Ryan Lizza has a long article about Barack Obama in The New Yorker. You can read the full 15 pages if you like, but his opening interview with longtime Illinois Alderman Toni Preckwinkle seems to be the scoop. Preckwinkle, who’s known Obama for years, seems shocked by the guy’s meteoric political rise, and she goes so far as to suggest Obama has lost his personal integrity.
I know. Some friend.
But Lizza’s article exposes a fundamental Orwellianism that we need to get straight. Despite the fact that he is running for President, there still seem to be people out there who are shocked – shocked! – that Obama behaves like a politician.
People, the man is a politician. As a very wise columnist once wrote, “they’re not like the rest of us.”
Of course, Obama is not entirely clean himself. (And no, I’m not referring to that misfit moment in his autobiography when he admitted he’d done cocaine.) If anyone is responsible for this “Obama is not a politician” belief, it’s Obama himself. In that galvanizing speech, the one that launched the Obama cult of personality, he said, “If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief -- it is that fundamental belief -- I am my brother's keeper, I am my sisters' keeper -- that makes this country work.”
It’s still one of the greatest speeches in modern history. It ranks up there with MLK’s “I Have A Dream,” and the similarities are not to be discounted.
Why is it so heartbreaking to accept that those words came out of the mouth of a politician? The difference between Obama and every other politician we have isn’t that Obama claims to be a different breed (normally, they all do) but that many of us believed him (normally, we never do).
But maybe that exposes a deeper cultural insecurity, a “Politician-Human” complex along the lines of the “Virgin-Whore” complex that stymied feminism. The Politician-Human complex might have evolved when we trusted the promises of politicians only to be painfully misled.
But it runs deeper than that. It hearkens back to the Founding Fathers. Nothing put George Washington’s wig in a knot like politicians, whom he described in his famous farewell letter as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men…enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
Which is a shame, since Washington, in addition to being our first President, was also our first politician.
Merriam-Webster defines a politician as: “a person experienced in the art or science of government; especially: one actively engaged in conducting the business of a government.”
Meanwhile, the most popular definition on Urban Dictionary has a different take: “A person who practices politics. "Politics" is derived from the words "poly" meaning "many", and "tics" meaning "blood-sucking parasites."” Incidentally, this is also the politest definition on the page.
Our nation’s bizarre love-hate relationship with its elected polity is more than I can unpack in a blog post, even one as irresponsibly long as this one. Suffice it to say that being a politician has, over the course of history, taken on many associated meanings, whether justified or not. We consider politicians selfish and utilitarian, or dishonest and insensitive. We consider “politician” to be a mindset, a personality and a social class.
But at the end of the day, it’s also a job. Obama’s job.
No comments:
Post a Comment