BARACK-BASHING

No doubt there'll be plenty more like this in the months ahead. LA Times writer David Ehrenstein complains that the Senator is a "Magic Negro", Sidney Poitier redux. To the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, he's "the Billy Eckstine of American politics". You have to be of bus-pass age to get that reference; he means Obama is too suave:

Whatever his vision of America, and I have no doubt about its fundamental decency, he has been mainly recommending himself. More specifically, Obama has been promoting the multiplicity of his origins as a qualification for leadership. This strikes me as little more than identity politics, but with a cunning refinement: instead of being representative of one thing, he is representative of all things. He is typical of everybody, the most racinated American of all. In America, you can be heroic for being typical. But I do not see how your grandfather can make you a hero. ... And it is narcissism to vote for a candidate because he is like yourself, or one of your own. I would not vote for a hero of the Jewish partisans from my mother's own town if he were not obsessed with the injustices of the health care system in this country.

But isn't the emphasis on personality partly the consequence of the campaign season starting so early? Wieseltier is on stronger ground, perhaps, when he raises the question of how the newcomer would deal with the wider world:

Obama's opposition to the Iraq war seems to have been principled, and somewhat prescient. But the foreign policy inclinations presented by the candidate are vague and platitudinous and sanguine about the reasonableness of the world. The ghost of Cyrus Vance seems to be consulting for the campaign. So I continue to regard the phenom with some misgivings. Nobody ever charmed anybody out of a nuclear weapon.

Comments

[dearieme]

Having been right about Iraq presumably makes him unique amongst the candidates. Add to that the advantages so neatly, if impolitically, summarised by Senator Biden, should surely make him capable of beating Little Madame Cattle Futures. But I don't suppose he will. Would she invite him to be her vice-presidential candidate? That would be rather brave.