Obama's Choice, and Ours

David Sirota, who has in the past often been quite critical of Senator Barack Obama (and I don't mean "critical" in the Sexist, Egotistical, Lying Hypocritical Bigot mode -- if I may quote 9 to 5 -- of our mouthbreathing mainstream media, which is struggling disgustingly at every opportunity these days to smear Obama as a skeeeery stealthy brown-skinned Islamofascist), writes of him in a more hopeful if still skeptical frame of mind today, on the occasion of Obama's long-expected announcement that his campaign for President is officially underway.

I sympathize with Sirota's position, and I'll quote a little of it in a bit in the hopes that this will nudge you to follow the link to read his whole statement.

But before I turn to his (and my own) skepticism about Obama, I do want to register -- as many others are, too, at the moment -- just how hopeful and encouraging the Democratic presidential field is, in its diversity, in its forceful rhetoric, in its accomplishments. Whatever my complaints about Clinton and Obama and others, it is bracing and inspiring to see something like the actually diverse, scientifically literate reality of America reflected in the field of folks who seek our Presidency (the appalling apparent inevitability that a nation of precarious workers will be "represented" always only by wealthy elites remains, for now, in full force). And even if I am not in Obama's corner at present, or in Clinton's -- so far I am thinking I like Edwards best, and I'll admit I am among those who pine in secret for the re-emergence of our elected but defrauded Gore -- I can say that I will work hard and then vote (almost) cheerfully for either of them if it comes down to it (as I still strongly suspect it will not).

To compare the Republican with the Democratic Presidential fields at present is practically to confront the nineteenth with the twenty-first centuries, to confront a spectacle of McKinley era assumptions and racist undertones (to put the point charitably) with a spectacle of secular assumptions and multicultural multilateralist resonances. Wherever one lodges one's Presidential hopes at the moment, it seems to me that things are looking up for democracy-minded Americans.

Be that as it may, Sirota writes of Obama that it is obvious he "is a person who wants to do the right thing and has genuinely strong convictions. But he also seems to believe that the reason our country has such challenges is because all sides of every issue have not come together in unity[.]" Sirota worries, and I worry right along with him, that this is more a rhetoric of good feeling than one of good sense. "The problem with this outlook," he writes, "is that it fundamentally misunderstands why we are at this moment in history." As Sirota goes on to drive home the point:

Forty-five million Americans are uninsured, and millions more underinsured not because low-income health advocates and the insurance industry haven't sat down together and sung Kumbaya. It's because, unlike every other industrialized country in the world, we have a government that has been bribed into allowing the insurance industry to profiteer off sick people. Our global warming problem did not happen because environmentalists and the auto industry refused to hug each other. It happened because the auto industry has bought off enough politicians to make sure we don't increase fuel efficiency standards.

This implies that there is little likely to be any sort of genial Obamesque way through the actually existing thicket of problems with which a truly visionary and efficacious Administration will need to contend in the midst of our current and forthcoming distress.

"[M]any of our most pressing problems are zero-sum," Sirota points out: "[S]omeone is benefiting from the status quo, and to change the status quo means someone may lose something." To hope otherwise may not be so much a matter of audacity as naivete, or worse. As it happens, I suspect that few of the actual problems of environmental threat or social injustice that beset our society are really, truly zero-sum in the way Sirota means, once one assumes a perspective that takes into account a longer time-span than a quarterly profits statement or a wider worldview than the one available from a smoke-filled backroom, but what matters is that plenty of people with the power to megaphone their priorities will wrongly imagine or cynically pretend that these are zero-sum problems and, hence, they may just as well be, even if there is little logical reason for this.

Rather than condemn Obama or anticipate the worst from him, it is right and proper that Sirota wishes him the best and proposes that he confronts in this moment a literally definitive choice: "Ultimately, Obama will have to make a very important decision -- one that none of the pundits will ever see, much less understand. He will have to decide whether he wants to offer up poll-tested platitudes about nebulous 'hope' and run for President, or whether he wants to really challenge the status quo and actually BE ELECTED President." Versions of this choice confront each of the Democratic contenders, of course, as does America more broadly.