An open letter to my friend Art

Dear Art,

Your series idea is brilliant. Thanks for embarking on a fascinating and necessary task.

I feel presumptuous replying to some of the questions you pose because you're writing specifically to an amalgam of the people you know who fit the profile of a "TOS," meaning "Thoughtful Obama Supporter," and I cannot be lumped with that group. Truth to tell, I would not even call myself a "TMS," if that means "Thoughtful McCain Supporter." In terms of political loyalties for this election, I am, instead, a "TPS."

Having followed both Democrat and Republican campaigns closely since the tumult of Primary Season, however, I'd like to take a crack at answering your question about unity if I may. What you asked was, "how and why do you think Obama is the right man at this time in history to lead and heal a nation politically divided?"

The first part of my answer would involve advancing a question of my own: are you sure you've got the right verb? I suspect that those people who believe most in Obama's potential are driven more by their emotions than by their intellects. For them, in other words, it is not a matter of thinking he can unite the rest of us; it is a matter of feeling or intuiting so.

Let's stipulate that San Francisco columnist Mark Morford -- he who wondered whether Obama might be that sort of self-actualized person whom the nonreligious Left sometimes identifies as a "light worker" -- does not represent rank-and-file Obama support. Let's also go a little further out on a limb and say the messianic schtick for which Obama and his supporters are known has been overblown, perhaps, by Republicans who see religoius imagery in words like "messiah" for obvious reasons, but don't remember that their largely-secular foes think of "messiah" as "That Handel aria that community choruses are forever singing at Christmas time." It should also be said that I'm not passing judgment on "higher" or "lower" brain function, or implying any deficiency in cognitive ability among Progressives whose worldview comports well with Obama's own.

What I think supports the "feeling rather than thinking" hypothesis are endorsements of Obama from such public intellectuals as law professor Doug Kmiec and contrarian pundit Christopher Hitchens. These are people who make their living in the idea trade, yet if you scrutinize their endorsements, what you find in the end are appeals to emotion rather than to logic (people who don't make their living in the idea trade don't even keep up the pretense of appealing to logic where Obama is concerned-- he's "change we need," and never mind asking why or how).

Kmiec has given himself the impossible task of squaring Obama's unstinting support for abortion with Catholic moral teaching, in the hope of convincing people like me that Obama deserves my vote not despite what I believe but because of it.

Kmiec freely admits that he disagrees with Obama on "important fundamentals" (are there any other kind?). Nevertheless, he says, "I am convinced he is not closed to understanding opposing points of view." Where I come from, Kmiec's conviction sounds an awful lot like hope-- and I mean hope in the "will he return my call?" sense rather than the scriptural sense (cf chapter 5 of Paul's Letter to the Romans). For more on that, see George Weigel, who is far more trustworthy --and not coincidentally, far more likely to "think with the church" than Doug Kmiec.

Christopher Hitchens --true to form-- endorses Obama negatively, by fulminating against the "instability" and "intemperance" of John McCain and the "national disgrace" of Sarah Palin. Nobody else damns with faint praise quite the way Hitchens does. Look past the five-dollar vocabulary in which he cloaks insults, and you'd get a more coherent and more intellectual argument from almost any barfly watching NFL Sunday at the local watering hole.

Jon Meacham of Newsweek is, I'll wager, another Obama supporter, and for a guy who says his problem with Sarah Palin is her allegedly "mindless" populism, he hems and haws more about her age than about, for example, her thoroughly mainstream interpretations of the First, Second, and Tenth Amendments. Reading Meacham's recent cover story (at the link), it's easy to imagine that his original peg was "Governor Palin can't seriously be worthy of standing a heartbeat away from the presidency because she's got an up-do and Naughty Monkey shoes. She doesn't look like Maggie Thatcher or, begging your pardon, Nancy Pelosi." ( it may not be fair to reverse-engineer Meacham's thought from an essay that is basically a collection of impressions, but on the evidence of how he fumbles Newsweek's annual Nativity story, he's not a guy who puts much stock in intellectual rigor).

I mention Kmiec, Hitchens, and Meacham not because any one of them necessarily represents Obama's demographic sweet spot, but because like Bill "I feel we didn't do enough" Ayers, they're intellectuals, and yet their brains take a back seat to the dictates of their hearts. The same might be said about Camille Paglia, who is an order of magnitude harder to generalize from or about because she at least tries for fair-mindedness. Unlike Meacham and Hitchens, she's impressed by Governor Palin, but come time to vote, she'll punch a ticket for the Dems because "I am one of the many who regard Obama as authentically inspirational."

Perhaps we're all heart- rather than head-driven. In any case, it seems to me that newsreader Chris Matthews was more astute than he knew when describing his visceral reaction to Obama's speechifying as "a thrill up my leg." I don't feel that way myself, but like so much else that people find appealing about the Democratic frontrunner, it was an emotional response. And as J.R. Dunn and many others have noticed, it cuts both pro and con. (Dunn's essay on Christopher Buckley's apostasy is brilliant, by the way. Do read it).

Barack Obama revels in his own star power. As to how he can unite a country despite his conspicuous lack of bipartisan political credibility, I think he'd say (in an uncharacteristically honest moment) that he'll repeatedly ask us to transcend partisan divisions and hope for the best. He might also "pull a Clinton" and redefine "unify" to increase the size of the fringe-who-don't-count. Anyone who insists on calling either approach to this hocus-pocus an ersatz copy of real unity simply has more transcending to do. Perspective is all. Hey, bringing people together is what community organizers do, right?

Point out that the "bible" of community organizing is Saul Alinsky's decidedly divisive Rules for Radicals, or suggest, as Palin did, that "community organizing" is superfluous when mayors do their jobs and people with initiative actually volunteer to do things, and you'll be treated like a pariah, because, well, "Jesus was a community organizer."

Argue with that, and the goalposts are moved again (because unlike a judgment, a feeling can't be wrong): the fallback Obama supporter's position must inevitably be what movie critics call a "willing suspension of disbelief" cloaked in a Lennonesque platitude like "Imagine" or "All We Are Saying is Give Peace a Chance."

Christopher Buckley, for example, is all about "willing suspension of disbelief." What I find hilarious is that the URL for his declaration purports to be a "conservative case for Obama" even though he most assuredly didn't make one. Like Susan Sarandon, who said in the Spring that she "can't wait to see what Obama does," Buckley figures that Obama has in him "the potential to be a good, perhaps even a great, leader" -- this because he seems unflappable and has a couple of smoothly-written memoirs that won't be remaindered as quickly as other political books. Oh, and "he is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment is calling for" -- whatever that means. I could as easily say that the historical moment calls for biracial baristas and shade-grown coffee beans.

And as to why Obama is the agent of change rather than other people, I think many supporters figure that his biracial background is all the calling card he needs, especially if you overlook those parts of his memoirs where he describes choosing to emphasize more of a black identity than a bi-racial identity (in marked contrast to people like Tiger Woods, for example). If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the rationale for hope in Obama, the thinking that explains the fact of feeling, is that "Lincoln appealed to the 'better angels of our nature' in trying to bring a country together. MLK did too, but not from the Oval Office, so now it's a black man's turn"-- and spare us the history lectures about how Lincoln's election was divisive for many southerners, and MLK was more explicitly Christian and did not come tainted by Chicago politics. In fact, you can boil the rationale down even further, to two words: "Fairness Doctrine."

With respect to our own time, Obama also benefits by contrast with others now on the scene: does anyone believe Joe Biden is an agent of change, or think that Hillary Clinton enjoys "reaching across the aisle" for its own sake?

Moreover, Obama is smart enough to (eventually) characterize his friendships with dubious characters as "outreach" attempts. In that respect, he's sincere about "no preconditions" -- a man who didn't have a problem with sermons from Jeremiah Wright for 20 years is not likely to find totalitarian leaders beyond the pale, either (it occurs to me that his dimmer apologists might see phrases like "beyond the pale" as freighted with racist connotation-- who's to say that "beyond the pale" is bad, anyway? Can't we all just get along?-- but whaddaya gonna do? Early childhood education only covers so much).

It's late, so I'll end here. You asked a thought-provoking question, and I wanted to give you the courtesy of a thought-provoking answer, although I've yet to approach this election with the irenic and admirably Christian detachment that you seem to have mastered.

Best,

Patrick

P.S. Please pray for me. I'll pray for you, too. And for our country.

P.P.S. You can add the editorial board of the Washington Post to the ranks of the intellectuals cited here, as Bill Dyer notes in a related post.