They have a dream. Not the dream Martin Luther King Jr. had of postracial harmony, but a more personal dream of a less sweeping nature: that the fierce, hot flame of Obama mania that ran from late 2008 through the spring a year later is not dead, only resting, and is ready and able to surge once again. Since mid-2009, when the glow began fading, there has been a tangible longing for the campaign and its aftermath, when people fainted at rallies, and euphoria reigned. A video made by the re-elect team features a boy who said Inauguration Day 2009 was his best birthday ever, that he had a cake for himself and the president.
Another has a boy saying he was too young to vote in the ’08 election, but has been counting the days ever since. A likely story. “Obama seeks to be BMOC once more,” the Washington Post said a month ago, detailing meetings of aides with largely indifferent or skeptical students.
Obama’s support with the young has slipped 20 points, along with similar drops among independents and Hispanic voters. Attempts to strike sparks, or to revive them, have been unavailing. The passion is over. The fire is out.
This is too bad, as the hope and change theme has also expired, as there has been too much change in all the wrong ways for a whole lot of people; and for some others, not nearly enough.
There’s been change in the deficit (it has tripled), change in the size of the state (it has expanded), change in our wars (we now have three of them), and change in the way we may be about to get health care, which makes swing voters queasy.
On the other hand, for the pacifist base of the party, too much stayed the same. Guantanamo Bay is still open, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried in it shortly.
Obama expanded and deepened the war in Afghanistan, hasn’t ended the war in Iraq, and may have begun what looks like a third war in Libya.
Add the Bush tax cuts, which Obama extended, and it looks to the left wing as if Bush never left. Try to win back the left with the social agenda he passed and this will enrage the swing voters, in shock from the spending, who abhor his health plan, and want to repeal it.
Try to say he kept us safe (as did Bush), and he enrages the left, as he uses Bush tactics. Talk about war, and his one-foot-in tactics irritate everyone — the hawks, who want more commitment; the centrists, who don’t like getting in wars, or losing them, either; and the base of his party, which campaigned for him as the country’s most anti-war candidate, and doesn’t like combat at all.
He can still win, if the GOP can’t find someone appealing, or the Republicans seem likely to pick up the Senate and voters want a check upon one-party dominance. But it will be as a battered and much-reduced figure, not at all a messiah, or god.
Hence the Proustian search for lost glories, the raptures that only come once. You are the first black president once, after which race becomes incidental. You run on change once: After that, change is your enemy.
You are a blank slate only once, after which you are written on. You run on hope only once, for all is possible only when nothing is tried. Once things are tried, limitations are evident. Campaign 2008 was an air-filled souffle of a moment. And souffles don’t rise twice.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
