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Can Obama Deliver Rebirth of a Nation?

Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Feb 29 (IPS) - Illinois Senator Barack Obama has made a

political career of trying to straddle delicate lines. But come November, he
hopes to instead break historic barriers by becoming the first black man to
be elected president of the United States.
Driven by fervent youth support and a coalition of African-American voters and
middle-class whites, Obama was catapulted to resounding victories in a string of
primaries since Super Tuesday, where the Democratic electorate was effectively split.
Thus Obama arrived one step closer to his goal in these late winter days. Taking the
lead in pledged delegates over his Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama
became the frontrunner to win his party's nomination.
His journey to this point, as he is fond of pointing out, is a unique one. The self-
described "skinny kid with a funny name" presents a new moment in U.S. politics --
but not simply because of his race.
Obama's campaign, much like his meteoric rise into the national consciousness, is
predicated on change. Not limited to the oval office, or just Washington, Obama has
his sights set higher -- proposing to change the political sensibility of the entire
country; the world even.
In the contest for the Democratic nomination, Obama has made a name for himself
not so much on issues or policy platforms, but rather on his booming oratory on the
stump calling for citizens to have "hope" and claiming his campaign to be "change
we can believe in".
Some critics doubt his ability to pursue change -- deriding his lofty rhetoric as the
shallow idealism of a young politician. They point to his inexperience and claim that
he will not be able to be the executive of a cumbersome bureaucracy and that he
won't know how to pull the levers of government.
"I ask my staff never to hand me paper until two seconds before I need it, because I
will lose it," said Obama in a debate when asked to identify a weakness. "And my
desk in my office doesn't look good."
Nonetheless, the Obama campaign has presented the candidate as a sort of saviour,
and not just a political saviour, but also a saviour of the U.S. soul -- a man ready to
offer instant absolution from the "politics of the past" and all that it has wrought on
the people.
"Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that before we can
work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation,"
said Obama's wife, Michelle, on the campaign trail.
And while critics call Obama a false messiah, he will, in fact, be able to seize some
opportunities early in office.
With presumed Republican nominee Sen. John McCain poised to be the war
candidate, either Democratic nominee can present himself or herself as a new face
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for U.S. foreign policy. But it's widely thought that Obama's international and
multicultural background will give him more leeway with world opinion -- giving the
U.S. a better chance to mend its largely unpopular image abroad both amongst
disillusioned allies and historic enemies.
Born in Hawaii to a white middle-class mother from Kansas and a Muslim Kenyan
father studying in the U.S. at the time, Obama lived several years of his youth in
Indonesia before moving back to Hawaii for the remainder of his youth.
This background, contend Obama supporters, will at the very least jar the world into
taking notice that there will be a more globally conscious approach for the U.S.
overseas. And Obama has largely campaigned on this window of opportunity, saying
that he would be open to unconditional talks with any world leader -- friend and foe
alike.
But experience, again, leads to a criticism of this tack.
While Obama's youth and idealism bring comparisons of President John Kennedy,
some observers seize upon Kennedy's own inexperience as a strike against Obama.
"Despite [Kennedy's] years of public policy experience and political acumen, that
Obama can't match, he was still woefully ill-equipped to deal with the two biggest
crises that confronted his administration; the Cuban Missile crisis and the civil rights
crisis," wrote political commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson on the widely-read
Huffington Post blog, referring to the two-week ordeal that brought the U.S. and the
Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.
But unwilling to suffer attacks on his experience, Obama has turned his relatively
short stay thus far in Washington -- he became the fifth black senator just three years
ago -- as a positive. He is not entrenched, he says, with the special interests that so
many voters see as a corrupting force in politics.
As he said about his messy desk, Obama is likely to surround himself with
experienced people who are fully able to handle the reins of the government while
he, infused with idealism, will be able to set the vision for the country as a whole.
Perhaps this harkens back to his days as a community organiser on the South Side of
Chicago. Indeed, the bottom-up approach would present a very new political model.
And the notion of inclusion on a Foucaultian omni-directional power structure is
something he hopes not only to bring to his administration, but also to the U.S. public
at large -- proposing to use the internet as a way to bring transparency and
accountability into the homes of citizens.
This approach, like many of Obama's strengths -- and some of his weaknesses --
emanate from his ability to straddle lines.
He's black, but was brought up by a middle-class white family. He went to prep
school and Harvard Law, but organised on the tough streets of the South Side. He
won largely black Democratic states like South Carolina, but also has taken some
mostly white states like Iowa, Idaho, Nebraska and Utah -- often bringing out
staggering numbers in states that usually go for Republican candidates in the general
election.
It's the blurring of those lines, though, that give some commentators pause. Obama
seems to get away with an awful lot, they say.
He manages to talk about uniting red states and blue states, but is accused of being
too far left by his opponents on the right, and even lambasted by some on the far-left
for not being out front enough on their positions of choice.
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Obama has eschewed taking a lot of tough positions in favour of his classic stem-
winders about "change" and "hope". While in the Illinois state senate, he voted
"present" nearly 130 times -- a position that does not force an aye or nay but shows
that the official was there.
On a controversial bill urging the U.S. to label Iran's Revolutionary Guard, an
organisation deeply entrenched in nearly all facets of Iranian government and
economics, a terrorist organisation -- with broad implications, some feared, for the
use of force against Iran -- Obama, unable to vote present, simply did not vote.
Most troubling is that these positions, or lack thereof, show a more calculating side to
the Obama campaign that one normally hears as a criticism of his rival, Clinton.
Accordingly, Obama -- widely considered the staunchest anti-war candidate because
of his eloquent opposition leading up to the U.S.-led Iraq invasion -- has voted with
Clinton on nearly every vote on Iraq since he entered the Senate in 2005.
Some democrats fear that the lack of a solid record -- both from examples like these
and Obama's short time on the national scene -- will serve as fodder for his
opponents, who will be able to project their attacks onto him throughout a long
general campaign.
Based on that criticism, some close to the Clinton campaign have called Obama "an
unknown quantity" or a "roll of the dice". If that is the case, Obama may need his
speeches to go beyond just rhetoric and asking voters to simply just "believe" and
"hope".