by Peggy Noonan
That’s a little what both candidates are like to me.
Mr. Obama hails from Chicago, but no one would confuse him with Chicagoans like Richard Daley or Dan Rostenkowski, or Harold Washington. “There is something colorless and odorless about him,” says a friend, “like an inert gas.” And Mr. McCain, in his experience, history and genes, is definitely military, and could easily come from Indiana or South Carolina or California, and could easily speak of upholding the values of those places.
What are the political implications of candidates seeming unconnected to regional roots, or being shorn of them? I suppose the question first surfaced in 2000, when Al Gore won the national popular vote and lost Tennessee, his home state. But he hadn’t ever really seemed of Tennessee. He was born and grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of a senator. That was his formative experience. They liked him better in New York and California than down South.
They like Mr. Obama in Illinois, but he hasn’t locked up neighboring Michigan, just as Mr. McCain has strong support in Arizona but still lags in Colorado and New Mexico.
On a policy level, the end of placeness may have implications. It may, for instance, lead a president to more easily oppose pork-barrel spending. If you’re not quite from anywhere, you’ll be slower to build a bridge to nowhere. If you don’t feel the constant tug of Back Home—if it is your natural habit to think of the nation not first in specific and concrete terms but in abstract ones—then you might wind up less preoccupied by the needs and demands of the people Back Home. Mr. McCain is already a scourge of pork. Mr. Obama? Not clear. One doesn’t sense any regional tug on his policy.
All this is part of a national story that wasn’t new even a quarter century ago. Americans move. They like moving. Got a lot of problems? The answer may be geographical relocation. New problem in the new place? GTT. Gone to Texas.
It’s in us. And yet.
I was at a gathering a few weeks ago for an aged Southern sage, a politico with an accent so thick you have to lean close and concentrate to understand every word, so thick, as they used to say, you could pour it on pancakes. Most of the people there were from the South, different ages and generations but Southerners—the men grounded and courteous in a certain way, the women sleeveless and sexy in a certain way. There was a lot of singing and toasting and drinking, and this was the thing: Even as an outsider, you knew them. They were Mississippi Delta people—Mizz-izz-DEHLT people—and the sense of placeness they brought into the room with them was sweet to me. It allowed you to know them, in the same way that at a gathering of, say, Irish Catholics from the suburbs of Boston, you would be able to know them, pick up who they are, with your American antennae. You grow up, move on, and bring the Delta with you, but as each generation passes, the Delta disappears, as in time the ward and the parish disappear.
I miss the old geographical vividness. But we are national now, and in a world so global that at the Olympics, when someone wins, wherever he is from, whatever nation or culture, he makes the same movements with his arms and face to mark his victory. South Korea’s Park Tae-hwan moves just like Michael Phelps, with the “Yes!” and the arms shooting upward and the fists. This must be good. Why does it feel like a leveling? Like a squashing and squeezing down of the particular, local and authentic.
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I end with a thought on the upcoming announcements of vice presidential picks. Major props to both campaigns for keeping it tight, who it’s going to be, for by now they should know and have, please God, fully vetted him or her. On the Democrats, who are up first, I firmly announce I like every name floated so far, for different reasons (Joe Biden offers experience and growth; Evan Bayh seems by nature moderate; Sam Nunn is that rare thing, a serious man whom all see as a serious man.) But part of me tugs for Tim Kaine of Virginia, because he has a wonderful American Man haircut, not the cut of the man in first but the guy in coach who may be the air marshal. He looks like he goes once every 10 days to Jimmy Hoffa’s barber and says, “Gimme a full Detroit.”
Detroit: that’s a place.
Obama and the Runaway Train
The Wall Street Journal: October 30, 2008
The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:
He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.
A great moment: When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, he did not respond with a politically shrewd “I have no comment,” or “We shouldn’t judge.” Instead he said, “My mother had me when she was 18,” which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn’t have to.
There is something else. On Feb. 5, Super Tuesday, Mr. Obama won the Alabama primary with 56% to Hillary Clinton’s 42%. That evening, a friend watched the victory speech on TV in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, saw on the screen “Obama Wins” and “Alabama.” She said, “Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school.” She said, “That’s where they used the hoses.” Suddenly my friend saw it new. Birmingham, 1963, and the water hoses used against the civil rights demonstrators. And now look, the black man thanking Alabama for his victory.
This means nothing? This means a great deal.
John McCain’s story is not of rise so much as endurance, not only in Vietnam, which was spectacular enough, but throughout a rough and rugged political career of 26 years. He is passionate, obstreperous, independent, sees existential fables within history. His self-confessed role model for many years was Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish Civil War, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Mr. McCain, in his last memoir: “He was and remains to my mind a hero for the twentieth century… an idealistic freedom fighter” who had “a beautiful fatalism” and who sacrificed “for something else, something greater.” Actually Jordan fought on the side of the communists and died pointlessly, but never mind. He joined his personality to a great purpose and found meaning in his maverickness. In his campaign, Mr. McCain rarely got down to the meaning of things; he mostly stated stands. But separate and seemingly unconnected stands do not coherence make.
However: It was a night during the Republican Convention in September, and two former U.S. senators, who had served with Mr. McCain for a combined 16 years, were having drinks in a hotel dining room. I told them I collected stories of senators who’d been cursed out by John McCain, and they laughed and told me of times they’d been the target of his wrath on the Senate floor.
The talk turned to presidents they had known, and why they had wanted the job. This one wanted it as the last item on his resume, that one wanted it out of an inflated sense of personal destiny. Is that why Mr. McCain wants it? “No,” said one, reflectively. “He wants to help the country.” The other added, with almost an air of wonder, “He wants to make America stronger, he really does.” And then they spoke, these two men who’d been bruised by him, of John McCain’s honest patriotism.
Those who have historically been sympathetic to the Republican Party or conservatism, and who support Barack Obama—Colin Powell, William Weld and Charles Fried, among others—and whose arguments have not passed muster with some muster-passers, go undamned here. Their objections include: The McCain campaign has been inadequate and some of his major decisions embarrassing. All too true
.
But conservatives must honor prudence, and ask if the circumstances accompanying an Obama victory will encourage the helpful moderation and nonpartisan spirit these supporters attempt, in their endorsements, to demonstrate.
There is for instance, in the words of Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Pawlenty, “the runaway train.” The size and dimension of the likely Democratic victory seem clear. A Democratic House with a bigger, more fervent Democratic majority; a Democratic Senate with the same, and possibly with a filibuster-breaking 60 seats; a new and popular Democratic president, elected by a few points or more; a Democratic base whose anger and hunger have built for eight years; Democratic activists and operatives hungry for business and action. What will this mix produce? A runaway train with no one to put on the brakes, to claim a mandate for slowing, no one to cry “Crossing ahead”? Democrats in Congress will move for innovation when much of the country hopes only for stability. Who will tell Congress of that rest of the nation? Mr. Obama will be overwhelmed trying to placate the innovators.
America enjoyed divided government most successfully recently from 1994 to 2000, with Bill Clinton in the White House and Newt Gingrich in effect running Congress. It wasn’t so bad. In fact, it yielded a great deal, including sweeping reform of the welfare system, and balanced budgets.
Whoever is elected Tuesday, his freedom in office will be limited. Mr. Obama is out of money and Mr. McCain is out of army, so what might be assumed to be the worst impulses of each—big spender, big scrapper—will be circumscribed by reality. In Mr. Obama’s case, energy will likely be diverted to other issues. He will raise taxes, of course, but he may also feel forced to bow to a clamorous base with the nonspending items they favor: the rewriting of union law to force greater unionization of smaller shops, for instance, and a return to a “fairness doctrine” that would limit free speech on the air.
And there is this. The past few months as the campaign unfolded, I listened for Mr. Obama to speak thoughtfully about the life issues, including abortion. Our last Democratic president knew what that issue was, and knew by nature how to speak of it. Bill Clinton famously said, over and over, that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” The “rare” mattered. It set a tone, as presidents do, and made an important concession: You only want a medical practice to be rare when it isn’t good. For Mr. Obama, whose mind tends, as intellectuals’ minds do, toward the abstract, it all seems so… abstract. And cold. And rather suggestive of radical departures. “That’s above my pay grade.” Friend, that is your pay grade, that’s where the presidency lives, in issues like that.
But let’s be frank. Something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment. History happens, it makes its turns, you hold on for dear life. Life moves.
A fitting end for a harem-scarem, rock-’em-sock-’em shakeup of a year—one of tumbling inevitabilities, torn coalitions, striking new personalities.
Eras end, and begin. “God is in charge of history.” And so my beautiful election ends.
CHAPTER 13
The Loneliest President since Nixon
These pieces chart Barack Obama’s decline from a figure of hope. When I think of him now I think of the comment of a smart acquaintance, a leftist Democrat who is a great Obama supporter and has worked and works closely with him.
Politics aside, I said, what is Obama’s biggest flaw?
His answer was immediate. “He doesn’t listen.”
You mean, I said, that his mind has already been made up, and when he listens he’s just going through the motions?
“No,” he said. “He likes to talk. He talks a lot. He’s not hearing you because he’s telling you.”
That is a bad flaw in a political leader.
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The Special Assistant for Reality
The Wall Street Journal: November 26, 2010
A reporter covering the president’s trip to Indiana this week said Mr. Obama was visiting the heartland in part to get out of the presidential bubble. I’m sure this was true. Presidents always get to the point where they want to escape Washington, and their lives, and their jobs. But they never can. Because when you’re president and you go to Indiana, you take the bubble with you. Your bubble meets Indiana; your bubble witnesses Indianans. But you don’t get out of the bubble in Indiana. Once you’re in the bubble—once you’re in the midst of a huge apparatus, once you have the cars and the aides and the security and the staffers—there is no getting out of it.
You cannot shake the bubble. Wherever you go, there it is. And the worst part is that the army of staff, security and aides that exists to be a barrier between a president and danger, or a president and inconvenience, winds up being a barrier between a president and reality.
You lose touch with America and Americans in the bubble, no matter who you are, or what party. This accounts for some of the spectacular blunders presidents make.
Because of the bubble, successful presidents have to walk into the presidency with an extremely strong sense of the reality of their country. In time, with the wear and tear of things, this sense of How Things Really Are may dissipate, disappear or remain stable, but it won’t get stronger. It never gets stronger. High political office is like great affluence: It detaches you. It separates you from normal life.
Once you’re president, you’re not going to be able to change the features on your famous face; you’re not going to be able to escape security, grab a fishing rod, and go sit on the side of a river waiting for normal Americans to walk by, settle in, fish with you, and say normal American things, from which you will garner insights into what normal Americans think.
What a president should ideally have, and what I think we all agree Mr. Obama badly needs, is an assistant whose sole job it is to explain and interpret the American people to him. Presidents already have special assistants for domestic policy, for congressional relations and national security. Why not a special assistant for reality? Someone to translate the views of the people, and explain how they think. An advocate for the average, a representative for the normal, to the extent America does normal.
If Mr. Obama had a special assistant for reality this week, this is how their dialogue might have gone over the anti-TSA uprising.
President: This thing is all ginned up, isn’t it? Right-wing Web sites fanned it. Then the mainstream media jumped in to display their phony populist street cred. Right?
Special Assistant for Reality: No, Mr. President, it was more spontaneous. Web sites can’t fan fires that aren’t there. This is like the town hall uprisings of summer 2009. In the past month, citizens took videos at airports the same way town hall protesters made videos there, and put them on YouTube. The more pictures of pat-downs people saw, the more they opposed them.
President: What’s the essence of the opposition?
SAR: Sir, Americans don’t like it when strangers touch their private parts. Especially when the strangers are in government uniforms and say they’re here to help.
President: Is it that we didn’t roll it out right? We made a mistake in not telling people in advance we were changing the procedure.
SAR: Um, no, Mr. President. If you’d told them in advance, they would have rebelled sooner.
President: We should have pointed out not everyone goes through the new machines, and only a minority get patted down.
SAR: Mr. President, if you’d told people, “Hello, there’s only 1 chance in 3 you’ll be molested at the airport today” most people wouldn’t think, “Oh good, I like those odds.”
President: But the polls are with me. People support the screenings.
SAR: At the moment, according to some. But most Americans don’t fly frequently, and the protocols are new. As time passes, support will go steadily down.
President: I’ve noted with sensitivity that I’m aware all this is a real inconvenience.
SAR: It’s not an inconvenience, it’s a humiliation. In the new machine, and in the pat-downs, citizens are told t
o spread their feet and put their hands in the air. It’s an attitude of submission—the same one the cops make the perps assume on “America’s Most Wanted.” Then, while you stand there in public in the attitude of submission, strangers touch intimate areas of your body. It’s a violation of privacy. It leaves people feeling reduced. It’s like society has decided you’re a meat sack and not a soul. Humans have a natural, untaught understanding of the apartness of their bodies, and they don’t like it when their space is violated. They recoil, and protest.
President: But you can have the pat-downs done in private.
SAR: Mr. President, you don’t know this, but when you ask for that, a lot of TSA people get pretty passive-aggressive. They get Bureaucratic Dead Face and start barking, “I need a supervisor! Private pat-down!” And everyone looks, and the line slows down, and you start to feel like you’re putting everyone out. You wait and wait, and finally they get another TSA person, and they take you into the little room and it’s embarrassing, and you start to realize you’re going to miss your plane. It’s then that you realize: all this is how they discourage private pat-downs.
President: I’ve wondered if this general feeling of discomfort might be related to a certain Puritan strain within American thinking—a kind of horror at the body that, melded with, say, old Catholic teaching, not to be pejorative, might make for a pretty combustible cultural cocktail. This heightened consciousness of the body might suggest an element of physical shame we hadn’t taken into account.