Standing on the Verge of Gettin' it on

It's really sort of amazing that the final days have come down to this: Barack Obama speaking to 100,000 person crowds, prominent Republicans endorsing him, while the Republican Party and the McCain campaign respond with personal attacks and indictments of policies in language that makes sense only to them.

Adlai Stevenson once remarked on a plea for a dignified campaign, "So, you promise to stop telling lies about us if we stop telling the truth about you." Just to get in one shot, The party who has a candidate that was born outside the United States accuses the other party's candidate of being born outside the United States.

But all that seems to be irrelevant because of the equation rotated 90˚: The Republicans attack Obama for things in the past while John McCain misbehaves in the present. The financial collapse was deadly for two reasons: it damns Republican governance and philosophy (or lack of same) and they got a fill dress run-through of a presidential crisis, with John McCain posturing and stumbling into the flats and making the wrong speech in the wrong scene and weaving around like an Arthur Miller character thinking he's playing Frank Capra. Running into the spotlight and screwing up. And with Sarah Palin removing all possibility of pathos. 

But I think I'd rather talk about Fortinbras, Marching on Elsinore as the old dynasty falls over itself drowning in its own poison and stab wounds. 

What do we get? 

Everything from just another corporatist running dog who will bomb Iran to a wimpy centrist hamstrung  by the bailout money from doing much of anything--to a transformative figure who will set us on the right track for the future and take us out of our racist divisive past--to a good pragmatic  President who will make major changes to the way we do business simply because that's what's necessary to keep Birnham Wood from trotting up to Dunsinane.

I don't entirely trust Barack Obama--his vote on the FISA bill effectively removes him from the Visionary Hero as far as  I'm concerned. Even taking into account the significant difference in tactics when one is in power, he's neither preternaturally wise nor a political bodhisattva. In a way, I think I as a progressive view his virtues in mainly negative terms: not stupid, not bound by theory, not bound by conventional wisdom, neither afraid of effecting radical change or of letting things be. Someone who sees the far-right madness the way we all have. Nobody I know or have read stands in awe of Barack Obama's insights and analysis: they are scarcely new and scarcely dazzling. If there is a dazzle, it's that he's fearlessly saying what the media have suppressed and clutched pearls at, and the Republican hordes have demonized to no end. Support the middle class; fix the broken health-care system; end our disastrous imperial military adventure and return to a multilateralist model of foreign problem solving. And hopefully deliver u from torture and restore our civil liberties, but that's less certain. By a fair bit.

When you look at the McCain smears of Obama in a slightly different way, it does in fact show where he stands. He stands accused of attending a church where Jeremiah Wright attacked America, and white America, in fierce and even paranoid--and maybe even false--terms. He also associated with developers whom one can easily demonize even if one does not put them in jail. He sits on a board with an ex-sixties radical put together by the best friend of Ronald Reagan. These are all sins against purity--just in different directions. The Right, of course would have you make a scalar sum, bad, bad, bad, bad--equals horribly bad. But the vectors sum up to something mighty peculiar. It's not necessarily good: it can mean as little as a man with no convictions, or a Cosmo Topper Milquetoast who cain't say no. But--even when you include this mythical Muslim vector, it can mean a man who will listen to anybody. It's not inconceivable that a Professor of Constitutional Law could listen to an impassioned black preacher, a veteran who fought for his country and yet attacks its actions, as a person to understand? AS Tony Rezko and the wheeler-dealers should be understood? This isn't always a virtue, in that it can lead to an overwhelming detachment-. It can also be the characteristic of someone secure in their beliefs, looking for the best way to act.

So what do we get, if and when we get a man like that?

We don't necessarily get a transformative figure: you can get a careful academic who makes few mistakes but does no blazingly right thing. You can get a pragmatist who adjusts the deck chairs on the Hindenburg. But I don't think that's what we get here, less due to the nature of Obama than the nature of the problems. Because, after all is said and done, a cliff is not a puzzle. 

The potential for a good President who's also black, though, can indeed have transformative power beyond Senator Obama's own intellectual profile. Could it be a turning point away from racism and towards something closer to our longed-for great national principles? 

The specter of a black man doing a good job of saving our asses might go a long way towards confronting the boogieman and discovering that it's *gasp* Mister Scaife, the banker! And I think it has a good chance of getting rid of something.

But there's more than one kind of racism in America--and I'm not talking about differences in targets. There's the active-culture racism, which lives in people who meet (say) blacks every day, talk to them, do business with them, and hate them. That's the sort of mean, hard, optimism-destroying racism that the South is sadly, still replete with, and lives like a demon in  the breasts of certain folks all over. I've seen that racism and seen it in action, and it has made me credit for the first time that not everybody gets into heaven. (If there is one.)

But there's also the racism that I'll irresponsibly call fanciful racism. It's not nice: it grows bigger with distance, which is dangerous in America. It's racism that infects your dreams rather than your heart. Screwing up your dreams is less obvious an evil than screwing up your heart, but ultimately is just as monstrous.

In America we're lucky to have both. The first kind, the poison of the heart kind, the can't-stand-to-be-in-the-same-room-with-them kind, will take a lot more than Barack Obama to get rid of: it will have to be done one by one, and it might only end when the last of them die out. But the other, who hate blacks because of some made-up reason, who can resent the blacks because slavery and Jim Crow ruin their beautiful picture of America, Or who hate blacks because they imagine that they must be angry and demanding vengeance--the Black as Conscience--or that they just believe What People Say--that can change. It can be slippery: there are folks I know who hate black people--except for every black person they actually know. They, of course, are different. 

The potential exists that, especially after all the wild apocalyptic (that is to say, revelatory) bellowings about Barack Obama, that he governs well, pulls us (eventually) out of this recession and ignominiously brings our troops home in shameful (not to say, ignominious) defeat--whereupon they discover that everything seems the same--then maybe, like the date for the Second Coming passing and the sky's windowshade still comfortably down--maybe some of those dreams will start to seem silly.

Or maybe they'll just think that President Obama is nice and not a bit like, well..

The first thing we do, though, is back away from the cliff. Then we look up.