Obama as the Repudiation of Generational Failure

Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left at 2:29 PM on January 7, 2008.

Obama is surging to victory in New Hampshire, currently holding a 7.6% lead across a remarkable eleven polls taken since Iowa. That makes his post-Iowa bounce anywhere from 10.6%--16.2%, depending on how one calculates polling averages. At this rate, he should be able to surge into a national lead by Friday, at the latest. While there is no guarantee that such a lead will last, and no guarantee that Obama will go on to win the nomination, clearly he is the frontrunner right now. An Obama nomination appears to be the most likely outcome of the Democratic primaries right now.

In some ways, an Obama victory would be a very, very good thing. The truth is that, as a nation, we failed from 1994 to 2007. We failed to expand health care coverage. We failed to stop the increasing corporatization of our lives and vicious exploitation of the Third World. We failed to close the income gap, either nationally or internationally. We failed to stop global warming. We have failed to respond to the threat of peak oil. We failed to stop a Presidential election from being stolen. We failed to stop the war in Iraq. The end result of these failures is that the Apollo Program of this era in American history is the war in Iraq. That's right--instead of doing something like, say, going to the Moon or stopping global warming, we invaded Iraq. In every political aspect, America has failed its generational role as a world leader in the post-Cold War era. While I refer to this as a generational failure, it is not limited to Americans of any age group. It isn't a failure of Boomers or Gen X or the Silent generation, or any of that. It is a generational failure in the lifespan of our country where we failed to live up to the promise of our nation. All adult Americans alive during that time period share a role in our failure.

It wasn't all bad during this era. While we failed in the political realm, we do have the amazing cultural and intellectual achievement that is the explosion of self-publishing content on the Internet. I fully believe that this is a cultural outpouring equal to that found in any other generation of human history. Optimistically, it also seems to possess the ability to rebuke and displace the leaders who led to our current state of failure. The Internet has become the nexus of self-organizing for all those movements and campaigns that have sought to overthrow our ruling regime of failure in America. The Barack Obama campaign, even though it is somewhat more "in house" than other movements and campaigns, is no exception to this rule.

If Barack Obama wins, it is absolutely a repudiation of the existing regime of failure. Our Apollo program, the Iraq war, is such a colossal mistake, waste, and humanitarian catastrophe that it is possible that there is simply no way that one of its facilitators could be the leader of the next regime. No matter how many apologies or denials have been issued, both Clinton and Edwards were facilitators back in 2002 and 2003. It is also possible that there is no way that one of the key players in the previous regime, Hillary Clinton, could be the leader of the new regime. Further, John Edwards was one of the key players in previous attempts to bring down the current regime, but along with others he failed in 2004. Barack Obama is not just younger and representative of a new class in American politics, he just isn't anywhere near as connected to the failures of the past fourteen years as any other candidate running for President in either major party.

Now, there are those of us online, myself included, who are not convinced that Obama is either a clean break from the old regime, or that he will be successful in his efforts to change the direction of our political institutions. However, at least as a personal symbol, he is the cleanest break with the current regime we could possibly hope for among the current crop of candidates. He is younger, has a different background, has been in Washington for a shorter period of time, opposed the war from the start, and has the largest activist following. He has a good energy program, a good media program, and, while it isn't nearly as good, he does want to remove most American troops from Iraq. Although I remain unconvinced at his ability to adequately fight the right-wing movement in this country that put the current regime in power, I suppose it is fair to say that I don't see anyone else out there who has successfully fought it either, including Hillary Clinton. I think that Senator Russ Feingold at least came close, and that is why I wanted to support him for President.

Obama isn't a perfect repudiation of our ongoing national failure, but I think it is justifiable to say he is a start. It certainly has been a long time since I remember anyone talking about the importance of the youth vote (like, since Bill Clinton's 1992 victory), and that certainly has to be a step in the right direction. It won't be an easy campaign, since the old regime appears set to score the candidate they wanted all along, John McCain, on the Republican side. McCain has caught Obama in general election polls on both the national and statewide level, so it might be time to start getting ready for another very close campaign. Media supporters of the old regime may like Obama now, but if and when he is matched up against Daddy McCain, they will start to hate his guts pretty quickly. The current regime hasn't failed for everyone, and those who benefited from our national failure won't go down without a fight.

Tagged as: obama, mccain, youth vote, democrats, republicans, clinton, new hampshire

Chris Bowers was a full-time editor at MyDD from May 2004 until June 2007. Some of his projects have included the creation of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the first scientifically random poll of progressive netroots activists, the Use It Or Lose It campaign, the nation's most accurate forecast of Democratic house pickups in 2006, and the 2006 Googlebomb the Elections campaign.