The General Election

I'm an Obama supporter. I've watched so many of his speeches, its amazing that I could still be impressed with any new ones. At times he's amazed me, other times he's disappointed me. Over the last 17 months Obama has changed how we talk about politics. But I have also seen him get caught in the old paradigms of the 1960's; he cannot dismiss them completely and in some cases (William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright) he has simply tried to avoid conflict altogether by joining in the villainization of controversial, but nevertheless complicated, figures. But Thursday night, I was worried. The first night of the convention seemed stale, the second night better, but still nervous, uncertain, the atmosphere seemed to lack a certain confidence. It got better with each night. But Obama's speech brought the energy to a new level. It was, as Andrew Sullivan points out, a frank argument for liberal democracy. I felt like I was watching an episode of the West Wing or the American President or another of those political dramas of the 1990's in which the ideological power of liberalism was under siege by the far right, but still managed to reign supreme. Watching these shows today, one can see the anxiety that surrounds their mythology of liberal heroism, an anxiety reflected by the political climate of the Clinton years, but a heroism that somehow avoids the real world constraints that were placed upon the Clinton administration. All of these shows struggled with the basic problem of liberal self-esteem during the 1990's, the nagging fear among liberals that what they believed was somehow out of sync with the rest of America, the confused bewilderment that they were being rejected by the very constituencies (the working class) that they wished to help. These cinematic fantasies of liberal triumph acknowledge such feeling of isolation, particularly on wedge issues such as gun control and immigration, but somehow the Josiah Bartletts of the world remained unswayed by this storm of intolerance and in doing so ultimately move the country in their direction. Obviously, the Clinton administration turned out quite a bit differently.

But times have changed. Obama didn't use the word liberal, but he made the case for it, even briefly touching on wedge issues like gun control and abortion that Democrats have typically avoided. The reason is not because Obama is stronger than Clinton was. Its that the political climate is different. In his speech, Obama did something that he had never really done before. His rhetoric for change had always placed the blame for political stagnation in the context of "the last thirty years." He has claimed that it is not a question of Democrats or Republicans being right, but a question of moving past the culture wars. In the primaries he ran against Hillary Clinton, and to large extent the Clinton legacy. The puzzling thing about this rhetoric, perhaps the reason why it leaves people uneasy, is that throughout all his talk of post-partisanship, Obama's core principles remain firmly grounded in the liberal idea that government can be force of good for its citizens. In his speech Thursday night, for the first time, Obama explicitly acknowledged his own candidacy as an extension of Clinton's presidency, and in doing so introduced a new meme into the race. That his presidency will fulfill the promises that Clinton's began but left unfinished. That Obama embodies the liberal aspirations of the democratic party, which can now leave the world of cinematic fantasy to which they were relegated in the 1990's, step forward naked, exposed, but unashamed, onto the national stage.