On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama stood on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, and announced that he was going to seek the nomination of the Democratic Party for the office of President of the United States. He was 47 years old, a mere two years removed from the state legislature, and had not completed even the first third of his freshman term in the United States Senate. He spoke then to the obvious question of his inexperience and the presumptuousness--the audacity, even--of his campaign at this time in his career and this nation's history. He also conceded that he had not to that point spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington.
He and his campaign staff knew that the most persistent question his campaign would have to deal with would be that inexperience. After all, if was to win that nomination, he would have to defeat all that Hillary Clinton took from her decade and a half in federal government and all else she brought to contest in terms of knowledge, skill, determination and, perhaps more than anything else, the certainty of a candidacy that would not rest or concede anything until, as her closest advisor said when he was in the fight for his political life "the last dog died."
And yet, as improbable as the odds were, Obama did put the country’s unease about his inexperience aside. He defeated all that Clinton brought to the battle by time and again demonstrating the ability to instill a confidence and a belief in his supporters that it really was his moment, that the country could no longer wait, and that, as Dr. King had described, great things would come, for he embodied this perfect match to his time--that he, Barack Obama, had captured the "fierce urgency of now."
And we wanted to believe he could match his accomplishments to King’s words.
But here we are, more than 200 days on, and we have seen that hope really is not a strategy for governing and that the fierce urgency of now has come up against the brutal reality of Washington politics, that the compact command structure of a campaign bears no relation to the expanse and diffusion of power and influence throughout the capitol, and that what must have seemed like surmountable hurdles in 2008 loom now as the shear face of El Capitan.
Nowhere is this more evident—thus far—than in the fight to pass health care reform that lives up to the promise of what he described for the purposes of the campaign. What was then a passage in a speech or a paragraph on the health care page of the campaign website must now be written as Division A, Title II, Subtitle B, Section 221, paragraph (a), subparagraph (1), et al. It must be finessed through congress by sending his best staffer up the hill to convince the congresswoman from Maryland and the senator from Montana that they need to get a strong bill passed—and soon—but all they tell him is that they’ll be lucky just to get something, anything, passed before the end of the year. His chief of staff tells him it’s best that he take Republican interests into account in the name of bi-partisanship.
He agrees. It’s his nature. He must be the president of "all the people, not just those who voted for me," and principles have seemingly given way to compromise.
Meanwhile, his critics see this penchant for compromise as weakness, and they employ the means to exploit it. They gather and shout at him. They invoke all manner of derision, no matter how absurd—Nazi, socialist, communist, fascist (simultaneously?)—and a dutiful media cover it with the air of acceptability, giving it a place in the national debate. And he compromises further, and deeper, and those in his own party move farther from what he promised because, back home, they can’t run on his programs any longer: "Sorry, Mr. President, but that won’t play well in my district. They’re eating me alive as it is." He understands, and he scales back further the expectation that meaningful reform is possible. Politics, he knows, is the art of the possible because he keeps scraping up against what everyone tells him is impossible.
And so what will we hear Wednesday night? More about the fierce urgency of now? Probably not. More likely he’ll tell us we’ll have to settle, with calm resignation, for incrementalism –and getting what you can get. He’ll tell us about what he prefers and what he supports, what he believes and what congress should do.
Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough.
It’s not good enough because tens of millions are uninsured or underinsured, and the only means to treatment is the emergency room or financial destruction. That’s where the fierce urgency of now resides. It’s in a mother who sees months or years of treatment for her daughter with spina bifida and no means to pay for it. It resides in the tool and die maker who is scheduled for permanent layoff in three months, and with his job—he can’t afford to pay COBRA premiums—goes his family’s health care policy. It resides in seniors and their families who see a lifetime of saving and struggle wiped away by end-of-life nursing care or having to decide between over-priced prescription medication or the heating bill.
The fierce urgency now has to be more than a means of explaining away a perceived lack of experience. It has to now be transformed into a means by which to govern: to take the public’s cause and loudly and unflinchingly champion it for them against the interests that are lined up against it. Half-steps and cautious rhetoric will not suffice; no more being thrown off-stride by teabaggers, birthers, and death panels.
He campaigned as though he had captured the moment, as though the stars had aligned to produce this perfect confluence of events that truly transformed a country. But we did not elect him just for the sake of having done so. We have every right to expect that he will govern as he campaigned: tirelessly, boldly, and with the audacity of one who knows he cannot be stopped. This is no time for timidity and caution, for we will have but one chance to get this right.
That time is now.