Essay of the week by Todd Gitlin.
Barack Obama's campaign was not simply a candidacy, but a movement. It seemed to take in, then discharge, enough energy to replace coal and oil. Millions lived and breathed under its spell. They partied for Obama. They broke donation records. They spent weekends or weeks phone-banking in Ohio and Pennsylvania, wolfing down donated doughnuts and soft drinks, in the same spirit (though more comfortably) that their parents staged sit-ins, almost a half century ago, at the segregated lunch counters of North Carolina and Tennessee. In a country widely believed to be disaffected - if not disgusted - by politics, these legions of volunteers made politics cool.
But there was a stark difference. This new force was not altogether, strictly speaking, a progressive movement, a liberal or antiwar movement, or what used to be called a protest movement or a movement of the left, though it embraced all these colorations and could not have succeeded otherwise. It was not a outsider movement to "speak truth to power" or at least to bang away at the walls that surround establishments. In truth, it was a bundle of forces and movements that set out to breathe life into the feckless Democrats, in the spirit of renovation, recovery, repair, and restoration of values trampled and promises unkept, these values and promises being multiple (sometimes contradictory, too), just like America itself.
Against the background of the calamitous and discredited Bush presidency, a presidency that existed symbiotically with a dedicated movement of its own, this was an Obama movement - an idea of Obama was what they had in common. The candidate was its cause. To many millions of his supporters, he was the change they could believe in - no matter that this was a paradox if not an invitation to hallucination.
The man was, as any significant national leader must prove to be, a projective screen, a vessel for vast and complex longings, "a man of the hour" who nimbly walks the chalky line where the man and the hour meet. Obama, an astute student of politics from the neighborhood level upwards, was not an empty vessel. But he himself understood early on that he embodied something - some intimation of possibility, or a cross-hatch of several possibilities - that extended beyond his own considerable talent.
Last July, when the McCain campaign decried Obama as (perish the thought) a "celebrity", and Obama responded by saying that "the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have just become a symbol," he was accused of bragging. But, as is his wont, he was in fact standing coolly off to the side and taking note of a big phenomenon as if it were happening outside himself - in this case, the phenomenon of himself dancing the complicated two-step of popular politics.
GK Chesterton was almost right when he wrote (in quiet 1922) "America is a nation with the soul of a church" - but even more confusingly, it is a crowd of souls swarming through a whole mall full of churches. Having assembled a larger majority of the popular vote than anyone since Ronald Reagan in 1980, in a turnout that, as a percentage, outdid any since 1968, Obama will preside over that mall.
So now, after the many and flagrant insults of George W Bush, the country is ready and eager to be, in the American fashion, born again, but at the same time severely chastened. Obama strides to the White House flanked by a friendly Congress, with an emergency at his back and legions to call forth - manifested, not least, in a trove of 10-13 million email addresses, a tremendous resource during the campaign but untested for mobilisation during years of governance. He needs to grab both ends of a paradox and perform the tricky task of firing up enthusiasm and lowering expectations at the same time. He has to show results while living with many compromises, some failures, and much inertia. For indeed, not all new starts are possible, certainly not at once, given all the bills simultaneously coming due from years - decades - of intertwined illusion, corruption, and smugness: two wars in an Asia that is simultaneously on fire on other fronts; the bursting of the housing bubble and resulting credit crisis; the meltdown of climatic stability amid an infatuation with fossil fuels; years of neglect in public investment and the common good. All presidencies, however bright-eyed at the start, soon slog into a marshland replete with what Donald Rumsfeld memorably called the known unknowns and unknown unknowns as well as the known knowns.
One way to estimate Obama's prospects, and therefore the country's, is to track the various results that his prime constituencies expect of him.
1: Economic repair and renewal. If there was any doubt that Obama would triumph, last autumn's economic meltdown dissolved it. The economic damage is so sweeping and cuts across so many social lines that it lifts this category to the top of his list.
Even before Obama moves into the White House, he profits - in the short term, at least - from the emergency, for the principle of government intervention in the ostensibly free market has lost its taint and emerged as practical common sense. For now, the rejectionists are a discredited rump of the Republican Party (possessing, however, some obstruction potential in Congress). The economic breakdown has required the launch of an interventional process under a government committed to rampant deregulation 15 minutes ago. Congress has already voted to inject significant funds in new energy initiatives, perhaps helping to solve one of the outstanding questions he confronts: how to promote huge environmental initiatives against the budget-balancers. The budget-balancers have, for now, collapsed.
If the economy improves decently on Obama's watch, the principle of active government could be stripped of its tarnish for a generation. He can expect a reasonable grace period. In the run-up to his inauguration, hope is more fashionable than grim realism. Even if the grace extended to Obama is measured in months more than years, it will probably last long enough to win a bigger Democratic margin in the 2010 midterm elections and a filibusterproof Congress for later initiatives. The era when big government was thought to be over, is over.
2. Professionalism, constitutionalism, and reason. Obama won 58% of American voters who hold post-college degrees, and those are far from the only citizens who expect government to be competent and to make sense. They expect rational and accomplished adults to be in charge, to offer plausible justifications of policy, and to stand reasonably free of entangling alliances with private capital. They reject cronyism; for example, they will not tolerate a former official of the Arabian Horse Association in charge of emergency preparation. They reject grotesque fabrications. They expect cogent public address from their leaders. They expect "intelligence" to be intelligent. They reject torture. They expect environmental protection, workplace inspection, security, deep, enduring, dramatic action against global warming.
Here, climbing out of a national chasm, Obama begins with a pack of goodwill. Of course, the bar will rise for him as Bush memories dim. But a few successes during Obama's first year -even handling natural or terrorist disasters competently - can do a great deal to restore the reputation of government overall, with benefits and goodwill that accrue for later use. The self-marginalisation and disarray of the Republican Party can only help. There's nowhere else for competence-lovers to go.
3. A modest foreign policy and the end of the "war on terror". This is the stickiest part of Obama's challenge. His candidacy began in the backlash to Bush's wild war in Iraq and all the unilateralism that attended it. That ill-conceived war itself accomplished the task of making Obama's views mainstream, and the phase-out has already begun. At the same time, he can, without any political cost, walk away from the moronic rhetoric of the "axis of evil". He can dispense with the clumsiness and presumption of combining intelligent security measures with preventive war itches under the specious banner of a "war on terror". Closing Guantánamo and banning torture, he can recoup much national honour. He will resurrect multilateralism and diplomacy in ways that will challenge Europeans and others. He will dampen the American troop presence in Iraq to the low tens of thousands. The Iraqi government will be beleaguered for years or decades to come, but Iraq will never become his war as Richard Nixon made Vietnam his.
To Obama accrues much goodwill in the world, a bit because his middle name is Hussein and his complexion is dark, more because he has the immense advantage of not being Bush, and still more because he is a vigorous, thoughtful, activist cosmopolitan. He will not need to be lectured on the virtues of well-applied foreign aid. But he will need still more political capital to get it into his mind to accomplish three big goals. First would be to challenge the immense Pentagon budget. (Given his need, as he sees it, to keep the military happy, this is unlikely to come in a first term.) Second, to do something about Afghanistan. But it's by no means clear how to do right in the other war Bush utterly misconstrued. Afghanistan may well be intractable - the British and the Russians have found it so. Third, to do something about the Middle East, which like a chronic illness remains as hard to remedy as it is inflammatory.
Here's the audacity part that will cheer the crusade as it metamorphoses from campaign to presidency. If Obama gets traction in the first three areas, with results to show, his presidency stands a decent chance of being transformative as a political force, consolidating an enduring big-tent majority with progressive leanings, relaunching government as a site for energy (in both senses) and inventiveness. The America in which he runs for re-election would be a country that has recovered from the depredations of the Bush years, that is freed of laissez-nous-faire fantasies and know-nothingism. But thanks to the foreign policy challenges, the deficits in global statesmanship and the full measure of the urgencies, it is very unlikely to be an America at ease in a dangerous world.
If he fails at one of the three, he will still be counted successful. If he fails at the first, he is vulnerable. If he cannot pass the "Are you better off than you were four years ago" test with voters, Obama may still triumph in 2012 - again, faute de mieux - but all the audacity in the world will fail to rescue his halo.
Sociologist, journalist and public intellectual, Todd Gitlin is professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, New York. Born in 1943, he came of age as a political activist in the 1960s, when he was president of Students for a Democratic Society, which he has written about in Letters to a Young Activist. In 1965, in Washington, he helped organise the first national demonstration against the Vietnam. A critic of both the Left and the Right, Gitlin is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars, and The Intellectuals and the Flag, in which he called upon left-leaning intellectuals to once again engage in public debate.
