The Next Elvis

Politics is the art of pushing people around for their own good. You promote public support to back your policies and put them in place. This involves manipulating people to get what you want. It does not generally attract people with low self esteem. 

This explains why truly great politicians are few and far between. It is very difficult to reconcile awareness of and empathy for other people's problems with a drive to be the big boss of everything.

Right now people are discovering that Barack Obama is a politician, not just a motivational speaker, and it's throwing them for a loop. Liberal supporters are dismayed as Obama announces positions--support for security surveillance, backing for faith-based charities--that appeal to conservatives.

Presidential candidates in a general election classically move to the center to appeal to the broadest range of voters and that always alienates their supporters on the fringes of political opinion. These moves may clash with candidates' previously stated positions or violate their own personal convictions of right and wrong. 

Acting in emergencies, even the greatest presidents have violated basic human rights. Lincoln suspended habeus corpus in the Civil War. Roosevelt interred Japanese Americans in World War II.

In seeking and exercising power, politicians throw their weight around, and sometimes they knock people over. Elections are about deciding which candidates we feel would make the most constructive use of their ability to manipulate or even hurt people, and abuse it the least. 

Anyone running for president of the United States has got to be an egomaniac. We need to pick the egomaniac with greatest dedication to the public good.

I think Barack Obama is a once in a lifetime presidential candidate, both because of who he is and what he makes of it. The first African American nominated as a major party candidate, Obama manages his identity in a way that demonstrates wisdom, great maturity, and the greatest dedication to the common interests of all Americans.

In the 1950s, pioneer rock 'n' roll producer Sam Phillips famously proclaimed, "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a million dollars."

He found Elvis Presley, with a resulting cultural payoff that was far more important than the millions Elvis made. As controversial and divisive as rock 'n' roll lifestyles and racial revolution have proven to be, I think they have advanced ideals of freedom and national community in ways that have made this country a much better place than it was in 1956.

Now Obama is crossing the same lines between the races that Elvis crossed, in the even bigger arena of national politics. How he, and the country, handle this larger exploration of race, identity, and community could have profound consequences for the well being of the American soul. For better or worse, Obama could be bigger than Elvis.

Political manipulation of race has in the past been one of the curses of American politics. At the start of his national career, and periodically on the campaign trail still, Obama himself has used his racial identity in a fairly dishonest way. 

Invoking the mixed heritage of his Kenyan father and his Kansan mother in his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic national convention, Obama proclaimed, "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."

This "only in America" stuff is manipulative, pandering hooey. In America, even in the 21st century, Obama's story is a miracle. There are people in Tennessee, my neck of the woods, who would rather see Obama dead than elected president.

Elsewhere, as in his book Dreams From My Father and in his remarkable speech on race during the controversy over the outspoken black pastor of his Chicago church, Obama has presented a more harrowing, straightforward, and constructive account of the struggles he went through to come to terms with his mixed heritage. When he speaks in these ways, Obama promotes racial understanding and healing in ways that only someone with his story could do.

When he speaks in these ways, I find it easy to forgive the ways in which he is a political animal.

If Obama is elected, black people will still be overrepresented in prison and white people will still be overrepresented in positions of power and white people will still be uncomfortable in all-black settings and black kids will still struggle to find an identity and build a future and America will still have miles to go to become a colorblind society.

If he makes it, Obama may prove incapable of delivering on all the promises, stated and unstated that his candidacy represents. If the country makes him president, it may prove incapable of living with what it has done.

This could all go horribly wrong. But right now, it is going different.