It had to be, for this year, a Democrat who broke the silence before a civil service commission meeting last month. "So, who's caught up in Obamamania?" The grin on the official's face divulged that he wasn't, exactly. Chatter went back and forth, laughter and smiles more knowing than tight-lipped — when these people enter city hall they walk into politics. Another appointee, a Republican, said he had only been watching closely enough to know "that there are three leading candidates, and I'm not terribly excited by any of them."
A couple of weeks ago, one colleague confessed he favored neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton nor John McCain. He was open to considering each one of them. The forum in which the open question was posed wasn't the right place for my opinion. And anyway, I have needed only one general election year, 2004, to know enough to stay out of the amicable political persuasion business. Friends vote however they want. But I did offer simple advice — if uninitiated, focus on policies — and, noting widespread ambivalence, considered the thought experiment. Political convictions intact, what if I were undecided?
Barack Obama's campaign courted me during February — tracts and phone calls, an automated invitation to cross party lines in the Ohio primary. Reasons why I might vote for Obama are scarce to start out. The Illinois senator opposes the Bush doctrine; I solemnly espouse it. He welcomes judicial activism; I don't oppose social legislation so much as I demand the impeachment of judges who try to promulgate it themselves. In one pamphlet, the campaign asked me to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton because the latter claims to impugn NAFTA — blamed by each candidate for Ohio's sallow economy — as immemorially as the former has.
Now, there is a double irony: Ohio was driven into these circumstances by Republican eminence in the state capital, and by the same majority flouting every rule of the free market. I would see tariffs abolished and countries made to specialize and compete; but the senator aggregated a promise to increase taxation and subsidies after a protectionist decree. OK, what else to vote for? Another colleague volunteered sheer character, as he saw parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy. Both men, he said, give people hope.
A narrow but limning reduction is to assume most of Kennedy's prepared text came from the hand and heart staff. Richard Reeves, validated by his syndicated columns from the far, mystical left, wrote Profile of Power, an incontestable and sober biography of thirty-fifth president. Hope felt in the telecast presence of Kennedy? It inheres in the hopeful: the New Englander was cool-headed, astute; until the day of his assassination, baffled with the supernatural investitures, in him, by others. If self-centered, dilatory and indulgent, JFK was faultlessly dispassionate for an executive station. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s hagiography convinces people of John F. Kennedy's glory in the same way that Clement Clarke Moore inspirits belief in Santa Claus.
The Kennedy whom Barack Obama resembles is Bobby. Reeves was ruthlessly plain about the attorney general's performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis: Robert Kennedy was inexperienced and impractical, but he was also magniloquent, vain and capricious.
There is no malice in Obama. He appears likable; modest, for a pol; and indelibly candid about his foibles. But he also appears to be somebody's speechwriter who accidentally got elected instead. His rhetoric — classical rhetoric — is sing-songy, and substitutes pomposity for wit even as it exchanges verity for style. Can Obama demonstrate the political power of his language? Well, no: he hasn't had time for it. Then, the nonchalance greeting accusations of Obama's staff telling NAFTA members other than what the candidate told voters. Leeway to which Obama is entitled, it was said. Really? That, what — the senator is vitally insubstantial? And thereby an ensuing smallness of the man.
Hillary Clinton: less to say about her. Her domestic positions are similar enough to Obama's for rejection; her foreign policy statements mutable enough to distrust. Even if she were to be nominated, even if she were inaugurated as president in ten months' time, that a debutant Illinoisan currently leads the primary race means that while inevitable, Clinton wouldn't be irresistible.
A rejoinder to the Obama campaign's retorts on NAFTA woke me up on a Sunday morning. I took notes. Hillary Clinton, in a recording, regretted this one steel mill having closed. She vowed to "end corporate giveaways," and "create jobs" to "help build the middle class." Only in a daydream from a mind of central planning can millions be placed into an abstractive construction set.
That returns me to last year's bizarre holiday tableau starring Clinton. To Carol of the Bells, symphonic but also the gravest Christmas chant selectable, Clinton wrapped boxes — not gifts, since each was figuratively identified as a federal program envisioned under a Clinton presidency.
I didn't comment on the advertisement but was struck by it. For the first time, I saw an earnest former first lady. Hillary Clinton sees herself the American matron of twentieth century socialism. Citizens are her guests: welcome to all the stuff set out by laborers, and free to come and go, but to do little more than say Please and Thank You. They can't be head of the household. She is. Her excitement, as she bundled those presents, was real. But Mrs. Clinton looks haggard from the wrong angle, these days, and her message of old-time statism — without the gilt Obama lays on his — is just as worn. Inherited popularity aside, Clintonism is old, so old. The voter is left with the appeal of a rotting feast.
Even though I conjectured a "President McCain" for the sake of an argument last April, I told a friend in December that the Arizona senator, nearly the Republican nominee in 2000, stood in this election as "an also-ran." In a party primary, John McCain would not have been — before Super Tuesday — my first choice, nor necessarily my second, while probably my third. He speaks silly things about "global warming" and the makers of pharmaceuticals — ah, but the other two senators do, too, and they are a lot sillier. He is stentorian on subjects that are none of his business, like free speech and its monetary form.
McCain is less silly on federal excess; he dislikes it. Whatever complaisance he showed on Capitol Hill over the president's judicial nominees, he has no love for judges looking into the Constitution and finding the Almighty, but seeing themselves. Cardinally, John McCain exhorts American power to expand the democratic world as a defense against what remains of the mephitic, totalitarian one. And partisan Republicans resent him for acting contra to the party now and then; but for the average citizen, if there's anything to be said of a mugwump, it's that he doesn't play favorites.
He would be no gentle, endearing president. Still, that can be plus, maybe sending David Gregory, that disrespectful bore from NBC, away from press conferences in tears. A leader for these times? As another colleague noted, he "fits the bill." I have seen sons of bitches in office, but never a real sonuvabitch. By process of elimination I vote for John McCain.