New World Man

It always amazes me how rare politicians are who have the ability to position themselves in a way that doesn’t turn off or demonize huge swaths of the electorate. Bill Clinton was able to do it, Reagan was too. But the order of the day (especially here in Canada) is to consciously split the electorate, go after specific constituencies and play into people’s fears rather than their hopes.

As overwhelming as the center-left’s adulation for Barack Obama, the 99th ranking senator in the house, seems at times, I have to admit to just loving his speeches. Riffing off on the themes of personal responsibility and American exceptionalism, ground long ago ceded by most Democrats, Obama’s June 4th Commencement address at Knox College, was a masterstroke.

“What will be your place in history?”

In other eras, across distant lands, this question could be answered with relative ease and certainty. As a servant in Rome, you knew you’d spend your life forced to build somebody else�s Empire. As a peasant in 11th Century China, you knew that no matter how hard you worked, the local warlord might come and take everything you had�and you also knew that famine might come knocking at the door. As a subject of King George, you knew that your freedom of worship and your freedom to speak and to build your own life would be ultimately limited by the throne.

And then America happened.

A place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form “a more perfect union” on this new frontier.
And as people around the world began to hear the tale of the lowly colonists who overthrew an empire for the sake of an idea, they started to come. Across oceans and the ages, they settled in Boston and Charleston, Chicago and St. Louis, Kalamazoo and Galesburg, to try and build their own American Dream. This collective dream moved forward imperfectly–it was scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of women, shaken by war and depression. And yet, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, people kept dreaming, and building, and working, and marching, and petitioning their government, until they made America a land where the question of our place in history is not answered for us. It’s answered by us.

Have we failed at times? Absolutely. Will you occasionally fail when you embark on your own American journey? You surely will. But the test is not perfection.
The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them. Whether chance of birth or circumstance decides life�s big winners and losers, or whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams.

We have faced this choice before.

This is followed by a litany of achievements by the center-left of the country. Obama places civil rights, regulation of public markets, public education, anti-trust legislation in the context of American achievement. TNR weighs in, noting that Obama avoids almost all of the pitfalls that befall Democrats these days, presenting a fresh positive agenda that proffers no demagoguery.

Still another remarkable point about Obama’s speech is that it focused mostly on working Americans without patronizing them as victims or publicly wondering why they vote Republican. Instead, he spoke straightforwardly of “the fact that when you drive by the old Maytag plant around lunchtime, no one walks out anymore.” And, gently, he warned the graduates that countries like India and China are producing a new generation of “skilled educated workers” who will be competing with their American counterparts, not just the guys who get laid off from factory jobs.

Presenting what few progressives bother to offer nowadays–a view of the global economy that is neither Pollyanna-ish nor protectionist and a vision of America’s future that includes good-paying blue-collar as well as white-collar jobs–Obama called for more job training and retraining and also government investments in new technologies that could give our businesses and workers a competitive advantage. “Just imagine what it could do for a town like Galesburg,” he said. “Ten or twenty years down the road that old Maytag plant could reopen its doors as an ethanol refinery that turned corn into fuel. Down the street a biotechnology research lab could open up on the cusp of discovering a cure for cancer.”

Just as impressive as what Obama said is what he didn’t say. There were no references to his inspiring life story, few indictments of injustices against those he described as “men and women who looked like me,” and little else that would make a middle-class, white, or conservative listener tune him out.

Of course we’ve yet to see a lot of concrete evidence how Obama will manage the implementation of his vision at the federal level, but he seems rooted strongly enough in the 21st century to be able to see where old ideas won’t cut it.

One of the reasons that Obama gets so much attention is that the dissaffected New Democrat wing of the Democrats has been so short on heroes lately. This blog subscribes to the view that Clinton’s triangulation strategy in the nineties was not a simple act of ordering policies from two columns, Chinese menu style, but the emergence of a distinct strain of American political thought, as TNR eloquently argued in May.

Even a cursory examination of some of the actions that Clinton’s Democratic critics point to as proving his accommodation to conservative ideology–such as signing a balanced budget, pushing for welfare reform, and declaring an end to the “era of big government”–show something more than a search for the center. Rather, they are the authentic expressions of a worldview Clinton carried not only throughout his presidency but through a quarter-century of public life. Three notions–America’s increasing global interdependence, the importance of the bonds of community, and the need to rethink government for a post-bureaucratic age–formed the basis for Clinton’s approach to government. They constituted an outlook–Clintonism–that has become rare to the point of extinction among Democrats since he left office. It is a vision Democrats would be wise to revisit.
…
From the promise in his second inaugural as governor to provide “a government that will give our people a better chance to fight for themselves” to his second inaugural address as president, when he pledged “a new government … humble enough not to try to solve all our problems for us, but strong enough to give us the tools to solve our problems for ourselves,” Clinton did what Democrats rarely do: He outlined a consistent vision for government and then acted to change not just what government does, but how it does it.
…
Today, most every Democrat running for national office will include in their stump speech a throwaway line extolling American virtues of “patriotism, responsibility, family, and faith.” But, to Clinton, these were not rhetorical boxes to check, but rather animating principles behind the policy decisions he made.

Obama’s rhetoric echoes many of the themes that Clinton espoused, and his biography could be offered up as proof-positive for Clinton’s vision of what America can offer. The question is how well Obama will gain experience and mature in office, and how long can his admirers allow him to do so. Then again, maybe he’s already qualified for a VP run in ‘08.

I’d love to read something critical about this guy if anyone can find anything.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 at 16:01 and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.