I have a helluva hard time saying nice things about the Democratic Party, but let’s give credit where it is due: This party has achieved inclusiveness, and it’s real and it’s actualized to the point of having nearly transcended into a state of casual indifference. Nobody thinks anymore about the implications of giving non-land-owners the vote. It happened almost two centuries ago, and it’s just a part of the fabric of society now. Nobody wrings their hands about women having the franchise. It happened a century ago, and even the most freakish right-wingers (and please pardon the redundancy there) don’t discuss the matter anymore. Similarly, in Democratic circles, a cosmopolitanism of race and sex and sexual orientation are fast becoming just simple facts of American life, no longer death-fights for inclusiveness, and now no longer even all that much discussed.
The Republicans couldn’t possibly be more different. They know they’re supposed to be inclusive, they know there some votes to be gotten there, and they’re good enough at marketing to go out and find some nice, clean-cut black kids with good teeth, dress them up in slacks and sweater vests, and stick ‘em up on the stage at their conventions, along with other camera-friendly props. But the truth is they haven’t remotely got a clue. You could see it with Sarah Palin. It was like, “Hey, she’s Republican, she’s a governor, she’s got a vagina! Let’s run her for vice president!” And then, of course, there were the good ol’ boys, in their cigar lounges, also drooling over the “va-va-va-voom!” factor. Yeah, baby. Like George W. Bush, when he was once asked what he and his father talk about when they get together, and replied: “p*ssy”. This guy was president of the United States and leader of the GOP one month ago. No that’s not a typo. Not one century ago. Not one millennium ago. One month ago.
And how about that Bobby Jindal, eh? “He’s freakin’ brown!! Get him up on the stage!!” If we had a shred of honesty injected into Republican politics, there’d be no question as to why they shoved him into the spotlight, and why people talk about him as a presidential candidate. What a sick joke. They couldn’t even find a real black guy for their token. I guess Clarence Thomas is too busy checking out porno mags underneath his black robes, and you never know what Alan Keyes is going to say next. Bring on Jindal. I mean, he’s skinny and brown! Maybe that’s Barack’s secret, eh?!?!
What’s most striking of all, however, is the difference in maturity between the two parties. Or at least between Obama and the GOP. Or at least between Obama’s rhetoric and the GOP. This is true in two respects. First, Obama is the most mature American politician we’ve seen in decades, at least since Jimmy Carter. That not only puts him light years beyond other politicians, it puts him galaxies ahead of any Republican anywhere in sight. He’s truly not perfect in this regard, and he’s worrisome in his vagueness and willingness to let all comers project onto him whatever they each want to see. But, even still, in his race speech in Philadelphia and in his address to the nation this week, you could see on display something so long absent from American political discourse: adulthood. This is the first major politician in my lifetime who talks to us in living color, in three dimensions, and without a subtle but sickening constant pandering of built-in contempt. I doubt we can underestimate the effect this alone will have in raising permanently the quality of our discourse. There will be no going back after this, and for a party like the GOP – which depends for its very existence on appealing to stupid, selfish and frightened voters with bumper-sticker slogans, phony wars abroad and, at home, chump change middle class tax cuts based on payments due later – nothing could be more existentially threatening.
The full force of this contrast was on display in the Obama-Jindal matchup this week. True, who wants to follow the Beatles on stage? But, that said, it was a pathetic display, and everyone knows it. The Republicans, in disarray, and increasingly seen by the public as wrecking the economy and then obstructing solutions to the damage they themselves have caused, sent out their Great Brown Hope, in an act of transparent desperation. If Jindal could have looked smaller or more panderingly counterfeit to his viewers, I really don’t know how. If his party’s rescue plan – “Let’s do nothing!” – could have smacked more of Herbert Hoover’s massively popular 1932 platform, I really can’t imagine it. Republicans, who were merely mortally wounded last week, are now in a full-on death spiral. Watch the knives come out big-time, as they accelerate the process with the sort of vicious acts of self-interest for which they are deservedly famous. It’s over now, and it’s over for all the right reasons. Americans have figured out that insanely destructive policy ideas are somewhat less than optimal, especially when you have other options. It took a while, and it took a war and an environment and an economy and a foreign policy and a natural disaster and a federal budget all going spectacularly south (pun fully intended), but, finally, dim-witted Americans have figured it out. “Oh, suicidal stupidity? No, but thank you very much. I don’t want that.”
And this is the other way in which Obama’s mature politics is so astonishing. Are we really so infantile a people that it took ‘til 2009? Are we really so embarrassingly frightened and immature that everything in sight had to go completely up in flames before we were willing to finally drop the endless indulgent fantasies of our politics and at last engage in just a modicum of real-world political discourse? Did we really allow mice-among-men the likes of George W. Bush or John Kerry to be our standard-bearers, in a nation of 300 million people? Sadly, the answer is yes, yes and yes again. Sigh.
Clearly, Barack Obama is no progressive panacea. Last week I ripped many of his policies and staffing choices as Cheneyesque. I wasn’t exaggerating, nor am I kidding about the disappointment and disillusionment many progressives are feeling when we look at the likes of Tim Geithner, or Obama’s stance on civil liberties questions. I’ve already given up playing the game of just-wait-cause-he’s-got-a-bigger-plan-in-mind-behind-all-these-apparent-cave-ins. But, having said that, he clearly stomped the Republicans this last month. I thought he should have stopped accommodating them after they burned him on the stimulus bill, but he didn’t, and poll data are showing that he is riding high and they are seeking subterranean basement levels of public support with all the burrowing alacrity of a bunker buster bomb. It may also be that he knows his political maturity approach will set the stage incrementally, allowing him to produce bigger progressive changes later on.
But, of course, it is also possible that he will not be a progressive at all, or that he will only lean that way on a few random (and relatively safe) issues. That would be tremendously disappointing and arguably strategically stupid, for regressives will continue to pitch their nihilism at every opportunity, and we know from the ugliest first-hand experience that the public is capable of drinking that Kool-Aid when it suits their selfish and lazy fantasies to do so.
Part of me thinks that Obama gets this, and he’s more clever than all of us, just carefully laying the necessary foundation for incrementally bringing change to hopelessly brainwashed Americans.
But then another part of me thinks that he’ll be buried by the failures of his own half-measures and naive accommodations to the predatory party.
Part of me thinks he smart enough to prioritize, and realizes that restoring actual human rights to our human rights policies would leave his entire agenda open to savaging by the right, especially if some bomb goes off somewhere at any time during the next four years.
But then another part of me thinks that Benjamin Netanyahu was given more honest insight into the politics of Barack Obama than this entire country of 300 million people who watched him campaign for two years and entrusted him with their leadership.
Part of me thinks that we should be grateful enough just to not have Bobby Jindal in the White House.
But then another part of me thinks that simply accepting that as enough opens the very door to Bobby Jindal being in the White House sometime soon.
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