Posted by
Michael Goodell on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 12:47:56 PM
In the wake of Barack Obama’s vote for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, true believers on the left are chorusing their dismay at their savior’s sudden shift to the center. Not since Satan got the boot has a deity fallen so fast and so far from favor. Fortunately, the Green Party’s selection of Cynthia McKinney as their Presidential candidate means the infantile left is not completely bereft of a standard bearer.
For the rest of left-leaning population, the brief foray by the presumptive Democrat Party nominee into rational thought represents sound political strategy. “He’s just saying what he has to in order to get elected,” they say. “It doesn’t matter. He’s still an agent of change.” Though the question of how a man who embodies an abrupt end to politics-as-usual can retain that status while employing the defining trope of politics-as-usual remains open to discussion, there is another possible explanation for Obama’s sudden apostasy. It is entirely conceivable that he is learning on the job.
This is not a bad thing. While many might prefer a President who actually knows something about foreign policy, military strategy, financial markets and, say, capitalism, by all accounts Obama is a pretty sharp guy, and as such, he has the potential to learn a lot of important things in the run up to the election.
As an example of his penchant for acquiring knowledge, he has already figured out that in order to be elected he needs the support of more than public employees, university professors and college students. This means he has to expand his reach, to go out and talk to a lot of real people. It’s possible that, in time, he might learn why it’s a bad idea to threaten to bomb your allies. If he manages to talk to people who actually work for a living, he might learn something about the capitalist system underpinning American prosperity. He might learn why pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to “give up their profits.” He might learn that “free” medical care is an impossibility. He might learn why people don’t want to pay more in taxes. And he might learn that real Americans actually don’t look forward to losing a war, any war, even the war in Iraq.
So let’s back off Barack. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and hope he manages to figure things out before his ascension to the White House.
Of course, it’s possible that he isn’t actually learning on the job. It’s possible that, inured to the phenomenon of wholesale adulation, he seeks to perpetuate that particular frisson by telling all his interlocutors exactly what they want to hear. It’s easy to buy off an audience with simplistic platitudes when the audience is filled with children. It will get a little more difficult when he sits down with people who actually love their country and care about their neighbors. It’s easy to blame “Big Oil” and General Motors for high gas prices when you’re talking to people who ride bikes between their classrooms and their dorms. It’s another matter when you’re confronted with people who drive trucks or who used to work for companies who built SUV’s because they could sell them at a profit to people who wanted to buy them.
It will be interesting to hear what he has to say to those people, and what he has to say to those bitter losers “clinging to their guns and religion.” He might even tell them he’s in favor of offshore oil exploration.
In the end, if Obama isn’t learning on the fly but is in fact merely telling people what they want to hear so they will like him, it is chilling to think of what he might say when he sits down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez or Kim Jong Il. Then again, maybe he can take Michelle along and let her do all the talking. Then he can be sure they’ll love him as much as he needs them to.