A friend from Illinois was the first who got me excited about the idea of Obama. I liked Obama's 2004 convention speech and had high hopes.
But as his campaign has progressed, and as I've listened to more of his words, I've been put off by his frequent theme of bridging or transcending the partisan divide. Yes, it was part of the famous 2004 address too, but that was a certain kind of occasion. I didn't realize then that it was such a key part of his personal political vision.
That's at heart a very old complaint about "faction" or "schism" being a political pitfall that a true "patriot" would avoid; the truest patriotic leader would forgo party politics in favor of the best interests of the nation. You can see it in Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, especially his Idea of a Patriot King, and in other political philosophizing around the time of the framing of the US Constitution.
What just dawned on me, though, was an unexpected echo. I was reading Salon's political coverage -- Walter Shapiro's 'Obama, hope, Iowa' -- and came across a line:
Again and again, the well-crafted 35-minute address repeats, with different words, the same formulation, the same inner logic that propels Obama's candidacy: "Americans all across the country are hungry for -- desperate for -- a new type of politics. Something different. A politics focused not on what divides us but on our common values and our common ideals, [focused] not so much on ideology, but practicality."
"Not so much on ideology, but practicality," Shapiro quotes Obama saying. About 20 years ago Michael Dukakis's speech accepting the Democratic nomination had a quotable line:
"This election isn’t about ideology. It’s about competence."
(Honestly, the speech is a lot better than I remembered it being! Worth a check. Sorry the source is a Geocities page!) Dukakis later regretted that statement, as I recall.
Yes, Dukakis had other faults. But opposing conservative ideology with trans- or post-ideological competence was one of his big themes, one of the big Democratic themes, when the race was on to determine who could best undo two terms of Republican damage and adventurism.
In any event, I hope that Obama's ideology of anti-ideology is more like a rhetoric of anti-rhetoric. I don't want him to believe his own statement. I want Obama to have an ideology and cloak it in the guise of eschewing ideology. I hope that hope is the form and some form of ideology is the content.