On my mind...

“Calling Captain AMERICA”

The current American president was featured in the British Esquire Magazine of February 2009. Mr. Andrew O’Hagan’s accompanying article on President Obama is probably the most insightful to date.

I would, thus, like to share it here:

” I first saw Barack Obama in the wings of the FleetCenter in Boston. He stood like someone who would sooner be outside having a cigarette, a slight but tall man shifting his weight from foot to foot and his mind from thought to thought, perhaps already aware that every personal pleasure, even such a simple, un-American pleasure as smoking, would now be drowned out by the clarion calls of destiny.

This was in 2004 and he was about to face the delegates and the cameras at the Democratic National Convention. He walked on stage, his suit gleaming, his whole face smiling, while the man around him seemed like members of some American politburo, clad in white liberal orthodoxy without the means or the man to win.

I did my best to support John Kerry, but there was an unmistakable shadow of blunted Sixties idealism about him. Obama seemed like a man in touch with a generation that had not fought in Vietnam, had not thought about it either, more recent disorders fuelling their shouts. I don’t have to rely on the glories of hindsight to conjure the image of the new great hope on the night of his debut: one can look at the convention footage and see the crowd levitating just as I remember them doing, reaching out for this new politician with a zeal which seemed overpowering.

The next morning at the Sheraton Hotel, I typed the following two sentences on my laptop and sent them back to London. ‘A great wow at the convention - and a man who must now accept the mantle of possible future black president - is Barack Obama, a lean young fighting machine of the left, who will soon join the Senate representing Illinois. Obama already seems like the answer to a question as yet unformed by the Democrats: what is the future if Kerry loses?’

Downstairs at the Sheraton, it was as if business as usual had been superseded by a new possibility, yet everybody one spoke to felt it might be a long time before America could cope with having a black president. The political past, at least the past of the Democratic party, was both receding and resurging  at the same time: in one of the corridors at the hotel I found Robert Kennedy Jr sitting alone at a signing table, waiting for people to buy his book. Eventually he took out his mobile phone and made a few calls, and I just watched him on the phone, wondering what was happening to the dreams of his father, who was assassinated on the campaign trail in 1968. Was Barack Obama about to take up the torch that the Kennedy brothers had once carried?

In A piece written for American Esquire during the 1960 campaign called ‘Superman Comes To The Supermarket’, Norman Mailer noted John F Kennedy’s slight detachment during the campaign. ‘Kennedy seemed at times like a young professor whose manner was adequate for the classroom,’ wrote Mailer, ‘but whose mind was off in some intricacy of the PhD thesis he was writing.’

This was just as true of Obama during the summer of 2008: he is a former professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and the impression he gave, especially during the debates, was of a man whose intelligence was being spliced by the stupidity of the occasions that aimed to test it. He tended to retreat into his sense of humour and his generational glamour, as when, during a hitch that made the lights start strobing in the rehearsal for one of the debates, he stood at the podium and began chanting the words to ‘Disco Inferno’. But the closing weeks of the campaign saw Obama with the numbers stacking up behind him, reaching into his moment: suddenly, it was as if the wishful thinking of several generations had crowned his confidence, and he seemed to feel that the story of his own life was new an electrifying element in people’s hopes for themselves, their ambitions for their children and for America’s recovery.

On election night, the image of a young black family walking out holding hands as the United States’ next First Family was an iconic moment for civilisation. Those who didn’t think so were not looking at Jesse Jackson’s face in the crowd, which was crumpled with tears, the abuses and lies and false promises of a lifetime somehow encoded on the face of a man who thought he would never live to see such change. The novelist in me wants to imagine what was in Jackson’s mind at that point: one would guess he watched Obama, who many will now call the leader of the free world, and was overwhelmed to know how hard-won has been the African-American association with freedom. He must have thought of slavery and of the Civil War, of his old friends Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, the black people imprisoned, hounded out of buses, dismissed from lunch counters not 50 years ago. He must also have thought of himself and his own attempt to confound history: Jackson’s tears were very human and greatly historical; more then anything, they encapsulated the wattage of Obama’s brilliance and the sheer scale of achievement the new president embodies.

The millions of young people watching the president-elect’s victory speech know, even if they couldn’t say so, that they were watching a moral spectacle: their moment had arrived, and it wasn’t just about the triumph of equality, but conceivably, for hundreds of millions of us, about the triumph of decency. This American election mattered to the world because it held out the possibility of an inestimably powerful leader who actually knew the difference between right and wrong. He didn’t just know it, he had experienced the difference at a personal level all his life. He wasn’t just a new man in an old job or a black man in triumph: he was a better man.

How do you protect a symbol? This question was already in the air by the time of Obama’s acceptance speech, which he delivered behind two giant bulletproof screens. There are enough people in the world today, there always have been, who would wish to take the shortcut to history by harming America’s first black president. Extremists love to take down a symbol: look how the World Trade Center fell in broad daylight and look how the public memory is still recovering from the very public slaying of that precious harbinger of a new generation, John F Kennedy.

But in writing of Obama’s safety I really mean the safety he must seek, and we must seek, from the power of disappointment. In the years to come we shouldn’t forget the obscenity of the Bush era: The greed, the civic carelessness, the unnecessary wars, the environmental horror. The status quo is never a friend to symbols of change, and the new president may spend a long period harvesting a lot of people’s senses of betrayal. He will certainly be more hawkish than many of his fans would wish. We already saw this with his appointments. In being bipartisan, he risks being resented by those who voted for him to see an instant end to Bush and his cronies. As a symbol, Obama’s power should be inexhaustible, but as a man he is bound to fail at many of the missions we expect of him. He told us as much during that acceptance speech.

If America is intelligent - as intelligent as it was when it elected him - then it will seek to protect Obama from the crazy expectations it has placed upon him and ready itself for a slow return to progress. The great American writer Henry Adams wrote that ‘modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces’, yet our celebrity age will find that very difficult to believe. We want a man for all seasons, and Obama’s historical project might be to bring modesty back to the American imagination, the kind of modesty that may allow a new generation to see that the world is not simply America.

Michelle Obama said she would agree to support her husband in his bid for the presidency on one condition: that he give up smoking. When you read his autobiography you get a sense that Obama had his share of fun like everybody else - a bit of pot, a bit of ‘blow’ as he says, a bit of time-wasting and a bit of self-indulgence - but the man who I watched being driven up to the doors of the Boston Sheraton four year ago, the morning after his triumphant debut, was someone who was already saying goodbye to normality in order to take up a prime position in the rarefied weather of other people’s dreams. He hadn’t any security detail at that point, so when the black van carrying the future president drove up to the hotel steps, he could just hang out the window and warm his arm and smile at we smokers standing free and easy on the steps. We locked eyes for a second and he smiled the way he smiles at everybody. Obama was already a legend, shaping himself to meet the coming moment. and now the moment is his. And hopefully ours. “