The Smartest Guy in the Room

 So it is to be Barack Obama. There's something thrilling about that. The first black President. Imagine that.

Looking at it one way, it's very nice indeed that, in the wake of the Republican Apocalypse (in the original meaning of the word: 'Revelation') where Fate gave the Republican Party exactly what it wanted: nearly unassailable control of the government, a scared and cowed populace, and a world without a military rival--and how they gleefully produced years of bad governance, a Las Vegas New Year's  Adult Video Extravaganza of corruption, unimpeded international political and military disasters, and two--count 'em, two--life-ruining recessions--that in the wake of all that, that Fate has turned around gave us a real opportunity. 

Now, let me be clear about this: Of the three main Democrats, I liked John Edwards the best, and that simply because I felt his positions were, as I saw it, the best. And electing Hillary Clinton would have been another real opportunity. So none of this 'Barack Obama transcends partisan politics' opera here. He doesn't have to be the lone pillar in a cracked and barren landscape to be grand. Yet grand it is.

But there's more to it than just a Black President: personally, there's something kind of electric about a President from Hyde Park and the University of Chicago, whence I stem. I do know people who know him personally. And we finally have a chance to make up for Paul Wolfowitz, David Brooks, and even Ahmed Chalabi.  It's also that the part of Hyde Park that embodies not just intelligence, but respect for intelligence AND learning AND careful thought that, expressed and applied, could actually do some good. 

To be frank, Barack Obama reads like a potboiler novelist's idea of the first Black President: exotic parentage, coming up from nothing, to be Head of His Class at Harvard Law School (which is close enough.) I mean, all you need is him to have roomed with a Saudi Prince and dated a fabulous movie star and the book writes itself, am I wrong? Of course, the popular imagination goes, it'll take all that to get one of, you know, them, into the White House.

But of course that's our current entertainment matrix makes far less sense than bestselling hack fiction.   In world of the current political novelists, the rags-to-riches candidates are the obnoxious elitists, while the scions of privileged dynasties are the endearing regular guys. (Even guys, like the current candidate, who have a III in back of his name.) And the smart, informed, and agile performances are damned with faint damnation, and the doddering, dopey blunderings of the old war hero are vehemently excused.  

Now it's easy to point out the simple naked bias of the current bought-and-paid-for media (IOKIYAR, everybody!), and it's a foregone cynical conclusion that the Democrat will be assaulted mercilessly while the Republican will stand inside the protective bubble--but the question still remains: why do the Republicans, given half a chance, keep running dopes?

This is not to say that Democrats universally run blazing intellectual lights: the trend seems to have started with Woodrow Wilson, and there have been more than enough career politicians of moderate intellectual means--But while the Democrats would persist in running Adlai Stevenson, and drift towards  Eugene McCarthy, and sprinkle recent history with Bill Bradley, Al Gore , Bill Clinton (Rhodes Scholar, dammit), Wesley Clark and (with the best pedigree of the bunch) B. H. Obama--the mediocre-career politician level is as high as the Republicans seem to get--and they consistently veer towards the Dan Quayles, and the George W. Bushes. The only republican who even makes pretensions towards being smart is Newt Gingrich, and that's all it is: pretension.

When you come down to it, the Republicans, almost since the beginning, have been trying to run Ulysses S. Grant in every election. When they couldn't get a war hero (Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John McCain) they got the genial sunny, good-time Charlie (Harding, Ford, Reagan, GWB) whose main use was to smile and wave while the rest of the party did their smash and grab.

There's only two Republican Presidents since Lincoln (whom the Party leadership hated--they would have deserted him for McClellan (a War Hero) if they could) that could be said to have real-world excellence: Teddy Roosevelt (who got in by assassination and left to form his own party) and Herbert Hoover--a very able geological engineer whose work in China and in WWI were entirely admirable, but who was expected to act just like Harding or McKinley, and unfortunately when it mattered most, did so.  (Hoover was also a Teddy supporter, who once said, 'The trouble with capitalism is capitalists; they're too damn greedy.')

But even if my clear trend is weighed down with a lot of soggy white politician ass on both sides, we have our recent history. Bear in mind that George W. Bush was picked by the leaders of the Republican Party--even over his smarter brother Jeb. Had they not chosen him, does anybody in their right minds believe that W would even have run? They wanted exactly whom he was. (The big mistake was with Cheney, but that's another story.) They not only wanted the lazy, incurious Good-time Charlie but someone with his belief in his own privilege completely unshakeable, and no tendency to self-examination.

Is W their perfect candidate? A dolt? W over even Jeb?

Where's their conservative Barack Obama?  Where's the smartest guy in their room?

There are three possible answers to that question:

Number one is that their Kwisatz Haderach has not been born yet. (This is a possibility, since the immortal spirits of Rutherford B. Hayes and William Mckinley seem to have been trapped in the First Bardo by the priests of the Unification Church. Time must be spent until such titans walk the earth again.) 

Number two is that the powerful do not want brilliant subservients, since that would give rise to unfortunate personal initiative and even doubts about the Master Plan. It works for Dr. Doom and Voldemort, after all.

The third possibility is that it is impossible to be smart and believe in the Republican party line. This seems, of course, to be the most likely alternative, It fits in with the fact that Liberals are inherently cooler than rightwingers , know all the cool bands, and are inherently more attractive to supermodels and movie stars.

Well, which is it?

Here's what I think:

When I was in college, the American Left was a mess. United as an opposition movement to the War in Vietnam and racism and sexism, it contained moderates of conscience; lifestyle ecstatic/romantics who believed in love and peace; and Marxists. The strange combination was held together by the external forces, and fun-loving potheads marched in violent demonstrations and sat in conference with professional Communist agitators. It was a strange chimerical movement, and could not survive the let-up in the external pressures: the end of the draft, and of the war caused much to fall apart. But something else happened in that alliance: The rest of the Left met the hard left, and once the alliance was over, could and did effectively reject it. For a while there it did in fact look to the outside as if the Grateful Dead and black light posters and sideburns and desegregation and class warfare were all of one piece, but it was only united by being a summa contra culture, and it fell apart into its disparate elements  as soon as the outside pressure began to ease.

Post-Goldwater conservatism--Southern Strategy conservatism, the conservatism that gladly accepted the southern racist Dixiecrat incubus for the sake of victory--is another purely reactive counter-culture, whose emotional engine is a cultural revulsion to the fever of the sixties. It is held together by main political force rather than circumstance, but it is still defined only in terms of what it is against. Modern movement conservatism yoked naked patrician privilege with millennialist Christianity with atheistic social Darwinist Objectivism--all snarling and spitting at secular meliorist agnostic humanism. Worse yet, stalking among these groups are the radical racists, the Nazis, the Timothy McVeighs, whom the Right still hasn't learned to recognize as the Trotskyists and paid Soviet agents in their midst, nor grown enough to repudiate them. It is perfectly OK to bail out Bear Stearns among the radical free marketeers, and it is OK among the rock-bound social conservatives to lionize and support the big corporations that market the secularist smut that so horrifies them? And who is there with an active cerebral cortex that embraces both The Fountainhead and the Left Behind books?

I think that if there's a conservative counterpart to Obama's Audacity of Hope, it's Anne Coulter's Treason. And even she, focussed on the essence of the Movement, stumbled ludicrously when she tried to be more inclusive with Godless. This foul-mouthed sardonic Black-Velvet-ad-gone-bad is pious? Yet she tried, because what mattered was not what she was, but what she opposed. Dinesh D'Souza wrote a book in which he came right out and announced his sympathy for the Islam of Osama bin Laden, but didn't even think that might be risky, since he was doing it in the context of deep revulsion of American secular humanism. That makes allying yourself the very Devil you made OK.

The very worst thing that can happen to such a reactive, anti movement is to have it win. The demolition of the Republican alliance may very well be the structurally inevitable consequence of  the Republican assumption of power in 2001. Hell, the counter-culture fell apart merely when the pressure eased up the tiniest bit. Eliminate the draft, and the hippies withdrew from movement Marxism like the plague. The same is happening to the domestic theocrats stuck in the same elevator with the American Empire guys. And how can the Manifest Destiny guys reconcile with the Wall-builders?

It helps towards the erasure of the post-Goldwater Republican party that they installed incompetents--not just Bush but Dick Cheney and his mentor Donald Rumsfeld (who are worse than Bush because they think they're a lot smarter than they are.). So by this combination we are being treated to the Movement blaming the wretched failure of their military adventure in Iraq on Cindy Sheehan. But it's all they've got.

Barack Obama, in a sense is the culmination of that sixties nightmare: not just black, but a child of miscegnation, a child of a third-world immigrant, raised by a flawed and developmentally dangerous single-mother household--and yet incandescently smart, eloquent, stable, and thoughtful. And a black guy who's going to ride the pressure wave of the imploding Republican Party into the White House.

Barack Obama, like Al Gore and Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter and Eugene McCarthy and Adlai Stevenson, has worked hard and expended great intellectual energy to re-work, re-synthesize and re-affirm a vision of America, It's not only worth doing, it must be done even if, in the end, that synthesis is not new. Barack Obama's synthesis of the American future is the one that has emerged from an American Left that has cast off its radical wing. And the fact that it's John Edwards's, Bill and Hillary Clinton's, Al Gore's and Thomas Jefferson's America makes it actually all the more important.

In one sense, the conservative Barack Obama would be William McKinley: an unapologetic, unreactive advocate of a boosterist, bourgeois Main Street culturally unified America which lionized wealth and strapped itself into rigid social norms with pride. Perhaps (as soon as Sun Myung Moon lets him go) he can come back and articulate a real conservative vision for America--but only after this weird jumble of an alliance falls apart, and only after the murderous and monstrous radical right is repudiated.

In the mean time, smart guy in the Right room will be Ann Coulter, and her manifestoes will continue to scream Treason and Godless and spend  all their time talking about what they are not. The Dinesh D'Souzas, thee Rush Limbaughs and the Glenn Backs and the David Brookses will not find themselves in uncomfortable deference to dopes and stuffed shirts whose function is not to lead, guide or inspire, but to keep the alliance together, so the dividends of power might be had by those who invested the capital in the first place.

We are in the midst of a national disaster. Thanks to governors not interested in governing, militarists who despise the military, and imperialists who don't care about the rest of the world, we're in a shambles that, even at its best, will necessarily produce a different america, and might produce the remnant of a once great dream, if we are not careful and smart.

And in contention for the job we have, on the one side, the new guy, any on the other side, Ulysses S. Grant.

The choice may finally, finally be clear.

Good God I hope so.