The Shadow of Obama's Rhetoric

In that historic moment in Grant Park when Barack Obama was giving his first speech as the President–elect, the ugly shadow of American politics was being sustained. Who was sustaining it? Barack Obama. I doubt he did it knowingly. He is, we all sense, a man of deeply honorable intentions and considerable intellect. Sustaining that ugly shadow, while not his intention, has been an unavoidable consequence of his rhetoric. The shadow is rooted in America’s belief in its own greatness, in its sense of having a special destiny and purpose. And in playing to that, he is no different than those who have gone before.

Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric, uplifting as it may be, is of the same stuff as Ronald Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill, which is the same stuff as Bush positioning his Iraq fiasco as a means for America to bring the winds of democracy throughout the mid-east. All are calling forth America’s greatness. Whether you are on the progressive left or the free market, socially conservative right, calling forth America’s greatness is de rigueur. And I hate to say it, but we Americans are suckers for such stuff. We are raised on it, along with our Wheaties and apple pie.

When you get past the core values of each man as an individual, Bush and Obama both invoke the core values and tropes provided by the American narrative. And those buttons can be pushed by politicians of any stripe. Yes, Obama will bring his own values and character to the office and that will indeed be very different from what went before, but he is not free from invoking what America most responds to; it is the politician’s bread and butter, and Obama invokes these themes with what I can only call gorgeous mastery. The U.S. can have an Obama for the exact same reason it can have a Bush. They are, in fact, flip sides of the same coin.

I almost regret saying all this, so enamored am I with Obama and what he means for the U.S. and the world. And yet, while my eyes welled with tears from his election, I am also saddened, I’ll even say scared, by what I perceive to be America’s deep and unending need to believe in its own special destiny. American politicians ignore that need at their peril. The unique status of America is so much a part of its self-understanding as a nation that all candidates, Obama included, must speak to it. Yet Obama, unlike any previous president, conveys, simply as a result of who he is, that by the fact of having elected me, you have confirmed your special uniqueness as a nation. As President-elect, he massages the deepest need of America to believe in itself as a nation above nations.

Unfortunately it is a need that can be harnessed for good or for ill. We know America can be a colossal force in either direction. Its arrogant overreaching in Iraq is only its most recent act for ill, sold as an enlightened America creating a beachhead for democracy in the Arab world. While there is no doubt that Barack Obama, who often invokes the language of America living up to its promise, will seek to institute policies and practices which will be both deeply humane and restorative, they will rest on the same troubling foundation as his predecessor. We are a nation with a unique destiny, therefore let us…

Who can say what will arise from invoking that belief? To get an Obama, you must be willing to get a George W. Bush. Feeding the addiction America has to its own self-image may provide some political advantage, but it is not a habit worth sustaining. When America has a President who can free it from its own narrative and write a new one that does not draw on its unique destiny, then the dangers from the America that the world has been living with these past eight years will not rise again. May Obama become that President.