An Obama presidency would be sociologically significant, but not politically so. Only an Edwards presidency would be truly revolutionary in political terms, even more so than Reagan.

ps. Slumpbuster is hilarious.

It’s never a good sign when a thoughtful comment is longer than the post that inspired it. Bad blogger! Bad! I was a little flip with “content-free,” but in my defense it was late, and this is a blog, so…

Here’s the thing. Everything you’re saying about Obama sounds great. Better than great. Super great! Obama’s message is inspiring, and the hope he represents is a breath of fresh air in American politics. There’s only one problem:

I’m not buyin’ it.

I don’t mean I think Obama is being dishonest, I just think there’s a huge difference between what makes a successful candidate and what makes a successful president. And almost every election has had a candidate that has appeared to be the candidate of unity, of optimism, and of hope, but we still haven’t had a massive revolution in government. (You can take your last paragraph, change “Obama” to “Clinton,” and imagine my 17-year-old self saying it in complete earnest a lifetime ago in 1992.)

Don’t get me wrong, I’d be very excited about President Obama for so many reasons, but I just don’t believe that he really represents a viable alternative model of politics. First of all, “politics-as-usual” does work, just not for the Democrats. The reason is that the Republicans play the game better than we do, and I firmly believe that the lesson isn’t to give up, it’s to fight harder. Politics-as-usual only leads to gridlock when the opposition party successfully stymies the majority; a majority that knows how to legislate can get quite a bit done.

(I have to disagree, also, that “that we can solve 90% of the biggest problems we face if we all can agree to leave aside our differences on the last 10%.” Abortion? Global warming? Universal health care? Terrorism? The war in Iraq? These aren’t marginal differences.)

I think you’re mischaracterizing my view of the struggle a little bit here: It’s not “those who agree” versus “those who don’t,” rather it’s “those who have” versus “those who need.” American civic and economic society has been strained to near the breaking point by the accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, the systematic disenfranchisement and neglect of the poor, and the privileging of corporate well-being over social justice. I honestly believe there is a non-crazy case to be made for a people vs. the powerful candidate, and I think to elide that very real struggle as “politics as usual” misses the point in a rather important way. Politics as usual doesn’t at all concern itself with the needs of the weakest members of society; it ought to.

Frankly, I’ll be pretty disappointed if the next president isn’t elected, as you say, as a liberal. The complete devaluation of real liberalism as a political force in this country wasn’t an accident, and it has left us worse off. (This is the other thing I was getting at in my post—liberalism doesn’t really have a major party anymore, which makes me sad.)

Anyway, John Edwards is getting my vote in the primary (well, OK, I’m writing in his name because his organization in RI apparently couldn’t get 1000 signatures to put him on the ballot) because I think he’s the candidate that speaks best to me. That said, if your candidate wins, I’ll be more than proud to check the box next to Barack Obama’s name in November.

(I also like the last paragraph of this Obama profile by Matt Taibbi:

So maybe it’s OK to let the grandiose things that an Obama presidency could represent overwhelm the less-stirring reality — i.e., Obama as more or less a typical middle-of-the-road Democrat with a lot of money and a well-run campaign. Maybe it’s OK because it’s not always about the candidates; sometimes it’s about us, what we want and what we want to believe. And if Barack Obama can carry that burden for us, why not let him? Seriously, why not? The happy ending doesn’t always have to ring false.

)

I do not think that Obama’s speech lacked content. I think Obama’s message is that there are times in the history of a society when we must look past petty differences and come together for the sake of something greater than all of us, and one such time is now. This is not the traditional “I support A, B, C, and will beat down D and take back X,Y,Z for us!,” but I think it is much deeper and more meaningful. The threats we face as a nation and as a world are too great for us to be worried about things like who favors an individual mandate in health care, or what a candidate’s definition of “fair trade” is. Global warming is a real threat, and finding a solution is literally a matter of life and death for millions of people. Fixing our broken health care system is another real problem. Instability abroad, nuclear weapons, terrorism, Globalization. The world is changing faster than it ever has before, and the partisan rancor that exists right now in our country is a major impediment to starting a movement toward solutions.

I think that right now is the wrong time to be concerned about getting that perfect health care system. It is the wrong time to want to exact revenge on the powerful few who seem to be gaining at the expense of the many. It is absolutely the wrong time to go about the business as usual in politics, which is to separate the populace into those who agree with you, and those who don’t, and work as hard as you can to make sure that the former slightly edges out the latter. This politics-as-usual model is the one that Edwards and Clinton operate in, and this is precisely the model that Obama rejects.

Obama rejects the idea that our problems are getting worse just because we are not electing the biggest and strongest fighters. He argues that the politics-as-usual model necessarily leads to gridlock, and ultimately more problems. When Barack Obama is sworn in as president in January 2009, he will not have been elected as a liberal, he will not have been elected as a African-American male, he will have been elected as the first politician in a long time with a real mandate to change this broken system, and ultimately work to solve the problems that we face.

Up top I alluded to an apparent fundamental difference of opinion between us as to the nature of the problems we face. I will try to explain what I mean. I am pretty confident that we can solve 90% of the biggest problems we face if we all can agree to leave aside our differences on the last 10%. Our country, more than ever I think, is fighting our biggest internal battles at the absolute margins, and this is destroying our ability to move forward on the issue we actually pretty much agree on. Someone like Edwards, whose theme seems to be that he is going to fight for “us” at the expense of “them,” is not the person for this time. I also think, possibly in disagreement with you, that the current distribution of power and money in this country is not simply something that can be solved with a fight for redistribution, “fair” trade, worker protections, etc. I think that unless we change the underlying political system (the business as usual), we are doomed to encounter different problems even as we think we are solving the issues of today.

Again, Obama will be a president for our time, a president who can bring people together around the 90%, and with a mandate to slice through the divisive 10%. We have spent too long fighting, and losing, we should not now waste time more time in battle, even if we end up winning.