As both nations are in the midst of choosing a new president, I took a look at how the American primary process appears from Moscow in an oped in The Boston Globe.
Because my desk at the office faces the newsroom television, I got to catch almost every minute of it. Sure, no one would have mistaken the event for the Oxford Union, but just as a stunt it was remarkable. It would have turned George W. Bush into a weeping mess. No breaks, no notes. He met specific concerns with vague wonkishness, threw out glimpses of his uniquely coarse humor, and petulantly swatted away the handful of confrontational questions thrown at him by the western reporters who got to ask their questions.
The two things that stuck out most to me relate to how I imagine Putin's extensive spy-training must have helped him. First, he said an awful lot, but divulged incredibly little actual information. It is a real skill to be this glib. Second, just the sheer stamina of it. The lights, the attention, and to not so much as break a sweat. I actually wonder if they train for this kind of thing.
Anyway, my favorite quote was when Putin allowed his modest side to peek through...
"I can see no serious failures, I have achieved all my goals and fulfilled every task. We restored the fundamentals of the economy on a new market basis.I have nothing to be ashamed of before the citizens who twice voted for me... I have worked as hard as a galley slave in the past eight years."
So I have had a hard time grappling with the fact that the Presidential candidate I am backing talks so much about it. Obama’s detractors say that he relies on a gauzy idea of “hope.” I’d agree it is a bad choice of words.
It is a more complicated thing. I was struck by what writer Michael Chabon said recently at an Obama rally in
"You know what I needed to do before I could decide to support Barack Obama for president? I had to give myself permission to feel hope. That's almost kind of sad, isn't it? I had to tell myself that it is OK. That it would be all right if I allowed myself to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation. That we can aspire to be more than merely secure or predominant. That we could apsire to build and to heal not just to patch and prop up. We can aspire to come together not just come to terms."
So on Tuesday there is a clear choice between Obama and Clinton. It is an incredibly rare opportunity for the poliics of vindictiveness, double-talk, self-pity, self-absorption, “inevitability,” and “triangulation” to be routed once and for all in just a few hours.
Hillary is running on experience, but what she accomplished as the junior senator of
And this time around, the
An obnoxious meme has been making the rounds is an appreciation of the
There are important principles at stake here. We should take a page from the great leaders of non-violence resistance, whose basic guiding principles I feel can be summed up simply: You need to believe in your cause strong enough that you will survive setbacks. You must believe that a reasonable person acting in good faith, if given all the facts, could be persuaded to see your side of things. And you must never stoop to the other side’s level. When you do, a major firewall between right and wrong vanishes, and the fight becomes about cynically and nihilistically beating the other guy, rather than creating something better.
We’ve stooped a lot with the
The pundit class has made much of Obama’s refusal to play dirty. For over a year now they’ve sniped that he isn’t tough enough. But here’s the thing: this is what a clean and honest campaign looks like. This is exactly the thing everyone who has been turned off by modern politics has been waiting for. It is something to be proud of.
And it is not something that is merely nice and pleasant and quaint. It is essential. I think Chabon hit the nail on the head with this. Obama has given us a chance to think beyond the nuts and bolts, and to actually reset the whole system.
I think most people who have dealt with a larger-than-ordinary case of the blues know the feeling that comes after a while, when you realize that you’ve come to like being miserable too much. It’s easy, it’s something you can count on. But sometimes, you are blessed with a moment when you have the right kind of eyes and the right set of circumstances, and you can see that all you need to do is stand up and walk out of it. That it is all up to you, see things like new, to take the Joy Division disc out of heavy rotation and pop in the Polyphonic Spree or whatnot, to realize how much you love the family and friends around you, the place where you are living, the weather and the light on that given day, and on and on.
Obama in 2008 is the political equivalent of that moment.
