Who's Wagging Whom? (Inevitability, Part Two)
Iowa and New Hampshire are always enlightening, and the results they give, whether indicative of where the country as a whole is or not, should be heartening regardless of which candidate we support, because they usually prove a solid portion of media prognosticators dead wrong.
My dream outcome for New Hampshire today would be an Edwards win there. Not only because the media has ignored him except to mention his hairdo (with all due derision, it goes without saying), but because it would tamp down some of Obama's more ridiculously Messianic rhetoric (I mean, is he seeking elective office or martyrdom here?), and force the media to admit that this is not the two-way race they've been insisting it is, but the three-way race it has been from the beginning, despite the narrative they've chosen to impose upon it.
Obama is the media's newly anointed Inevitable One, obviously. Whether actual voters will have anything to say about this remains to be seen. The Globe quotes John Zogby at length panting over Obama's early 13-point lead. Zogby's bias against Clinton is not a secret, and one wonders if the Globe's endorsement of Obama and their consulting a pollster rebuked by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) for "practices that are so clearly out of line with industry standards — like using loaded and biased questions" in the Zogby/Judicial Watch poll conducted in March 2007, might be seen as an attempt, however feeble, to influence the outcome of the New Hampshire vote.
I'm hoping for more surprises, myself. I don't believe in inevitability in politics. I can't always tell it apart from the self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know if you have to believe in inevitability to believe in hope. We'll find out later today, I guess.
I am sick to death of it already. Frankly, I think this country is so far gone that it no longer matters whether, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Huckabee, Romney or Francis the Talking Mule wins.
I will go to the polls in November, hold my nose and vote for whoever the Democrats put forward.
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I hope Obama wins this election, media anointment or no. Frank Rich captured well the excitement and significance of his Iowa win in this editorial:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/opinion/06rich.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Vaclav Havel did not have much of a platform when he became President, but he was exactly what post-Soviet bloc Czechoslovakia needed when he did. Inspiration and hope are not mere intangibles when they are so sorely absent as in our times. Washington politics corrupts even those with best intentions, and as we have seen, experience didn't help Bush. Despite her experience, or maybe because of it, I have little confidence in Clinton, who contrary to her denials, enabled the disastrous Iraq war to happen with her vote as a Senator. I will never forget that. A vote for her will be a vote for more of the same and an approval for her monumental mistake.
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We should certainly all have a candidate we can believe in, but skepticism of The Obama-as-Savior Narrative is both warranted and healthy. It's easy to see skepticism as hostility to an agenda of "hope," but it's important for Obama supporters to realize that it may not be hostility to hope so much as a healthy skepticism about political sloganeering that motivates the opposition. Skepticism is good. Losing New Hampshire will make Obama a much better, tougher candidate in the long run, I think.
There is an irony here, though. Obama's core of True Believers claim to want a united America, but like all True Believers, whatever their slogan or savior of choice, they demonstrate an inability to comprehend why others don't share their fervency and faith. It's hard for them to even imagine how a President Obama might not be the salve for an injured nation. It's hard for them to understand resistance to their faith as anything but flat-out resistance to "hope". That's an untenable position, politically, to take.
"Hope" is a great campaign slogan. I'm all for it. Deval Patrick ran on the same platform, but with less adept opponents (both in his own and in the other party). I voted for Patrick in both the primaries and the general election, and I think he's doing remarkably well, but his getting down to the day-to-day drudgery of governance alienated and angered many faithful supporters who had mistaken a great slogan for a governing strategy, and had set themselves up for disillusionment. Campaigns lend themselves to a salvation narrative, but governing is a grind.
Obama is obviously a charismatic and competent politician. But his fan club should be aware that there are plenty of healthy skeptics on the road to the White House, like the old-timer from Cincinnati who wrote in the the New York Times the other day:These folks (and there are a lot of them out there) are not hostile to a message of hope -- they're not enemies of Obama, either, though they may be immune to the charms his more fervent fans take as given -- but they want a little gravitas. It's not hard to float when you're light as a feather. Obama will have to show he can do some heavy lifting to carry his message of hope. But think of it as a workout. He's building political muscle.
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