Three giant issues that the President-Elect does not seem to illicit in the day-to-day(though, he should):
1. Obama’s election isn’t a huge win for Black America in literal terms, only symbolic. What Obama’s win signifies importance as is his election as the first post-Vietnam President(try telling the black votership that, however *sigh*). Forget the color of his skin; this is a far more important factor, and should be viewed with both hope and skepticism.
2. His campaign was forthright and efficient in going forward from the moment his election was solid. This shows incredible management skills: Obama’s camp steamed ahead upon his election, addressing cabinet appointments and media issues with stunning confidence and efficiency. His camp made certain that the media didn’t allow repercussions-economic or otherwise-to relate to the President-Elect immediately, and how brilliant is that? The only matter in which he fails is expectation management: he screwed that possibility in the primaries. We expect the Sun, but we’ll likely only get the Moon. Surmise from that what you will.
3. Bringing the Presidency into the 21st Century. Firstly, I’m not opposed to President Obama using his blackberry. Should he review highly sensitive documents on such a device? Not at all. Should he be able to use it for day-to-day messages and conversing? Dammit, yes. How he brings the office of POTUS into the 21st century is naturally at his discretion, though I do hope it is with the most transparent means possible.
I think Obama maintained a pretty serious demeanor throughout the election. One reason was to avoid looking like Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor. Too many people dot really know any black people except for celebrities.
I think Obama also recognized that this is an unusual time in our history. He appears to be committed to working hard. He is picking a lot of good people. I hope it translates into good policy.
Steve
From the brief portion of a Frontline piece I saw on Obama I learned that Obama was not only plucked from the minors on the basis of his impressive initial convention speech but was thereafter carefully and calculatingly groomed to become a contending candidate. It’s no discredit to Obama that he did not spring forth in a clap of thunder from the thigh of a god as the ready-made natural contender he appeared to be in the campaign but was, rather, assembled, managed and nurtured by committee for his purely political potential. A percentage of Dems felt it necessary to hedge the bet on Hillary. This is how delicious sausage is always made.
What he does seem to provide is almost the perfect Zelig figure in whom everyone sees just who they want to see. As Steve presciently predicted, his entire administration as named to date is purely off the shelf centrist Clinton Democratic stock–not necessarily a bad thing at all, but by the same token structurally not that much different from its opposite camp of eight years ago when the Republicans chose their contender and tutored and groomed him to their ends, then supplied him with their administrators. We know already Obama brings precious little of experience or substance beyond campaign organizing to the table. If his tenure can be handled as one long campaign, as Rove did Bush’s tenure, Obama cannot fail.
Where he will succeed beyond that will be, if he can, using the only thing he has, that Zelig-charm, to do that one thing that is the President’s ironic sole duty, not to do anything special himself but to successfully get others to do things successfully on his behalf, moreso than any or all of them could have done without him. Achieving this beyond the just-finished, campaign contribution bloated arena of media marketing will become another kettle of fish entirely, and the progressive changing phases of the Obama visage these days presage this.
1. I’m not quite sure of the significance of a post-Vietnam War candidate other than as an age cohort identifier. Obama is, of course, at the same time a quite-a-major-bit-post WWII candidate, a quite-a-bit-post Korean War candidate, a post-Vietnam War candidate, a not-yet-post Gulf War candidate, and a not-nearly-post Iraq War candidate, all of which surely have some degree of significance which currently escapes me as well.
2a. I guess.
2b. We’ll be lucky if the light and power isn’t turned off entirely.
3. I find it hard to fathom how a toy like the Blackberry is representative of a new century, but then again that’s perhaps just exactly the macabre joke upon us all that the Blackberry represents.
Most of Obama’s plans are unfortunately doomed to the mathematics of our current economic quagmire: his WPA infrastructure jobs plans and green energy tax-tweak incentives just dig us deeper into our current grave, their short-Obama-term political payoffs notwithstanding.
Where Obama will ultimately impress me, if he does, and (but of course) the only real hope he has for success is to recognize that what America must have to avoid rapidly approaching failure is some astounding new source of wealth and, moreover, one that cannot easily be stolen as an intellectual property or cannot be outsourced and produced more cheaply by competitors. It is entirely too bad that the New World has already been taken and that it is us.
I keep speaking glibly of clean fusion power, but, really, that’s the sort of breakthrough in wealth production that will be required, if not clean fusion per se, then something astonishing on the same quantum order, something that totally resets the economic counters. Anything less will simply be politically stirring the pot of declining slop in a figure eight anticlockwise from the figure eight in which it has currently been stirred to date.
RJ: “…the sort of breakthrough in wealth production that will be required…something astonishing on the same quantum order [as clean fusion], something that totally resets the economic counters…”
I wonder if by analogy, we might see the good fortune Bill Clinton faced in having a presidency largely coincident with the productivity gains enabled by the steep growth curve ascended by the technology industry, while factoring in also the good fortune he faced relative to the incoming president in his inheriting an economy from Bush the Elder and Wiser emerging gradually from a recession mild by historic standards – rather than the flashlight-free tour of a tricked-out haunted house from which BHO will be lucky to find five minutes for a daylit break with the smokers out back…
The implications of post-vietnam politics are being mildly discussed. Obama symbolizes the beginning of the end of an era: its time for the boomers to enjoy their retirement(or exercise their philanthropic desires) and leave the governing and the leading to reality-hardened and less moralistic Gen-X’ers”. It is, on the surface, exactly as you say: it is an age-identifier. Each generation has its defining moments, causes, struggles. Most boomers have that righteousness-and rightfully so-of a collective that lived through and fought against(or for, in some instances) obscene disregard of human lives(segregation, civil rights), invasion of privacy (Roe v Wade), an ongoing and irrational occupation(Vietnam), that the Gen X’ers and Me Generations lack. Iraq pt. 2 came too late for most of us to be fired up in the enthusiastically youthful way that endeared the boomers to history; we missed the turbulence of fighting for the drastic changes brought by civil rights and the like. Even the generational youth immediately encountered by the Iraq War has lived until recently in times peaceable enough that you’ll never see the mass protests and demonstrations of the Boomers. We’re too global now, there are too many causes, and revolutions are short-lived if existent at all in America.
What were the biggest issues, if any, of my generation? The most resounding in my mind, apart from a half-assed environmentalism campaign beginning in the late 80′s/early 90′s, is/was HIV/AIDS. Thats its. Nothing else comes to mind as a single cause we all believed in. And if HIV/AIDS/Sex Ed is any indication, we failed. Miserably.
Perhaps I’m ranting, but the generational difference goes beyond mere politics though in a manner that stands to still shape them: In an issue of Spin magazine, sometime between ’94 and ’96, there was an interview with Mario Cuomo that, though I was only 16-18, brought tears to my eyes, and has remained with me ever since. I paraphrase, so bear with me(surely, Cuomo was considerably more eloquent): “This new generation has no collective hero. “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio our nation turns its lonely eyes to you”-think about (the importance of) that line. This new generation has never had a collective hero, someone to rally around. It’s never had a collective ideal”. It saddened me then, to consider that, and it still does. But that could be to our advantage. Our collective LACK of ideals, our growing up with increasing globalism, while never having a generational rallying point, has hardened us. Whether that turns out to be for better or worse remains to be seen.
This is not the exact passage I read, but its similar enough:
NEWFIELD: You often quote Paul Simon’s line from the song Mrs. Robinson: “Where have you gone Joe Dimaggio?”
CUOMO: Absolutely.
NEWFIELD: What does the line mean, and why do you keep quoting it? Is that reference to Dimaggio about this yearning, is it about these lost heroes?
CUOMO: I believe that the United States of America is now generally, not every individual, but generally, one big vacuum. People don’t have any single uplifting purpose, any great idol, any great truth that they can put their arms around as a people, as a culture, and say, “This we believe in, and this makes us special. This is something larger than ourselves.” No hero. No heroine. No John Kennedy, he’s dead. No Bobby Kennedy, he’s dead. No Martin Luther King, Jr., we killed him too. No Joan of Arc. No great president. I mean, think about the presidents we’ve had. There’s none of them we would lionize as a hero, somebody to follow. No great truth. No, since the Second World War, we haven’t had any single uplifting purpose to believe in.
Ah, so.
I quit caring about heroes outside myself after they even shot John Lennon, after we decided that rather than try to reach the stars we’d be ever so much happier courageously bending our multi-million-year evolutionary destiny toward the ultimate end of being able to Twitter.
Like I said, Zelig-Man Obama really has in just that the perfect qualities to be President, in your terms, to be a post-Revolutionary War, post George Washington/warrior-king President. Chief One-Size-Fits-All-Hero. If he can keep up with a learning curve nothing in his past experience can have led him to even imagine and conduct a symphony of near-perfect choices in near-perfect harmony in geopolitical real time, he could even conceivably be a great one.
Still best to look to yourself for any heroics you expect to have to count on, though.