I still haven’t made up my mind who to vote for in the California primary. But I am feeling pretty inspired by what I have seen from Barack Obama of late, and so is Gary Kamiya of salon.com:
In November 2004, American voters reelected the worst president in modern history. That election did more than blight the political hopes of half the people in this country, it raised serious questions about America’s very identity. What kind of country could possibly reelect a president as manifestly unfit for office as George W. Bush? Why would millions of Americans again endorse an ignorant, incompetent leader who launched a disastrous and pointless war, presided over an administration based on secrets and lies, trampled the Constitution, ran up a ruinous debt, ignored the global environmental crisis, approved torture and secret prisons, and destroyed America’s moral standing in the world?
Of course, not all Americans share the same political views; of course, post-9/11 hysteria played a major role. But even making due allowance for those factors, Bush’s reelection was shocking. Like an unidentified tumor that suddenly shows up on an X-ray, it cast a malaise over the whole nation. For many Americans, it revealed a foreign entity within the country itself, one even more frightening in some ways than the one outside. We can fight terrorists. But what do you do about your own country when you no longer recognize it?
The Democratic Party should have represented that half of the country that was appalled by Bushism. But the Democrats abjectly failed. Cowed by patriotic fervor and Beltway thinking, the Democrats fell in line behind Bush and his demented war. Only when it was clear to all but the most benighted neoconservative ideologues that Iraq was an unmitigated disaster did mainstream Democrats like Clinton and Edwards speak out.
A price had to be paid for this collapse, and the price was anger — anger not just at Bush and his policies, but at the timid Democrats who went along with those policies. This anger is cleansing. Those establishment pundits who sanctimoniously tut-tutted about how Democratic voters were “unhinged” by “Bush hatred” failed to recognize that when a cancerous entity invades your body, the healthy response is to attack it. Anger is a patriotic response to Bush’s profoundly un-American policies, and to the Democrats who failed to oppose them. It is the white blood cells coming to rescue an endangered organism.
Yet as anyone who spends too much time reading political blogs knows, anger can itself become a toxin, self-perpetuating and self-destructive. It must be expressed — but then it must be overcome. To fall into a state of permanent anger, of righteous indignation, is to become the very enemy you are fighting. This is the error that George W. Bush made when he launched his Manichean “war on terror,” and turned America into a country far more like its fundamentalist enemies than it had ever been before.
Barack Obama’s unique appeal is that he allows voters — Democrats, independents and fed-up Republicans alike — to simultaneously express their anger and transcend it. As a political outsider, as a black man, as someone who was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning, Obama is the antithesis of both Bushism and the mainstream Bush-lite Democratic stance on Iraq. Yet Obama’s entire message is one of reconciliation and unity, the belief that even the most implacable foes can come together. And it’s his race that seals the deal. As a mixed-race black man appealing to whites without using traditional racial guilt codes, he is the living proof of his own credo. By voting for a black man, whites are voting for hope and change in the future — but they are simultaneously making a statement that hope and change are happening right now, within their own minds, hearts and souls. They are leaping across the racial divide without a safety net.