FLOTSAM & JETSAM: WATCHING OBAMA

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Sam Smith

I've been trying to figure out why I find Barack Obama less impressive
than many of my white friends and have come up with two tentative
answers:

First, I went to the same school as Obama, albeit graduating magna cum
probation from Harvard College rather than with honors from its law
school. Now Harvard graduates come in all flavors, but too many of the
most successful ones learn quickly to gravitate to gratuitous gravitas.
If you watch Obama closely he seems in public to have only two moods,
happy or look-how-serious-I-am-about-this, the latter being the quality
that allows Washington officials – and Harvard Law grads - to convince
everyone else they should invade Iraq and Vietnam or forget about global
warming for the time being. The problem is that, as one journalist
noted, there is a big difference between being somber and being serious.
And gravitas – with which Obama overflows – seems often just a karaoke
version of seriousness.

(If you are inclined to think that college background is irrelevant,
remember this: The Vietnam war was in no small part the invention and
obsession of machismo-seeking Harvard grads and during the last twenty
years of America's extraordinary decline, our country has been in the
hands of products of Yale: two Bushes and a Clinton.)

The other difference I have with many of my white friends is that I have
lived and worked most of my life in Washington, DC, which has as much
pulpit borne politics per square inch as any place in the country. When
Obama does his Martin Luther King cover, therefore, what comes to mind
is not "I have a Dream" but, "Oh no, not again," for it brings to mind
crummy council members and dubious mayors being propelled into office
with the help of similar irrelevant rhetoric.

The fact is that King is long dead and black preachers, just like white
ones, don't act like that much any more regardless of their comfortable
cadences. The ministry – white and black - has walked away from the
1960s and its values just as surely as have the politicians and the
media. So when someone tries to pull the noble preacher shtick, I feel
more like I'm being conned than being converted.

The alternative to this is to spend less time looking for Jesus or JFK
and MLK and more time seeking policies and a politics with which one is
comfortable. They can come in all colors, geographies and genders - not
because of them but because, for the good things in life, it just
doesn't matter.  

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