Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the eighth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.
In American politics it was a year like no other: the year of a long, long Demo-cratic primary season — protracted by the Clintons’ difficulty in accepting that they were not to be the new queen and returning king, after all — succeeded by a relatively brief and one-sided but galvanic general campaign — one in which the new sensation, Sarah ‘Wink-Wink’ Palin, was already backfiring (“Whenever Putin rears his head over the horizon…”) when Wall Street crashed, putting paid to such fun talk and the (scary!) ambition behind it, once and for all.
For much of the watching world, it was a year of dubiety and/or tremulous hope as, beginning in the snows of Iowa nearly 12 months ago, Barack Obama made his unlikely way, step by step, towards the American presidency. And it culminated in the incredulous happiness, tears and joy, both of Chicago’s Grant Park and much of the watching world, as on the night of November 4 a young African-American family waved to the world from the President-elect’s podium.
With his uncommon intelligence, remarkable oratory and charisma, Obama had been both creator and beneficiary of that happiness. But any election reveals its electorate; the fact was that, whatever Obama’s catalyzing contribution, America had overcome its bogeyman and elected a black man to be the most powerful person in the world; and how cynical would you have to be to insist that the ruinous trend in black-white relations that had begun with the Middle Passage 400 years ago had not just been stopped dead in its tracks?
Besides, this was an America that had been ripped from its constitutional moorings by the imperial presidency of Bush-Cheney; an unleashed and rampaging superpower that had launched two wars, established a global system of torture camps, and fallen, as in ‘1984,’ to spying illegally on its own citizenry (down to what books they borrowed from the library).
And no small part of the happiness that flooded the US and the world that night was due to the at least subliminal realization that, very late in the day, a majority of Americans had acted to pull their country back from the brink of the unspeakable threat and horror it had become.
So it was real, and earned, that happiness — how often do epochal good things happen in our world? — and it has persisted. It was no surprise that, according to US editors and news directors voting in the Associated Press’s annual poll, Obama’s election was the top news story of the year (followed closely by the economic meltdown he will inherit). Time magazine could hardly have done otherwise than name Obama its ‘Person of the Year’; nor was it surprising when, last week, Gallup found him ‘The Most Admired Man in America.’ (Thirty-two per cent of respondents chose Obama against five per cent for the second-placed GW Bush. It was the first time a president-elect had topped the poll since Eisenhower in 1952.)
Indeed, this happiness was so durable that when, back in September, the markets crashed and the economic attrition began in earnest, the resultant mixed mood was one worthy of drama. What it was, was a deep soul’s joy, surfing on a tsunami of looming doom.
Yet we live in the world, and — to revise one of candidate Hillary’s anti-Obama lines — the poetry of the campaigns is fast giving way to the prose of governance. It’s less than two months since November 4, yet already it’s hard to hold on to the wonder of Grant Park. (That wonder is most often expressed these days in shrunken form, as the US media’s preoccupation with celebrity-watching. On any given day, the leisure activities of the Obamas on vacation in Hawaii, say, are right up there with the latest antics of, yes, Paris Hilton or Britney Spears.)
In that time, the President-elect has mystified his base with his (admittedly, incomprehensible to this columnist also) selection of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. He has fanned the first embers of skepticism and discontent with his centrist and right-of-centre cabinet picks (inducing him to protest pointedly, “The ‘change’ comes from me,” though whether he is able to control his stable of prima donnas in the coming months and years remains to be seen). And most recently he deeply hurt and angered the gay community — already reeling from California’s overturning of the right of gays to marry — with his choice of Rick Warren, the volubly homophobic evangelist, to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.
(It’s clear that Obama’s first goal will be to ‘unify’ his deeply polarized country; that, to be fair, was his main campaign plank. But it’s not at all clear that the way to do that is by giving each side a turn at the crease, so to speak. Warren may share with some of the younger generation of evangelists a concern for the environment and the poor. But at the end of the day what he preaches is discrimination and oppression. It’s hard to find the flaw in the rhetoric of furious bloggers who argue that, by such a morally-neutral ‘inclusion’ measure, Obama might as well have found a role at his inauguration for the notorious ex-Klansman David Duke.)
Finally, there was — and is — the Blagojevich affair. It’s true that, as Frank Rich writes, the Illinois Governor’s “alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street,” and that “those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk.”
But Obama has been at least slightly tarnished by his defensive response to questions about his team’s communications with the Senate seat-selling governor. And his report, released last week, exonerating members of his transition team from concealing any attempted wrongdoing by Blagojevich, was an unhappy case of Himself investigating Himself.
Moreover, the President-elect will be taking office in a world more crippled by economic collapse and rendered disorderly and dangerous by eight years of Bush’s foreign policy than any faced by an incoming US president as far back as this columnist can remember. As this is being written, eg, news comes that Pakistan has begun moving thousands of troops to the Indian border, sharply raising India-Pakistan tensions in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks (and taking the pressure off the Taleban and al Qaeda in western Pakistan and Afghanistan).
In his person, Obama has already made history; 2008 will rightly go down in the books as an historic year; and the poetry of it deserves to be long — and happily — remembered. But 2009 is shaping up with a vengeance to be a year of prose. And given the size, intractability and number of the challenges awaiting him, Chief Executive Obama will need to prove himself to be in fact ‘the Golden Boy.’
Put another way, he will need to do the seemingly impossible: ignite the prose of governance with the poetry of his campaign. Or else his presidency will fail.
It’s as unlikely and stark as that.
