Obama Must Symbolize America's Innate Goodness in Order to Reach the White House

By Ira Chernus, AlterNet. Posted May 20, 2008.

There's no doubt which party Barack Obama represents. Just listen to him: "This is going to be a very concrete contest around very specific plans for how we improve the lives of Americans." That's how Democrats typically talk -- as if elections are decided on the merits of competing policy proposals, as if the candidate who has the most popular plan to improve life wins.

We wish! If it were true, a Democrat would have been living in the White House for the last 28 years. Since Ronald Reagan's first victory, the polls have told the same story: A majority of the voters agree with the Democrats on the issues. But a Democrat never gains a majority of the votes.

Things look only a bit better today. A recent poll shows a mere 32 percent of the public saying Republicans can do better than Democrats in addressing with the nation's problems. But John McCain gets fully 44 percent of the vote against Obama (and more against Clinton). On Iraq, a large majority have favored Obama's policy position over McCain's for years. Yet when the pollsters ask who can best handle the war, the two candidates remain tied. So if Obama really means what he said about focusing on "specific plans," he's choosing the wrong strategy.

Don't worry, though. He's too smart a politician to really mean it. He surely knows that many voters care less about satisfying policies than satisfying symbols. They want a president who will symbolize values that make them feel good. And a substantial portion of those voters want to feel good, not about what the nation could be in the future, but what it has been in the past and what it is in the present. That's what they think patriotism is all about. A candidate who cannot symbolize America's innate goodness, past and present, will have a tough time reaching the White House.

It's a safe bet that Obama (and his strategists) know all this perfectly well. Even if he did tell columnist Maureen Dowd that he's not interested in crafting a narrative, I don't believe it. It can't be just dumb luck that he has become such an appealing symbol of a traditional patriotic story: We Americans are eternally full of hope because there's nothing we can't accomplish together when we live up to our motto, E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One). You can't get much more all-American than that.

And Obama's knack for turning this red-white-and-blue narrative into a black-and-white-and-brown-and-yellow-and-red narrative makes him all the more appealing -- to some voters.

To others, though, that translation of the flag's colors into a rainbow of racial colors is the problem, not the solution. The America they love is not a stewpot where all boundaries are blurred in one sweet harmonious dish. Their "one," which the "many" are supposed to blend into, is a monoculture. It's built out of well-established categories, long-standing rules, and universally acknowledged boundaries that separate not only whites from nonwhites but men from women, parents from children, citizens from foreigners, authority figures from masses, hard workers from slackers, "our troops" from "terrorists," patriots from subversives, etc. Their America is unified, and virtuous, because it aligns all these dichotomies under the overriding rubric of good against evil.

Yes, that rigidly structured "one" is a fantasy. It has never existed in reality. But that's exactly why so many voters crave a president who can mask that painful truth. They want their leader to symbolize the fantasy of strict boundaries so powerfully that he'll convince them it has always been, and will always be, the heart and soul of America.

Many are unsure that a "she" could ever be such a symbol; a woman president, simply by being a woman, would blur traditional categories and cross long-standing boundaries in a way that millions would find threatening. Many are unsure that a person of color, even if male, could be that symbol, for the very same reason.

Now suppose that man of color has parents of different races, from different continents and different religions. Suppose he himself was raised on different continents amidst people of different races and religions. Suppose he was raised in working class surroundings but carries himself like the Ivy Leaguer he was. And suppose he says he's ready for the most responsible grownup job in the world, yet he still looks as boyish as a college student. He is bound to symbolize precisely the blurring of categories and the crossing of boundaries that so many voters find so frightening to contemplate.

That's why the very narrative that Obama backers count on to carry him to victory may be his biggest obstacle. John McCain, on the other hand, has a seemingly unbreakable lock on the symbolism of old, familiar, patriotic categories and clear-cut boundaries. (And for that purpose, the older a candidate is, the better.)

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Ira Chernus is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.

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