Whatever else you want to say about “Dreams for My Father”, it was skillfully written. I wondered after reading it whether many of the campaign volunteers decided to sign up if for no other reason that the author was more intelligent than the average politician. Thematically, it is related to Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” although I doubt that Obama has ever acknowledged the influence of this novel that is a combination of Black consciousness and existential outsider literature.
If “Dreams for My Father” was ghost-written by Bill Ayers, one of the less outrageous claims of the ultraright, then one might conclude that “Audacity of Hope” was ghost-written by a committee consisting of David Broder, Thomas Friedman, and Juan Williams. It is a platitude-sodden mess that has none of the piquancy of the first book—understandable since it was a typical meet-the-candidate type venture. Since I am toying with the idea of writing a comic book on Obama, this research is a necessary evil. There is one passage that does have the ring of truth, however. In it Obama practically predicts the politician he would become: Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the in¬come scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment. And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways—I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they'd received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate: the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural parts of the state. Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, out¬side the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the copulation—that is, the people that I'd entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent. And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don't want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over again. You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you haven't changed Washington, and you've made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes. The path of least resistance—of fund-raisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops—starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don't quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
