standing cartoon depicting him as a cross between Moses and various dragon-slaying culture heroes isn’t really censorious but, rather, fond-amused.
And all this is one Barack Obama.
But there’s another Obama: the calculating, even ruthless, Chicago politician, saying whatever he assesses he needs to say in order to get himself elected President.
This is the Obama who civic-mindedly eschewed taking private financing until he saw the advantage it would give him, and flip-flopped. Who vowed to oppose a FISA bill that granted immunity to the telecoms, until he saw the political risks inherent in that stance, and broke his vow. Who was averse to America’s primitive gun culture until he was caught speaking dismissively of it — and came out against gun control. Who recently opposed late-term abortion; voted to enlarge the sphere of capital punishment; produced his own faith-based federal programme; reversed himself on the status of Jerusalem, and on NAFTA; and who more than once threw supporters who loved him under the bus when their public pronouncements embarrassed him.
That, too, is Barack Obama.
Then, pity the journalist seeking to portray the ‘real’ Obama. If he contents himself with reporting the larger-than-life Che or JFK of the 21st century, humanity’s lightning rod and the world’s beloved, he faces the fair charge of absconding from his duty: of letting himself be ‘taken in.’
If, on the other hand, determinedly hewing to some notion of professionalism, he insists on ‘seeing through’ the crystal icon to the cold-eyed political calculation and even the morally mottled character it hides, he commits the equally unpardonable sin of scanting a phenomenal moment in world history, when the collective heart of much of mankind is open and brimming for the first time since the ’60s — since JFK and MLK and Bobby — and ‘Barack Obama’ is the name it’s given to that hope.
In Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, the protagonist concludes that “the secret to sanity [is] the ability to hold impossible combinations in one’s mind.” No doubt Mailer, were he alive, would see the challenge of encompassing Obama as the ultimate test of a journalist’s sanity.
Well, Bobby Kennedy, too, could in private be ruthless, even cruel, at times. Yet when in the course of his campaign he was assassinated — two weeks after telling an NAACP official that he feared “There are guns between me and the White House” — two million ‘ordinary’ Americans left off whatever they were doing to wade through marshes or walk across fields or clamber onto tenement and factory roofs, to stand at attention, saluting or weeping and throwing flowers, as the train bearing his corpse from New York to DC passed them. And the question asked by one journalist then, ‘What did he have, that he could do this to people?’ remains unanswered to this day.
Meanwhile, there was Obama last Thursday, in the heart of Europe, this tall and slender, personable young brown man, stroking — but also admonishing — the massed cohorts of yet another tribe of his adoring nations, this one overwhelmingly white. And one looked at the tremulous, happy hope in those white faces (the shining eyes, the parted lips!) and the unexpected thought that came — that somehow 500 years of transatlantic slave history had just been abolished, so completely it was hard to realize they’d ever occurred — was like vertigo.