"What we need now is not a leader to assure us of our greatness, but one who will challenge us to reassert it." That is the pull quote on the cover of Esquire Magazine for June's issue, along with a photograph of our man Barack. Follow me below the fold to see a cynical man's take on the aching need in our country for Obama's leadership.
The Cynic and Senator Obama, by Charles P. Pierce, from Esquire Magazine, June 2008.
This article captured, in a bottle, the feelings of many people I know about Barack Obama. We are cynics. We believe that the glass is half-empty, the sun may not come out tomorrow, and it will rain on our wedding day. We desperately want to have hope for the future, but we are used to being beaten down by the opposition, losing our hope along with our will, believing that there is nothing to be done by us that could possibly make a difference.
The cynic doesn't think he's wiser or more clever or more politically attuned than anyone else. It's just that he fears that, every morning, he'll discover that his country has done something to deface itself further, that something else he thought solid will tremble and quake and fall to ruin, that his fellow citizens will sell more of their birthright for some silver that they can forge into shackles. He has come to believe that the worst thing a citizen of the United States of American can believe is that his country will not do something simply because it's wrong.
Such a cynic followed Barack Obama around on some campaign appearances lately. He is desperate to be convinced that Obama is the man to take us back from the brink. "Someone will have to measure the wreckage. Someone will have to walk through the ruins. Someone will have to count the cost."
He goes looking for some support for the Obama argument. Is Obama tough enough? The pastors of the South Side of Chicago provide him the answer: when a bureaucrat tasked with listening to the concerns of the community organizers on the South Side turns out to be an arrogant twit, Obama doesn't let everyone quit, but refocuses them, saying "We need to strategize right now about how to deal with stuff like this and hold people accountable so this kind of thing doesn't happen again."
Is Obama smart enough? The cynic visits with Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law, and learns that Obama worked on a paper that applied lessons from modern physics to the study of law. Yes, physics. The Heisenberg Principle, the Theory of Relativity. Tribe says he tested Obama's mind. The cynic is convinced that Obama is smart enough.
But is Obama shrewd enough of a politician? He looks to one of the shrewdest, Mike Capuano of Massachusetts, and finds the answer to be yes.
But can he do it?
The cynic's main problem with Obama is not a lacking of intelligence, toughness, or shrewdness. It's Obama's decision not to call for penance and absolution for our country for the deeds of the Bush administration. Obama didn't want to see Bush impeached, because he believed it would be one big distraction that did nothing to accomplish the business of the people. The cynic wants to see people in handcuffs. The cynic wants to see punishment.
But when watching the crowd explode when Obama takes the stage at an event, the cynic comes to a startling revelation:
The cynic believes in an old, abandonded country that's no less illusory than the redeemed one Obama is promising to this crowd. Isn't that something? the cynic thinks. Maybe that's enough, that single revelation, just a flicker of the lost imagination.... Convince me America is not an illusion. Convince me that it never was. Convince me that you're not a pious mirage. Convince me that we're not. Now that you brought it up, convince me.
Convince me.
Convince me.
Convince me.
I want to believe. Are you a cynic, too?
Read the article, have some faith.
I believe, now. I hope you do, too.