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The Reactionary Utopian
June 3, 2008
President Other
by Joe Sobran
[Breaker quote: The Hopeless Hopefuls]
When Bill Buckley ran for mayor of New York in 1965, he offered the voter "the internal composure that comes of knowing that there are rational limits to politics." It was the most sublime campaign promise of all time, and he wound up with 13 percent of the vote. He could take pleasure in knowing that Aristotle would have endorsed him.
The U.S. presidential race of 2008 is not a fight in which Aristotle has an obvious dog. It may have hit its low point early when Hillary Clinton suggested ever so tactfully the other day, in a decidedly non-Aristotelian moment, that Barack Obama may yet be assassinated. You go, girl!
Obama missed the opportunity to make a telling riposte: "In my administration there would be no bimbo eruptions." Instead, he has remained cautious and doggedly "inspirational." What he inspires is anybody's guess; for an alleged idealist, he is still annoyingly vague about his ideals.
One knows that he issues from Chicago's socialist, even pro-Soviet, matrix of yesteryear -- a fact he is trying to conceal, with the free assistance of the news media. He has adopted the old strategy of appearing moderate in his manners while being extreme in principle. He has been the most left-wing member of the U.S. Senate since his arrival there. He has also supported the most grim and grisly late-term abortions -- while calling himself a Christian and denouncing dog fighting, an irony noted only, as far as I know, by the conservative Washington Times.
I presume that if Obama actually watched an abortionist dismember a viable child, he would get violently sick. However, to snare certain votes and endorsements he is willing to pretend that such savagery is protected by the U.S. Constitution. And the press keeps treating him as the very incarnation of all the better angels of our nature. No wonder Hillary is so furiously frustrated by his hypocrisy. Takes one to know one, and he's beating her at her own game.
Obama's ballyhooed speech on race at the end of April, when he had to distance himself from the rabid Pastor Wright, was the sort of bombastic performance that gives rhetoric a bad name. Even so keen a satirist as Maureen Dowd of The New York Times was awed by its supposed profundity -- though there wasn't a single fresh insight in it.
After eight years of the bumbling Bush, 2008 should have been the Democrats' year, but they are reduced to a pathetic pair of presidential aspirants -- two hopeless hopefuls. Obama's popularity in his party is merely the inverse of Hillary's unpopularity. John McCain is nothing to write home about, but either of these two should be duck soup for him in November. The big money, which usually favors war in the Middle East, will flow to him.
This could still become -- though it probably won't -- the year of President Other, of an alternative to the usual sorry selection between twin mediocrities. Obama has no discernible political philosophy except More, Much More of Same. Nobody has ever accused him of being "right-wing," which would imply that he had some sort of principle other than socialism. (As we have often remarked, "right-wing" can mean anything of which the speaker disapproves: anarchism, libertarianism, monarchism, caesarism, conservatism, militarism, racialism, fascism, what have you.)
Since nobody seems to be very clear about what he stands for, you might say that Obama is running on his Otherness. His meaningless mantra is "Change." Change from what? And into what? Never mind. Just "Change." That word alone signifies the hysterical enthusiasm he generates, but doesn't explain it. He's a suave young blank the voter is invited to fill in.
Being unknown and undefined is part of his appeal -- the essence of it, in fact. He is not Hillary, whom we know only too well. He is not white, but neither is he very black. He isn't identified with any scandal, or even gaffe. He has no vivid personal history to specify him. He eludes identification with a studied, inoffensive blandness. He's as close to being a Mr. Nobody as a politician can get. Though his last book was called The Audacity of Hope, if there is a single word that fails to describe him, it's surely that one: audacity.
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The Reactionary Utopian columns are copyright © 2008 by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, www.fgfbooks.com.
All rights reserved. Editor may use this column if copyright information is included.Joe Sobran is an author and a syndicated columnist. See complete bio here.
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