“My heart is full of love for this country.” Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope
“I actually believe my own bullshit.” Barack Obama (quoted) in Renegade
Obama often speaks about America like a true believer. Listen in on his recent remarks honoring recipients of America’s Medal of Freedom: “[W]hat unites them is a belief –that most – forgive me to those of you who are not Americans – but what we consider to be that most American of beliefs – that our lives are what we make of them; that no barriers of race, gender, or physical infirmity can restrain the human spirit; and that the truest test of a person’s life is what we do for one another.” This is b.s. we all can believe in. Obama is well aware “what we do for one another” must compete with other measures of self-worth in our Market-Democracy. American capitalism/consumerism saps faith in “common things,” promoting negative freedoms and a Rand-y culture of narcissism. Obama believes government should nurture a counter-culture of positive freedoms and mutual protection. He has no problem with inventing a useable past if it helps him revive National Greatness liberalism (minus the racialism that made many New Deal/Fair Deal programs affirmative action for white people). Get ready for years of magical thinking.
A quick survey of recent presidential discourse in Jedediah Purdy’s new book, Tolerable Anarchy, highlights why Obama’s rhetoric seems radically different from that of his post-60s precursors, including Democrats like Carter and Clinton. Purdy charts how praise for The Great Society gave way to kudos for The Ownership Society. (Which Obama debunked during the campaign by drilling down to its bottom line: “You’re on your own.”) Reagan, of course, was the Great Communicator of disdain for public life and governance: “The most terrifying words in the English Language are, ‘I’m from the Government and I’m here to help.’” But Nixon got there early as this line from his Second Inaugural address suggests: “[L]et each of us ask: not just what will my country do for me, but what can I do for myself?”
Nixon was flipping John Kennedy’s call to service: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Obama has been quoting President Kennedy a lot lately. But he may have a deeper oratorical connection to Bobby Kennedy. Obama’s famous speech on Race and Rev. Wright echoed the plea for compassion Bobby Kennedy voiced after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Kennedy memorably quoted his “favorite poet” Aeschylus in that extemporaneous talk: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” When he spoke those words to black people “tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust…against all white people” he’d earned a hearing because all Americans knew he spoke as a brother who’d endured pain which cannot be forgot.
Kennedy’s speech was replayed in the 2006 movie Bobby – a sub-Altman ensemble piece about the day Kennedy himself was shot in L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel. Bobby wasn’t deft, but it was pretty prophetic. Informed by the idea a politician’s words could shape the dailiness of American life, it anticipated the yearning for a national moral spokesman that would give Obama traction.
That longing may turn out to be mixed blessing for America’s orator-in-chief (though he didn’t offer himself as the second coming of Bobby-at-his-best). When the Obama Effect generates blowback, the President can seem a tad too cool and calibrating. Just ask those Iranians who sought to make a Green Revolution. Many of them were moved by the moral audacity of Obama’s Cairo speech. When he refused to accept conventional wisdom that America’s national interest required him to ignore misdeeds committed by our country against Iran in the past, his straight talk helped inspire Iranians to resist cynicism before and after Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election. But Obama seemed less than livingly responsive as the Iran crisis developed. His day-late-for-the-sky-is-falling talking points had a more engaged party – journalist Richard Cohen – mulling over the difference between acknowledging pain and feeling it.
Logic as well as emotion was left hanging when Obama shut-up and walked back to his Beer Summit with Henry Louis Gates and Police Sgt. James Crowley. That silent spectacle of racial “healing” on the White House lawn covered up the most salient legal issues raised by the dispute between snotty professor and prickly cop. While race and class belonged in the picture, this case was chiefly about free speech as Obama – the former law professor – surely grasped. No one claims Gates physically assaulted Crowley. Even if one accepts the cop’s version of the event, it’s clear Gates was arrested for saying, or perhaps yelling, stuff the officer didn’t want to hear. And that’s unconstitutional, as First Amendment expert Harvey Silvergate explained in Forbes Magazine. Gates had a right to talk back to Crowley (even if the prof was talking trash). But cops don’t hear it that way. Gates missed the point when he claimed he was victimized by a “rogue cop.” As Silvergate notes: “any citizen – white, black, yellow, male, female, gay, straight, upper or middle or lower class – who deigns to give lip to a police officer during a neighborhood confrontation or traffic stop stands a good chance of being busted.” Though Officer Crowley seems even more touchy than most cops. (The thin skin Crowley’s in was on display during the press conference following the Beer Summit. When a reporter stepped on the end of one of Crowley’s comments with a follow-up question, Crowley shot a look around the press room that implied someone there had just been guilty of…disorderly conduct.) A comment in the New York Times by one of Crowley’s friends speaks to his habit of command: “When he has the uniform on, Jim has an expectation of deference.”
Such expectations might have been lowered in a good way had Cambridge’s Police Department pressed charges against Gates. If the case had gone forward, Silvergate projects Gates and his lawyers would’ve raised a First Amendment defense:
The defendant almost certainly would have prevailed if not at the trial court level, then in the appellate courts – and the scope of the ‘disorderly persons’ statute would have been severely limited in all future citizen-police confrontations. The future use of handcuffs to penalize a citizen mouthing off against official authority would have been at long last, curtailed.
Silvergate’s sense of lost possibility points up how Obama passed on the chance to mount the bully pulpit in defense of everyone’s right to speak freely to power. Then again, that’s really a job for a judge (or an artist) rather than a president who’s not exactly a free man in D.C. Obama needed to ensure further fall-out from the Gates/Crowley dust-up wouldn’t deflect attention from his legislative agenda (i.e. healthcare reform). Though I don’t want to imply his priorities and principles were all that at odds in this instance. Obama probably believes America needs universal healthcare now more than it needs to establish a universal right to mouth off to men in uniform. There’s another timing issue in the equation too. Obama’s failure to seize this moment to pump up resistance to “official authority” becomes more tolerable when you consider tribunes of “real” Americans are intent on subverting his legitimacy by any means necessary. After all, Obama’s not presiding over an ideal speaking situation in a forever absolved fantasy land; he’s leading a conflicted nation where many folks feel estranged from his image of modernity, equality and urbanity. Obama isn’t about to traduce himself. He’s not asking anyone to hum authority songs. But he’ll play patriot games (as noted at the top of this piece) or “healing” games – Hell, he’ll “orbit the moon” as Robert Gibbs says – if that’s what it takes to win over Americans in the heartland. Though he knows he’s never going to reach birthers of the nation or deathers like Sarah Palin.
I’m reminded just now Palin has her own emotional, oratorical connection to Kennedys. She quoted Kennedy-hating, Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler approvingly in her acceptance speech at the Republican Convention (though she didn’t name him). Remember her shout-out to morally superior small towns where America “grows good people”? That was the Pegler note. He hit uglier ones back in the day. Pegler once wished in print (in the mid-60s) “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter [Bobby] Kennedy’s spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”[1]
Bobby Kennedy was killed by an Arab not a white Southerner. A fact that seems relevant to certain rightwing bloggers who downgrade home-grown threats of terror emanating from their side of the political spectrum. They prefer to focus on Islamist fanatics and Leftists who locked on the wrong side of history after 9/11 proved time was a jet plane. But now it’s the Right that’s stuck in the past. The heaviest threat to our polity isn’t coming from abroad. It’s right out there in the open carry states like Arizona where a dozen angry men showed off their guns to the crowd outside Obama’s last healthcare forum.
After Martin Luther King was murdered, Bobby Kennedy appealed to Americans: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” Let’s hope Bobby’s wisdom always sounds timeless. But I fear it may soon turn out to be all-too-punctual.
Note
1 Robert Kennedy Jr. called attention to this statement at Huffington Post after Palin quoted Pegler in her Convention speech.
From August, 2009