It was kind of fun watching Chris Matthews throw himself into the tank for Barack Obama after the debates. But after a while, it got kind of embarrassing. I could not exactly figure out why it felt so awkward, but finally last night it dawned on me: for Matthews, the possibility of an Obama election would be a way of reasserting American Exceptionalism.
Once it was clear Obama had won, Matthews (and others) began gleefully exclaiming how with the election of an African-American, America had "done it again," showing the world what a real democracy looks like. Matthews crowed that no other Western democracy had succeeded in electing a minority (since I suppose women don't count), but America had proved that somehow, someway, they were able to put racism aside, becoming, once again, the vanguard in equality and the like. (Think to how the whole world was sitting around in "Independence Day," waiting for the Americans to figure out how to kill the aliens.)
Despite the fact that I'm happy for the people who had so much invested in an Obama presidency based on personal grounds, and despite the fact that Parliament's "Chocolate City" was ringing in my head all night long, Matthews has very little to be proud of. To suggest that somehow America is post-racial is ridiculous. To look at Obama's election as some sort of proof that because "even" African-Americans (at least, those who are brilliant, who go to Harvard and Columbia, who grow up in materially decent circumstances) can get elected president, that racism is over (or, conversely, that we're in a new pluralism) is preposterous.
Yet that's what Matthews was doing. And his guests were no better, including one preacher who was proclaiming the end of the politics of racial grievance (or something similar). As though White America could now say, "we gave you the White House. Now you really have nothing to complain about as I continue to keep my structural racism intact."
Part of the obvious way in which this elections' results have to be understood with a level of skepticism comes out of two interesting points from last night: first, I think it was Bill Bennett or David Gergen who was making the weak argument that Obama has to rule from the center. Look at everything that broke his way in order for him to get elected, the man said. For a Democrat to get elected in this town, the economy has to be destroyed, the current President has to be a woefully unpopular Republican, and so on. The second point was kos's blunt "turnout sucked." For all of the efforts by the Obama campaign to energize a new base of voters, they don't seem to have supplemented the 2004 voters much. Instead, they substituted them. The "broad shift to Democrats" Krugman sees could be merely that more Democrats came out this time.
But the skepticism from these two points underscores the problem of taking Matthews in his yuppie glee about the transformative nature of this election. If the 2008 numbers had been equivalent to the 2004 numbers plus all the extra people Obama brought in (Nate suspects near universal African-American turnout this time), then we could argue that people came in from the cold to make their votes known. But that's not, for now, what happened. Similarly, Obama's election can be excused by any number of issues of timing and chance (Lehman seems particularly apt for fault, according to Krugman). Are timing and chance enough of a foothold for transformative politics?
I don't think so. I think America actually blew its transformative opportunity (or showed the lie that is the possibility of transformational politics) when it failed to elect John Kerry in 2004. McCain's line about how if Obama wanted to run against Bush he should've run in '04, despite its snarkiness, was very important because of the implicit indictment:
We failed to get rid of the worst President in history.
Not only did we not defeat him, we reëlected him! Who knows if Bush would've stood for one more term if the Constitution were different. But what we do know is that Obama vs. McCain is not, to me, a very resounding substitute for a referendum on Bushism. Could "any" Democrat have won this year? If so, why are we congratulating Axelrod et al. for bringing in not that many more votes for the Democrat? John Kerry got 59m votes to Obama's 63m. Is four million votes what transformation looks like? (That's not even 2% of the US population.)
Kos always talks about "first more Democrats, then better Democrats," underscoring the slow process of movement that befits any kind of political program. With Obama, we've got more Democrats in the White House than before, and he's even better, probably, than many of the other Democratic candidates would've been. But to use terms like "transformative" suggests that there can be a single break in time, a rupture or bifurcation where the system has to reorient itself. Our inability to do so in 2004 (when the stakes were, I think I believe, higher) suggests that we cannot expect transformation in electoral politics.
So good on Obama for getting elected. But unlike Matthews and the rest (including Obama's own rhetoric opening his speech last night), I'm not going to imagine that some of new day has dawned, where now the world is a completely different place. It's just a step closer to where it ought to be, and that step might not even be a big one.
I'm reminded of 1992, and especially of the scenes in "War Room" when Stephanopoulos comes off as such a true believer, believing in the transformative power of a Clinton election, coupled with, finally, having majorities in Congress. But there was no such transformation, and the majorities didn't last long.
I suspect then that I just want to urge extreme caution. Part of "Chocolate City"'s brilliance lies in its almost utopian absurdity coupled with a deep knowledge of the limitation of hope within a political program. "A chocolate city is no dream / It's my piece of the rock" reminds us that we need to stay grounded, need not to lose sight of the material, and need to remember that just because it feels like that as of November 5, 2008, everything is different, it's really not.
It's just one more step.
Gainin' on ya!