Hopemongering

I am not a big fan of hope. When you are stranded on a desert island you “hope” a plane will pass by and spot you. When you are looknig for a particular book or album or brand of cognac you “hope” that the store has it while you’re walking over. This feeling implies a loss of agency, that things have slipped beyond your control. It’s passive, irrational, and unproductive.

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 San Francisco:

"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 New York other than voting for a disastrous war is beyond me. In 2000, the NY Democratic party cleared a path for the wife of the president, and she roundly beat heavyweight Rick Lazio that November. When she says “experience,” she’s actually talking about living in the same house as a president whose greatest accomplishments were pissing away a critical historical moment and alienating every left-leaning American from the Democratic party. What is to be proud of in all this?

And this time around, the Clintons have not campaigned in a way that makes us proud. Just prior to Nevada, the Clintonoids began going on about Obama’s remarks that the GOP has been the party of ideas for the past 15 years. He didn’t say he agreed with them, just that they have set the agenda – and it is impossible to deny this. The only ideas the Clintons have given us we could do without – semantically proving that blow-jobs aren’t really sex, and that crying on command is a new method of feminist empowerment. I hate the way the Clintons make me think about politics and my country.

An obnoxious meme has been making the rounds is an appreciation of the Clintons’ sharp-elbowed, knee-in-the-crotch style of politics because it is the only way to beat those mean old Republicans. This is bogus from the start. The only Democrat the Republicans are not afraid of is Hillary – they’ve been fighting this fight for 16 years. They know how to handle this, and are itching for the opportunity to rally the nation against her.

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 Clintons, and look what it got us. We achieved a number of tactical victoires – they kept Republicans from destroying Social Security, they fought off a bogus impeachment effort. But strategically, the party has suffered nothing but a string of defeats since 1968, which was accelerated by the Clinton administration.

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.