Thursday, July 17, 2008

On Obama's formative Chicago years

This week's The New Yorker magazine has caused quite a stir with its satirical cover (see above), which snickered at all the outrageous accusations some mischievous Obama bashers have hurled at the Democratic presumptive presidential nominee.

It's too bad the candidate and his staff didn't just laugh at what was an outstanding political cartoon. Instead, there was some huffing and puffing over how some people would inevitably not get the 'toon's joke and take it as more evidence of his Manchurian Candidate-like, secret alliance with Satanic forces.

Which, of course, created an unflattering story about the rather humorless and ill-advised pose being struck by the Obama camp. What is not getting enough play is the excellent in-depth article in that issue of The New Yorker about Obama's political training in Chicago.

"Making It," by Ryan Lizza, is a must-read for Obama's supporters, and for anyone else who has been going around saying they don't know enough about Obama to feel comfortable with him.

The article does nothing to perpetuate the myth that Barack Obama is somehow above the hurly-burly of real politics, or the fear he's so idealistic he doesn't have a grasp of what it takes to get something accomplished in that realm. What it does do is fill in a lot of blanks with well-researched background on a man who sometimes seems to have come out of nowhere.

Lizza's piece documents a remarkable rise to power in a city known for its no-holds-barred brand of politics, and, to some extent, it debunks the notion that Obama has suddenly lurched to the right to make himself more appealing to Independents and disillusioned Republicans.
Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.
Click here to read the entire piece in New Yorker.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Barak Obama seems to me to be “He who will not be mocked”. He started his campaign warning us of the sensitivity he has to being reminded of his large ears, and his list of “Untouchable topics” grows longer by the day. We are not allowed to question his associations with Anti-American Clergy (whom he held in very close proximity until recently), any statements made by his wife (political or no), his ethnicity,(white enough or black enough) his middle name, his lack of Foreign Policy experience, his associations with ex-Weather underground terrorists whom aided in his rise to the Senate. Without a teleprompter he stutters and malapproriates with equal spacticity to our current Commander-in Chief. Every day is a new topic that is off limits if one wants to avoid the Racist moniker being stamped on ones forehead.

In all fairness, the Republican candidate John McCain is even more humorless. It would be a great year to vote for Pat Palson. Too bad he is dead.

F.T. Rea said...

anonymous,

Every campaign has people who work to knock down negative stories about their candidate.

Let's not pretend that isn't true.

You have used that sort of thing as evidence of something else -- a tin ear when it comes to jokes.

Anonymous said...

I would say Obama is not only humorless, but hypersensitive, and tries to characterize all criticism, humor or no under an umbrella of uncivil(even racist) slander. Both George Bush and Bill Clinton both suffered years of extreme vitriol about their characters, their intelligence, and anything else their opponents could think of and they are still mocked mercilessly. I don't hear them complaining over every quibble. Obama needs to grow a thicker skin or he is going to get baited at every turn by the right into time and energy wasting arguments. There hasn't been a President since Washington that didn't regularly get his name tarnished. It goes with the job. Obama shows a lack of Leadership maturity or he would deal with it better.

F.T. Rea said...

anonymous (5:03 p.m.),

Comparing Barack Obama to Bill Clinton and George Bush, in this context, is a reach. As far as what you have been hearing. It sounds like it's been what you want to hear.

While Obama did react to the New Yorker cover, and I obviously wish he had not, none of us has been hearing him complain about every joke about him. We haven't heard that because it hasn't happened.

Perhaps you are confusing what Obama, himself, says with what surrogates might have said, or what pundits have said.

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