I had intended to avoid writing about this topic here, as it doesn’t pertain to my life in Peace Corps directly, but I’ve frankly become disgusted by the amount of negative press directed towards supporters of Barack Obama. I’ve heard/read the word “Obamaniacs” tossed around quite a bit, as well as “cult of personality.” Having attended two of the Senator’s rallies in Seattle, I think that there is a great deal to be said for being inspired by a political candidate. As shown in the string of 12 primary/caucus victories across the country, Obama has hit a chord among Americans who were waiting for someone who spoke about unity instead of divisiveness and who advocates for much-needed change in the United States.
To those who deride the Obama campaign, it’s not as if Senator Obama’s only strong point is that he is a charismatic speaker, he is clearly a brilliant man and if people bothered to read his policy statements, which are readily available on his website (http://www.barackobama.com/issues), they would discover that he has thoughtful, practical, well-articulated policy statements.
But for lazy journalists, of whom there are many, it is much easier just to make fun of Obama supporters and the “Change” mantra without more than superficially exploring the candidate or the substance of his positions.
When I went back to Seattle for vacation, I spent a lot of time volunteering at the headquarters of the Barack Obama campaign in Seattle. I did so because I have long supported Senator Obama as a presidential candidate (before he became popular!), and having worked extensively on Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004, I knew that I had valuable experience that could help the Obama team in WA state. I did a lot of phone banking, most of which involved explaining WA’s confusing primary/caucus system to Democratic voters, and helped run my local precinct caucus.
I also attended – I’ll say it – an inspirational and amazing Obama rally. The crowd filled up the arena to overflowing (capacity was 17,100 but 18,000 crammed in) and at least 3,000 people who couldn’t get in listened outside. The day before, by contrast, a Clinton rally drew about 5,000 people. At the rally, I saw young people, old people, people of all different races, all different party affiliations – I saw people moved and united by the message of Senator Obama, in a way that empowered them to feel as if they had a voice in the American political system. Isn’t that the way Democracy is supposed to work?
Some deride the Obama campaign as a “cult of personality.” What I saw was my high school age sister and her friends, many of whom turn 18 in time to vote, skip school en masse to attend a political rally. These teenagers waited outside in the winter cold for hours to hear someone speak – someone who makes them look up from their iPods and take an interest in politics, in voting, in civic life. I volunteered with a woman who had never before taken an interest in politics, who had never before donated to a candidate, but was inspired enough by Obama to have put her job on hold to work for his campaign. She was just one of many. The Obama campaign has had more than 1 million people donate money, most in sums under $100. These aren’t the huge corporate donors of traditional politics (I’m looking at you, Hillary with your $2,300 maxed-out donors) – this is democracy with a little “d.” The pundits can call it whatever they want.
HOPE
Another criticism of Senator Obama is that he is somehow naïve because he talks a great deal about hope. This is a logical fallacy. One can be hopeful without being naïve about the very real problems, foreign and domestic, that are facing our country. Someone who has grown up in the circumstances that Obama has, has faced the racial prejudices that he has in our race-conscious country, has worked as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side, has worked as an state Senator and then a national Senator – that person is not just a blind optimist. One of Senator Obama’s strengths is that even with all the challenges facing our nation, he believes in the “audacity of hope” and encourages others to do the same. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has devoted much of her campaign to, as Frank Rich writes, “preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself.” (New York Times 2/24/08). Rhetoric is not all there is, but Obama is a very inspirational leader, and these times that we are in certainly call for someone to inspire as well as to lead.
Think about some of the great leaders in American history: Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. All of these people were fine leaders, but were also charismatic speakers who knew how to inspire people. We don’t fault any of them for being able to unite Americans during difficult times in the nation’s history. In fact, many of these leaders are oft-remembered precisely for their inspirational rhetoric – Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, Roosevelt’s fireside chats, Kennedy’s inaugural address, and MLK’s “I have a dream speech.” Yet, Senator Obama is currently being criticized for giving inspirational speeches, that his are just empty words. This irritates me to no end.
CHANGE
Another thing that I don’t understand is why it’s so awful to want change in politics. Sure, the word has been bandied about perhaps a bit too much recently. But is it wrong to want a change from an Administration that started an unjust war based on false intelligence, which has shown blatant disregard for the Constitution, which tortures political prisoners in “black sites” around the world, which time and time again has acted in the interests of corporations and lobbyists rather than that of the people (i.e. Dick Cheney and his closed-door energy talks with oil companies), an Administration that appointed a hack like Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General yet had the mouth-dropping audacity to fire 7 US Attorneys without explanation, for political reasons, thinking that ordinary citizens would not notice? I’m not going to apologize for wanting a change from an Administration that wrongly imprisoned and two years later deported a co-worker of mine on legally untenable grounds that he was a “terrorist.” We have a President is in the White House not because he got more votes from the American people, but because the Supreme Court voted in his favor.
BILLARY
What about Hillary Clinton? Or rather, The Clintons, because we all know that they’re really running jointly, thanks to her claims of political experience through osmosis and his attack-dog shenanigans on the campaign trail before just recently being reigned in. I think Hillary is brilliant, I think she is a capable leader, I think she has very good ideas (policy-wise she and Obama are quite similar), but do I think that she would bring about significant change in the way things are done in Washington? No. She voted to authorize the war in Iraq, and I cannot condone that, no matter the verbal backtracking she does these days. Some great things happened under President Clinton, in terms of the economy, reducing the deficit, improving America´s foreign relations, etc. But there were also some not-so-great things as well – NAFTA, Rwanda, the Balkans, the collapse of Hillary’s universal health care proposal. I didn’t give a crap about the Lewinsky scandal and frankly think the impeachment trial was a sham and a waste of taxpayer money, but the Clinton’s business dealings have always been less than transparent (i.e. Whitewater). Now, with the news that the Clinton’s refuse to release their tax returns as well as their Presidential library – one has to wonder what they are hiding.
“HOPEMONGERING”
Senator Obama pokes fun of the fact that his opponents criticize his unwavering optimism; at the Seattle rally that I attended, he joked that he was a “hopemonger.” From the despicable ads that Clinton ran in TX the week before the primary, which I’ll call the “3am phone call” ad, I’d call Clinton a fearmonger. The ad was a naked, blatant play on people’s fears about terrorism; it was probably Mark Penn’s idea. As Senator Obama pointed out, Hillary did have a metaphorical chance to answer that late-night phone call almost five years, and she voted YES to authorize the President to lead us into this mismanaged, morally wrong, and costly war in Iraq. A war that was based upon false intelligence from the get-go. A war which is now estimated to cost us $2 trillion. Clinton now claims that she wants her vote back. I’m surprised that all of her decades of experience haven’t shown her that that’s not the way the world works.
Senator Obama, on the other hand, was one of the few political figures nationally who spoke out against the war in 2002, back when he was an Illinois State Senator.
I think that the 3am phone call ad was despicable, yet representative of the typical Washington smear campaigns in which the Clintons are well-versed. However, to answer the ad’s question, Hillary would not be the one I would want answering this 3am phone call. What kind of direct experience has she had at averting threats to national security? The woman did not even have national security clearance during her husband’s tenure in the White House. She keeps touting her international experience, but she has little more experience than Obama internationally, perhaps less. In my opinion, paying fleeting diplomatic visits as the First Lady is not the same as dealing with foreign country on a Presidential level. Barack Obama, by sheer dint of his cultural background (white Kansan mother, black Kenyan father) growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii, becoming the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, has a much greater understanding of America’s impact upon the rest of the world than Clinton will ever have.
On a personal level, as someone who immigrated to the United States with my family when I was four, as someone who grew up non-white in a very white state (I love WA), and is now living and working abroad –Barack Obama speaks for me as an American in ways that Hillary Rodham Clinton never will.
2000 was the first Presidential election in which I was eligible to vote. I did not vote for George W. Bush twice, and I’ve been waiting eight years for this November. Bill and Hillary had a great run in the Oval Office, but the US doesn’t need any more of their fear-mongering and top-down Washington politics. I think it’s about time for a change. Given the growing strength of the Obama campaign, it’s clear that I am not the only one.
Hopefully you (and I) will get your chance to vote for him in November.