Obama And The American Experience

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPolitics.einnews.com

December 14, 2007

It's human nature to be optimistic. Even when times are tough, even when fate turns ugly, belief in a better future drives most lives---individually, and since revolutionary times, the life of our nation.

America's optimism has been tested over the past few decades. We've taken a lot of hits from those in whom we invested hope.

Kennedy was gunned down in his prime. Johnson left office rather than face a Vietnam War-weary electorate. Nixon choppered off from the White House lawn in disgrace. Ford and Carter seemed at the time to be big disappointments and were voted out of the White House. Reagan left office as a popular president, even though during the height of the Iran-Contra affair only 14% believed him when he said he had nothing to do with it. Then came Bush I, who managed only 37% of the 1992 vote, followed by Clinton, who, for the most part was tied in knots by Gingrichian gridlock and impeachment. And now Bush II.

The 8 presidential experiences since Kennedy don't exactly make the grade as an all-star line up.

On the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue Democratic arrogance lost a congressional majority mandate that had existed for two generations. Those Democrats were replaced by a Gingrich-DeLay team fixated on entrenching its own power and dismantling the public sector.

Americans who were 21 (the voting age at the time) when Kennedy was shot are now 65 years old. Most Americans have no experience with a President who inspires the nation past his first hundred days in office, or, in George W. Bush's presidency, past the first few months after 9/11. Most are too young to remember a White House and a Congress working in tandem as a matter of routine to accomplish big things that move the nation forward.

You would think that the electorate would lower its expectations to match what common memory recalls as past performance. But hope and optimism are too deeply embedded in our national psyche to accept mediocrity or worse from our leaders. Proof of that lies in the failing grades President Bush and Congress get in poll after poll.

We're disappointed, Deeply disappointed. But we haven't abandoned hope. We expect more. Americans are hard-wired to believe that free and independent people can govern themselves better than those who aren't.

And that's what 2008 presidential campaign is all about. The buzzword is "change." The emotional reach goes deeper. It goes deeper than better management. It goes deeper than any single issue or program.

Most Americans are embarrassed down to their toes at what's happening in their name and at the incompetence of their government. Fixing all of that would seem to be a minimal requirement. Overcoming it and getting our groove back as a nation is where most Americans are desperate to go.

How else to explain why, out of a field of very experienced Democrats, the least "experienced" candidate is surging in the polls? If we were hiring a President based on past job experience, Barack Obama wouldn't make the first cut. But seniority isn't what this presidential campaign is all about.

It's striking that in the recent Washington Post/ABC News poll only 9% of New Hampshire's respondents felt Obama had the best experience to be president, trailing Clinton, Edwards and Richardson. Yet he is now in a virtual tie with Clinton for the most voter support.

A few years back, Obama published his Audacity of Hope. In the title, he almost perfectly captured today's electoral mood. It would indeed by audacious to elect a president as young, as black, as lacking in government and worldly experience as Obama. It would be stunning to elect an American president with a name that sounds eerily similar to the nation's number one public enemy, Osama bin Laden.

In his first book, Dreams from My Father, Obama talks frankly about his bi-racial upbringing, his years harboring black rage, his experimentation with drugs, and with a litany of other life experiences that in past elections would have meant fairly instant voter rejection.

A panel of Democratic voters who watched the Des Moines Register debate for Fox Cable News was asked afterward whether they felt questions about Obama's past drug use were legitimate or whether they were just dirty politics. Every hand went up for dirty politics.

For those entrenched in the ways of Washington, none of this quite makes sense. Some attribute his growing support to his charisma. Some say he's running a superior campaign. This week, Oprah gets the credit.

But what makes the prospect of an Obama presidency real doesn't necessarily come from Obama. Rather it comes from an electorate that knows in its gut that as a country we are better than Bush, better than a gridlocked Congress, better than our recent history of national self-government, and anxious to find an authentic someone with both common sense and the capacity to inspire the nation for the long road back.

The hope, the optimism inherent in the American spirit is the movement. Obama didn't create it. But he well could be its inheritor.

Joe Rothstein, editor of US Politics Today, is a former daily newspaper editor and long-time national political strategist based in Washington, D.C.

See all previous articles by Joe Rothstein here.