It was sweet, this fantasy that an American longing for unity could somehow be fulfilled single-handedly by a handsome, plausible young senator from Chicago.
But it was always going to be sweet the way artificial sugar is sweet: without any caloric content, and leaving a weird aftertaste that keeps reminding you that what you just swallowed wasn’t real.
How could it ever have been real, anyway? Barack Obama is a very liberal fellow. In his brief time in the U.S. Senate, he’s established that body’s most liberal voting record.
This is terrific for liberals who want their ideas executed by the executive branch. Obama is their kind of guy.
Yet for 16 months, Obama has been trying to be everyone’s kind of guy, and with his transracial dignity, his vagaries about “hope” and “change,” and his persuasive powers of oration he almost seemed to be pulling it off. Even many Republicans were seduced by the promise of his healing and unifying powers.
Cranks and malcontents complained from the start that all the fragrant vapors hanging about Obama would evaporate the minute he began laying out policy proposals.
These, the cranks insisted, would reveal him as a hard leftie: against free trade, desirous of punitive taxation, in favor of the slaughter of the unborn when it suits their mothers.
How could a politician like that, however golden-tongued, bring political unity to a country in which half the population is in favor of precisely the opposite?
Well, he can’t. And he won’t. And now that Obama seems to have secured the Democratic nomination, I think we can safely wave goodbye to Mr. Unifier.
On Tuesday, basking in his new role as presumptive presidential nominee, Obama spoke to a rally in St. Paul, Minn. He immediately and rather petulantly poked John McCain right in the medals: “I honor [McCain’s military] service, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine.”
Then, with a nod toward the Republican candidate’s famous (and, for conservatives, famously irritating) maverick-style political “independence,” Obama reinforced the course of attack of which we’ll be seeing more in the coming months.
Obama is hoping to tie the anvil of the current president’s unpopularity around McCain’s throat, so he went on to talk of “four more years of Bush economic policies” and McCain’s “embrace of George Bush’s policies.”
We’ll be hearing more of this: McCain linked to Bush linked to economic failure at home linked to military disaster in Iraq linked back to McCain.
Expect to hear some sharpening of Obama’s more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, as well, as he pursues Hillary Clinton’s indignant devotees.
The truth is, Obama can no longer afford to expend his unifying skills on “the other side,” as he referred to Republicans in his victory speech this week.
If the Healer can heal, if the Unifier can unify, it’s his own party that needs these gifts. And that means the candidate’s true contours are going to be increasingly difficult to hide.
Palling around with unrepentant 1970s revolutionaries, submitting himself to the mentorship of incendiary pastors, talking of “typical white people” and those who cling, yokel-like, to guns and religion? Not the stuff of unity.
We have come to the end of a strange and dreamy period when Barack Obama could pose as a national unifier and people actually believed him. I suppose it was rather sweet while it lasted.
