Hillary Clinton and John McCain should be careful what they ask for from the Rev. Wright controversy. Surrogates for their campaigns are still, even after Barack Obama's clear denunciation of Rev. Wright on Tuesday, accusing him of bad judgment for not doing it sooner, and, implicitly, of doing it out of political calculation. His opponents see hypocrisy in the contradiction between that calculation and Obama's call for a new kind of politics, but in the process they are inviting a kind of examination of their own campaigns that Obama's is better prepared to withstand.
Contrary to the popular image painted of him in the media, Obama actually seems to be the only one of the three Presidential candidates who does not defiantly hold himself above moral imperfection, and who, ironically, likely seems aloof to his critics precisely because he is the most at peace with his own flawed humanity.
Just before the Pennsylvania primary, John Stewart asked Barack Obama where he stood in the state polls, and he said, "We're down about seven or eight percent," which was exactly what the pollsters had been reporting. It was a tiny example, but still after all this time, an astonishing one to me, of Obama's comfortableness with honesty, and a reminder of how uncomfortable that seems to make his opponents. Obama had this to say about his own negative campaigning:
"This campaign isn't perfect, I'm not perfect. People start throwing elbows at you and you've got to throw an elbow back. I know this happened the last several weeks, I told this to my team, 'We are starting to sound like the other folks.'"
Obama is doing something the other candidates seem to never do, something that is at the heart of his appeal to so many people, and of the unsettling effect he has on others-- admitting a moral failure.
He didn't blame his mistakes on lack of sleep. He didn't deny he'd said something he'd said. Commentators have fallen into the habit of describing Obama as being in a predicament of his own making, trapped between impossible-to-meet, self-imposed standards of moral purity on the one hand and the demands of rough-and-tumble politics on the other. But they are making a mistake of perception born of the very habits that are the object Obama's true critique, and completely misreading the source of his popularity. Obama's supporters aren't excited by the possibility of a future when, as Hillary mockingly put it, "The heavens will open and everything will be perfect." They are optimistic about a future when specious, insincere, sentimental ideals might be nudged out of our politics a little bit by a politician brave enough to sometimes concern himself with not just moralism, but morality. Sometimes even his own.
Yet, while his opponents respond to criticism with high dudgeon and desperate evasion, and he routinely cops to his own failings, Obama is the candidate people most often see as being "above it all." This is not entirely a misperception. It's just that what Obama is trying to hold himself above isn't moral imperfection but moral pretense, which can be confusing at a time when politics is all about shot-and-a-beer charades and flags-of-our-father's puffery.
The ethical gulf between Hillary Clinton's decision to vote for an inexcusable and horrific war and Obama's decision to attend a church run by an at times angry and buffoonish pastor is enormous, yet Obama reflected thoughtfully and authentically on his own mistakes (as well as Rev. Wright's,) in his Philadelphia speech, and forcefully denounced Wright's offensive statements. Even more impressively, with little political gain to be had, and at a moment of great political pressure, he stayed true to his own sense of morality and refused to repudiate Rev. Wright himself. And now, weeks later, he's been forced to completely reject his former pastor, and has done so with clarity and real feeling.
Meanwhile, Clinton has yet to address her vote on the war in any meaningful way, let alone show signs of examining it or learning from it. Instead she's lectured her critics and opponents, waving campaign leaflets the way her husband wags his finger, with hectoring calls for Obama, the one who's supposed to be so full of moral superiority, to be "ashamed of himself."
But it is precisely Obama's resistance to the screeching demands of our inflated and hysterical political culture, and his struggle to stay as true to himself as he can while doing so, that has captured the hearts of so many people. The other candidates, and many journalists, seem to think that Obama has gotten himself in trouble because he's not doing what he should to "win," that he isn't "fighting" enough, but they don't see that he isn't trying to win the same thing they are, and that he's fighting on a different front. What really bothers them about Barack Obama isn't that he doesn't care about winning, it's that he's willing to lose. While Hillary Clinton has kept as her motto her husband's triangulationist admonishment, "First you have to win elections," one gets the sense that Obama might be more inclined to heed Abraham Lincoln's advice, "My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure."
I can only imagine what goes through Hillary Clinton's mind as she watches Obama not allow himself to be shamed into wearing an American flag pin. "What, is he crazy? He has nothing to lose by wearing a pin! What an idiot! I sponsored an anti-flag burning bill, for God sake! It's a no-brainer!" Clinton and her husband long ago cultivated an image of themselves as tenacious warriors willing to meet the enemy with inexhaustible ferocity. But it's become clear to many of their former supporters during this campaign that their enemy isn't who we thought it was, that it is in fact anyone and anything that gets in the way of The Clintons.
The only thing Hillary Clinton, or John McCain for that matter, ever seems to worry about being true to is their ambitions. I've yet to see either of them respond to any challenge with the politically inexpedient, centered, self-knowledge Obama displays in even something as small the flag pin question. Hillary responded to campaign director Mark Penn's paid advocacy of trade with Colombia and support of questionable military efforts there by "firing" him without firing him, and with obfuscation far more worthy of the accusations of arrogance she routinely aims at Obama. Yet Reverend Wright, who has been completely shut out of the Obama campaign from the beginning, is still a hot-button issue and somehow Mark Penn, still employed by the Clinton campaign, is not. Obama seems genuinely troubled by Wright's words, and the course their relationship has taken, while Clinton only seems bothered by Penn's clumsiness.
Hillary seems much more uncomfortable when challenged than Obama does (remember her complaints about being "ganged up on" by debate opponents, or her tantrum-like insistence in another debate that she "doesn't just want change, [she's] been working for change for thirty five years!") Yet she has accused Obama of not being able to "take the heat," because he pointed out the lack of substance in recent debate questions.
Her great strengths are supposed to be her experience and political acumen, but, more than a decade after letting her health care initiative be characterized as socialism, and trying to jam it down the throats of everyone in Washington, this supposedly super-savvy politician has returned to the battle with a plan whose centerpiece is government mandates. Her words. How in the world has she earned a reputation for political deftness? And if experience is her great virtue, why does she seem to take every slight personally, and lurch from one reactive extreme to another? What is experience for if not to temper us?
It seems to me that Barack Obama has been winning this campaign, and is sometimes in trouble, because he doesn't have the other candidate's habits of resistance to their own morally imperfect humanity. He's living and dying by his rejection of the rictus smiles and Stepford eyes (and yes, flag pins) of old-style politics. What he's above, in fact, is the Clinton style of "being above it all." The sneering and gloating, the thin-skinned over-reactions, the serrated nastiness of, "As far as I know" qualifications, bald-faced "Playing the race card" attacks, and red-faced, lying admonishments afterwards: these things are the stuff of being "above it all," of being above messy things like empathy, and friendship, and self-doubt.
There's nothing wrong with being above lying about war.
There's something very troubling, however, about the air both Clinton and McCain give off of being above responsibility to their own selves. Neither ever gives off a hint of genuinely wrestling with the demands of their own inner lives.
The Obama campaign will probably succeed, and it may fail, but I get the sense that it won't stop for a very long time. The seeking-the-Presidency part will have to end of course, one way or another. But from the beginning, Obama has campaigned, ironically enough, it must be said, at this very churchy moment of the process, in an almost Buddhist-like fashion. He has seemed to have a sense of how the way in which each of us, as individuals, responds to challenges in our lives makes the difference between perpetuating a culture of small-mindedness, recrimination and violence, or winning in the most important way. He is setting an example that helps others move toward a new political culture of self-awareness and compassion. Even if it's only by taking a couple of imperfect baby steps.
Obama seems to have an intuitive sense that the world will begin to change when each of us, one by one, begins to work for peace at the level of our own behavior, our own habits of thought and action. With all the yelling and screaming going on around him, Barack Obama seems peaceful, comfortable in his own skin, and not at all afraid to address his own habits of thought. That's why he has attracted supporters who are convinced of the necessity of taking a good honest look at how we treat ourselves, and how we treat others.
