The Heroes & Villains Suite

"Movements are for Beethoven and the bowels."
-Tom Robbins

One of the best capitalists I ever met was a Socialist named Dave. This fellow could have sold sand to a Saudi and I was ever-amazed at his ability to move - to actually sell - copies of The Socialist Worker to the most unlikely of customers: robber barons, hedge fund managers, sentient beings. In a previous life, Dave had probably been a Jain merchant or a huckster of Old West patent medicines, but when I met him he was the de facto director of sales and marketing for the Washington, DC branch of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Yes, even the Socialists need a marketing department because, after all, there's no such thing as a free lunch and you can't topple the plutocrats with good intentions.

What made Dave such an ace salesman was that - as far as I could tell - he actually believed in his product, as did his fellow Socialists. Walking into a weekly ISO meeting was not unlike entering a church, full of fervently true believers, ready to share with you The Good Word, in all its splendor. And just like in a religious service, the adherents refused to believe that anyone could be but passionate about their gospel. I mean, c'mon, this is The Truth we're talking about here and it shall set you free, goddamnit.

"America," said Alan Ginsberg, "I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry."

I'm not sorry either, Alan, but ultimately, I just never could see the merits of either religion or Socialism in all their hopped-up piety. I tried to give myself over, I really did, but in the end, I was was like the sober dude watching a Cheech & Chong film: I just didn't get it.

* * *

And so, it's confession time.

Here's mine: I can't understand the frenzy surrounding Barack Obama. The media adore him; college kids go weak-kneed in his presence; Halle Barry has offered to "collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear." Hell, I'm even afraid that there will be riots across the United States if some Danish newspaper dares to print a cartoon depicting his likeness.

To be sure, Obama is a handsome, charismatic figure, seemingly full of optimism and capable of the most soaring rhetoric. In other words, he's a politician, and a very talented one at that. If experience has taught us anything, though, it's that the more talented a politician is, the more vigilant - indeed, suspicious - we as citizens ought to be.²

Skepticism is doubly healthy when it comes to mass movements, which - whether good or bad - often lead to a mob mentality, as seen in religious services, political rallies, Amway conventions and rock concerts. Such events are designed to manipulate your emotions, and to think that Obama and his staff are unaware of his effect on people, or that his camp would do anything but exploit it, is naive.

As potentially the first African-American president, Obama rightly inspires a sense of hope across the United States, a desire to believe that perhaps all that hooey about boot straps and melting pots is true. A similar truth goes for Hillary Clinton, too, where gender is concerned. But if the color of one's skin or the nature of a person's genitalia shouldn't be reason for voting against a person, such factors similarly should not be reason to vote for a person.

I am not, for the record, a Democrat, and even less in this critique of Obama am I endorsing Hillary Clinton. In fact, from a purely strategic point of view, I can't see why the Democrats wouldn't nominate Obama for their push to recapture the White House in 2008. Beyond the fact that Obama stands a better chance of defeating John McCain, Clinton comes packaged with such a pre-congealed opposition that her presidency could be nearly as divisive and unproductive as the previous seven years.

For all his talk of post-partisanship, change, and transformation, however, Obama offers a rather down-the-line liberalism that is almost certain to produce partisanship and deformation aplenty. Given the trainwreck that has been the Bush administration, the next US president will likely enjoy a brief grace period following his or her inauguration - "finally, someone else" - during which much might be accomplished. That next president, however, is set to inherit an unpopular war and a battered economy, the unwinding of which will require that tough decisions be made, and in Washington tough decisions tend to be fraught with partisan bickering. As David Brooks wrote recently, the issues of Iraq and the economy loom darkly on the horizon:

On withdrawing troops from Iraq:

There would be furious opposition from Republicans and many independents. They would argue that you can't evacuate troops just as Iraqis are about to hold national elections and tensions are at their highest. They would point out that it's insanity to end local reconstruction and Iraqi training just when they are producing results. They would accuse the new administration of reverse-Rumsfeldism, of ignoring postsurge realities and of imposing an ideological solution on a complex situation.

All dreams of changing the tone in Washington would be gone. All of Obama's unity hopes would evaporate. And if the situation did deteriorate after a quick withdrawal, as the National Intelligence Estimate warns, the bloodshed would be on the new president's head.

On the economy:

Which brings us to second looming Democratic divide: domestic spending. Both campaigns promise fiscal discipline, as well as ambitious new programs. These kinds of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too vows were merely laughable last year when the federal deficit was running at a manageable $163 billion a year. But the economic slowdown, the hangover from the Bush years and the growing bite of entitlements mean that the federal deficit will almost certainly top $400 billion by 2009. The accumulated national debt will be in shouting distance of the $10 trillion mark. With that much red ink, the primary-season spending plans are simply ridiculous.

It'd be 1993 all over again. The new Democratic president would be faced with Bill Clinton's Robert Rubin vs. Robert Reich choice: either scale back priorities for the sake of fiscal discipline or blow through all known deficit records for the sake of bigger programs.

Choose the former, and the new president would further outrage the left. Choose the latter and lose the financial establishment and the political center.

Granted, an ounce of magnetism - of which Obama clearly runs a surplus - can go a long way in smoothing feathers otherwise ruffled in such debates, but let's not forget that the American political system is inherently nasty.

"But," argue Obama's supporters, "this man is different. He's...he's....he's transformative. He can change the system."

At the risk of sullying Obama's halo, though, I'd like to play buzzkill and suggest a moment of detached cynicism. Specifically: we shouldn't, as Russell Roberts has noted, delude ourselves into thinking that everything would be crackerjack wonderful if we could just get the right people into office:

We should be realistic about politicians. George Stigler used to contrast his theory of politics with Ralph Nader's. In Nader's view, all of the ugly aspects of government were caused by the wrong people getting elected. If we could just elect better people, then we'd get better policies. Stigler argued that it didn't matter who the people were—once they got in office, they responded to incentives. They would convince themselves that they were doing the right thing, either because they really thought so or because doing the wrong thing was necessary in order to be able to do the right thing down the line.

Being a Stiglerian in this area, I expect less of my politicians and I am rarely disappointed.

Just as this is not an endorsement for any candidate, neither should it be construed as a condemnation of Obama. Of all the candidates left standing, he may well be the best person for the job of President, though he has yet to convince me. What worries me about his fan base (for lack of a better word) is the religiosity - bordering on self-righteousness - the unquestioning adoration that leads people to believe that the politicians operating the levers, rather than the machine itself, are the answer to all of our ills.

But hell, if he doesn't get elected, I might know where he can get a job selling papers.


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Notes
¹ Photo from ABC News

² John McCain, by contrast, has never struck me as a great politician. As Nicholas Kristoff wrote:

[McCain's] pride in "straight talk" may arise partly because he is an execrable actor. When he does try double-talk, he looks so guilty and uncomfortable that he convinces nobody.

Or maybe McCain is actually so talented that he's able to convince us that's he's untalented, like some MC Escher painting turned human.