The junior senator from Illinois will run for President of the United States. Before and after Barack Obama declared, intimations were made in news and opinion columns that character's content would be less germane to a candidacy than that of melanin. Elevating skin color to the "primary determinant of human traits and capacities" is ex vi termini racism, and the ease, or even imperative, with which it has been done, even by the senator himself, baffles.
Two years ago, Paula Zahn told Obama that she was "fascinated" by his choice of "black" as a qualification of nationality. Obama replied that he was proud of his heritage. His favorite anecdote, though, was rather about the reduction of the person on a city sidewalk. "[T]he cab driver doesn't go by and say, 'Hey, there's a mixed-race guy.' They [sic] say, 'There's a black guy.'"
How to parse this? Is he a member of a congenital ordination, or a victim, or a martyr? Obama continued and told Zahn that he has learned Negro spirituals and goes to church. Did he need to be black to do this? Barack Obama, some of the people who write or talk about him, and some taxi drivers define Barack Obama firstly, or mostly, as black. Others believe appearance and imputations thereof to be the least significant matters about the senator, and I am one of them.
Of larger importance is Obama's practiced and often belletristic rhetoric. Elaborate use of the English language is not a feature of modern statesmanship, so this attracts attention. I noticed this ability to elegantly say nothing, or something false, during Obama's address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "And John Kerry believes," he orated, on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, "that in a dangerous world, war must be an option, but it should never be the first option." The only two options left are diplomatic exaction, which President Bush endeavored to do for several months; and capitulation, which Obama suggests should have happened four years ago, and espouses now.
But the correctio phrase promises a fourth way, and whatever that might be is footnoted, so Obama can go on to the figuration. When he maintained that "We have real enemies in the world," and that "these enemies must be found," the tacit subject was al Qaeda, yet the statement can be read, comically, as a circumlocution of foreign affairs. "The people I meet," their stories set in anaphoric pathos from the same speech, "don't expect government to solve all their problems." Except — what? "[W]ith just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life."
While the ideas to which Obama subscribes aren't pronounced, they are more relevant to a voter's decision. One commentator placed the senator relatively, "in the Democratic center" — which would be, absolutely, far left — and a survey of his presidential platform shows no signal difference from that of John Kerry, or Al Gore; or John Edwards, or Hillary Clinton. For those who see action abroad as American trespass, somehow necessary but ever to be conducted with self-reproach; who like socialized medicine and athletic, even vindictive, regulation of commerce; strange and perfunctory invocations of God; any one of these current or one-time senators will do.
Enthusiasts, of course, will be tempted to select the man who looks and talks propitiously, and then Barack Obama is again valued for minor qualities. When the senator said, at his campaign proclamation, "In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope," what was the listener told, substantively, other than this man's fondness for antithesis?
Andrew Ferguson wrote for the Weekly Standard a review of Obama's authorship, comprising two books: a memoir written before politics and a political manifest written after. The second book Ferguson called "infinitely weaker," unction supplanting the guilelessness of the first one. While it is hard to accept inferiority beyond measure without a book going to print not proofread, or missing pages or words altogether, Ferguson's imprecision on that point was balanced by the reasonable regret that "we have lost a writer and gained another politician. It's not a fair trade."
Obama's declaration for executive office came on Saturday. On Sunday, he rebutted criticism from Australia's prime minister, John Howard. Obama was "wrong," Howard said, to call for retreat, as it would "encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq." It is known that the enemy delighted in the Democratic win and in its own words anticipates, from the new majority, a hurried entreaty.
"I think it's flattering that one of George Bush's allies on the other side of the world started attacking me the day after I announced," said Obama, then in the next sentence disparaged Canberra's military commitment and challenged Howard to undertake what the senator would have the United States renounce. This the day after the senator spoke, using paradox, of salad days in Springfield, when he "learned to disagree without being disagreeable." Color, clever distinction, statecraft? Most obvious about Barack Obama is that he has been made — or has made himself, for exertion in American politics — insufferably prosaic, and no uncommon politician.