The Chicago Cipher
What do people see when they look at Barack Obama? Whatever they want to see. But what happens when he has to define himself?
We had been on the phone for barely five minutes—talking about another subject entirely, as it happened—when the political consultant Mark McKinnon started spinning an elaborate and alluring fantasy about, what else, Barack Obama and the presidency. “There’s this great documentary out right now about Barry Goldwater,” said McKinnon, who served until recently as media guru to George W. Bush and currently advises John McCain. “And it reveals that Goldwater and John F. Kennedy were having conversations about how, if they were the nominees in 1964, they were going to jump on a plane and campaign together around the country. Which is a really interesting idea, and the sort of thing you could see Obama and McCain doing. I mean, wouldn’t that be great?”
Now, McKinnon isn’t exactly your typical professional partisan: Before taking up with Bush in 1998, he was a lifelong Democrat. And yet in many quarters in Washington and beyond, his reverie—not in its quirky specifics but in its expectant, roseate spirit—is the political dream du jour. The dream of Obama’s not simply running but transforming our politics. Indeed, transforming the country.
Before all that could happen, of course, Obama would have to win the Democratic nomination. And here the dream is equally seductive. Among many serious Democrats, the consensus is that if Obama runs—an eventuality everyone now considers a foregone conclusion—the contest immediately becomes a two-horse race between him and Hillary Clinton. Slate editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg goes further, contending that “Obama, not Hillary, [would] be the de facto Democratic front-runner.” And Markos Moulitsas, the commissar of the liberal blog Daily Kos, goes further still: “If Obama runs, he wins.”
Let me say that I find Obama an intriguing and compelling character: obviously talented, often inspiring, the possessor of nearly infinite potential. I have no doubt that he shouldn’t wait—that the time for him to run is now. And I’m prepared to believe that he would make a stronger Democratic standard-bearer than Clinton or any of the other wannabes nervously awaiting his decision. But let me also say that Weisberg, Kos, and many other Obamamaniacs must be smoking something (and, whatever it is, I’d like a taste). For all his promise, Obama is basically an empty vessel, with vulnerabilities that have been obscured by his blinding, meteoric ascent. And though it’s not impossible for him to win the Democratic nomination, the road to that destination will be rougher than his adherents admit—or, quite possibly, than Obama himself imagines.Two weeks back, when Obama rolled into town to address a charity dinner for kids in poverty (and squeeze in a few meetings with big-dollar donors such as George Soros), I hustled over to the Mandarin Oriental to catch his act. As a speaker, Obama is cool in the strictest sense, his tone even and conversational, his gestures spare and deliberate. He began his talk with a story about Robert F. Kennedy’s trip to the Mississippi Delta in 1967. Visiting one tar-paper shack, Kennedy encountered a child with a distended belly and hollow eyes. “At that point, Bobby Kennedy begins to cry,” Obama said, “and he asks, ‘How can a country like this allow it?’ How can a country like this allow it?”
Obama’s affinity for RFK is pronounced and unsurprising. In the fall of 2005, he recounted that same story in the keynote he delivered at the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award Ceremony—a speech in which he identified the qualities that have made the ghost of RFK enduring. Charisma and eloquence. Youth and energy. “An idealism not based in rigid ideology.” An outlook “hard to place … into any of the categories that so often constrain us politically.” The very set of qualities, that is, that many people now discern in Obama—and that he so clearly aims to project.
Yet the differences between Obama and RFK are many, beginning with the length and depth of their résumés when their eyes turned toward the White House. By 1968, Kennedy had not only served three years as a senator from New York but three as U.S. Attorney General. He’d been a central player in shaping his brother’s foreign policy and had spent much of the decade knee-deep in the civil-rights movement. Obama’s stint in the Illinois State Senate pales by comparison.
God knows the last thing I’d argue is that Obama ought to pad his CV by loitering for years in the Senate, an institution that prepares one for little besides the exercise of pomposity. But, substantively speaking, Obama hasn’t even made the most of his brief time there. The legislation he has offered has been uniformly mundane, marginal, and provincial—securing additional funding for veterans, to cite but one example...[READ MORE]
Featured Holiday Article: THE GIFT RIGHT OUT
Christmas shopping in the U.S. has been a reliable source of anxiety and stress for well over a century. “As soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is eaten, the great question of buying Christmas presents begins to take the terrifying shape it has come to assume in recent years,” the New York Tribune wrote in 1894. But recently millions of Americans, instead of trudging through malls in a desperate quest for the perfect sweater, have switched to buying gift cards.
The National Retail Federation expects that Americans will buy close to twenty-five billion dollars’ worth of gift cards this season, up thirty-four per cent from last year, with two-thirds of shoppers intending to buy at least one card; gift cards now rival apparel as the most popular category of present. This is, in part, because of clever corporate marketing: stores like gift cards because they amount to an interest-free loan from customers, and because recipients usually spend more than the amount on the card—a phenomenon that retailers tenderly refer to as “uplifting” spending. But the boom in gift cards is also a rational response to the most important economic fact about Christmas gift giving: most of us just aren’t that good at it.We all know that bad gifts inflict a cost—just think of the rigid smiles that greet an unwanted floral tie or Josh Rouse CD—but it’s surprising how big that cost can be. Since the early nineteen-nineties, Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been doing a series of studies in which college students are asked to put a value on the presents they receive. Waldfogel’s main finding is that, in general, people spend a lot more on presents than they’re worth to those who receive them, a phenomenon that he calls “the deadweight loss of Christmas.” A deadweight loss is created when you spend eighty dollars to give me a sweater that I would spend only sixty-five dollars to buy myself. Waldfogel estimates that somewhere between ten and eighteen per cent of seasonal spending becomes deadweight loss, which means that billions of dollars a year is now going to waste...[READ MORE]
MUSIC
Featured Artist: Pablo
Paul "Pablo" Schalda has a ghost's voice, an old haunted soul that shivers its way up through his mouth to share its cracked-glasses view of the world with those of us lucky enough to listen. New York's Pablo is the vehicle for that voice and the lives it's lived. Previously heard draped over the Pavement-influenced treble clang of outerborough indie rock heroes AWEK, Schalda's distinct and affecting vocals stand at the center of Pablo, drawing chills from the tight economy of his lyrics and conveying something deeper than most words usually get across anyway. It's smart music that connects at gut level, a rare treasure in a crowded space. Clipped stories prop themselves up against solitary acoustic guitar, or find a full body in the stellar and spare accompaniment provided by brother Will Schalda (ex-REALISTICS) and his varied keys, wife Maggie Schalda's harmonies, and the Strandberg Brothers' ample multi-instrumentation. The result is a sound singular enough to equally evoke Odetta and the Replacements, and one that's perked up the ears of KEXP's "John in the Morning" and landed the outfit support slots up and down the East Coast with Matt Pond PA, Earlimart, Brendan Benson, myself and more. On the heels of a well-received self-released EP, Pablo's first full-length recording is set to be released this May on Brooklyn's own 230 Records. -Kevin Devine
Pablo - "Loser Crew"
Featured Holiday Song: Santa Claus is Freaking Me Out
With eerie precision, Lord Weatherby, an eccentric minstrel of pseudonomic proportions, muses on the physical improbability of Santa Claus, his dubious journey around the earth while delivering copious amounts of behavioral rewards, and a bunch of just plainly weird things in general. Borrowing some of the vocal stylings of Nick Cave or Tom Waits, Lord Weatherby and his backing dirge-rock ditty sounds like a deranged lament by the Grinch who deconstructed Christmas. It's this unusual gent's party, and he can cry if he wants to.
Lord Weatherby - "Santa Claus is Freaking Me Out"