The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters is perhaps the most insightful article I’ve read about the current presidential race. In a race full of baby boomer politicians–Clinton, McCain, Guiliani–why does Obama seem to stick out so much? It’s not that he’s black. I don’t even think that it’s about the Politics of Hope. It’s certainly not because his policies are dramatically different from anyone else on the left–or the right for that matter.

The divide is still—amazingly—between those who fought in Vietnam and those who didn’t, and between those who fought and dissented and those who fought but never dissented at all. By defining the contours of the Boomer generation, it lasted decades. And with time came a strange intensity.

At first blush, this is a tough line to take in, but the article goes far to making it a believable point of view.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

The high temperature—Bill O’Reilly’s nightly screeds against anti-Americans on one channel, Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” on the other; MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” on the one side, Ann Coulter’s Treason on the other; Michael Moore’s accusation of treason at the core of the Iraq War, Sean Hannity’s assertion of treason in the opposition to it—is particularly striking when you examine the generally minor policy choices on the table. Something deeper and more powerful than the actual decisions we face is driving the tone of the debate.
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[Hillary Clinton] and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war.
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Of the viable national candidates, only Obama and possibly McCain have the potential to bridge this widening partisan gulf. Polling reveals Obama to be the favored Democrat among Republicans. McCain’s bipartisan appeal has receded in recent years, especially with his enthusiastic embrace of the latest phase of the Iraq War. And his personal history can only reinforce the Vietnam divide. But Obama’s reach outside his own ranks remains striking. Why?

To me, this strikes home. When I argue with my fellow Republican, baby boomer, conservative, Cuban-American father, I often get the feeling that, even when we agree, which is a great deal of the time, we enter political conversations with different basic assumptions. The difference is one of mild cynicism vs. hope, and it may simply be generational. However, even he may vote Obama in the general election.

If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.

For a while I’ve known that I’d vote for Obama in the general election should he win the primary (as a registered Republican voter, I can’t vote for him in the MA primary). Now I have a better understanding as to why I was drawn to him from the beginning. His campaign, his election, doesn’t represent better policies, something vague like “hope,” or a radical departure from partisan politics. It reprsents a change in the conversation; a chance for America, in a very real way, to start some important conversations with the rest of the world over again, with a different point of view, a different face. I really don’t believe he’s going to be more of the same, and I really Hope he wins the primary.

Btw – check out this pretty cheesy but slick campaign commercial for Obama.