Yesterday, the NYTimes editorial took Barack, Michelle, and the Obama campaign to task for sowing the seeds of division while campaiging on a theme of unity. Whether you agree or not, it was extraordinary to see this in print:
Having run on the idea of broad participation across society’s divisions, Mr. Obama’s campaign often seems to teeter on becoming a cult of personality — a feeling that the candidate and those around him do nothing to dispel. In an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” on Monday, Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, was asked if she would work to support Mrs. Clinton if she won. “I’d have to think about that,” she replied.
Mrs. Obama quickly got back on her talking points, stressing party unity. But her unguarded answer was similar to what we heard from Obama supporters in e-mail messages that we received after endorsing Mrs. Clinton.
We've heard a lot about "identity poltiics" in this campaign, but the editorial got me thinking about the politics of personality, "cults of personality" more generally, and the (un)importance of history in this election cycle - ragerding Hillary more so than Barack.
More after the flip, with videos of Hillary from the '90s.
First about Barack. To me, he represents symbolic change more than anything else. In describing his decision to run and how he views the presidency, he has openly offered himself up as a symbol. What strikes me - and this is an observation, not a criticism - is how little we really know about him. The biography is vague, sparse: he no longer has parents, there is a half-sister (same mother, different father); are there other siblings? What do we know about the Kenyan half of his family? Its very difficult to place him geographically: in the script he has written for himself, he says he comes from the streets of Chicago, that he is tough politically because he was schooled in "Chicago-style politics;" yet, he has never run in a closely fought campaign; Chicago is an adopted locale, which can be more firmly associted with Michelle and her background than his; strangely, she is more solid as a character than he is, more grounded, we can place her, we feel like we know her from her biography. I can admire Barack, but I don't feel like I know him at all; I can look up to him (and notice how often in pictures he is photographed from below), but I can't identify with him.
The sparseness of the biography contributes to the sense, expressed by many, of a lack of substance when it comes to policy. A muti-racial candidate who brings with him a linked thread of geographic locales, his thoughts on policy appeal to a demographic as diffuse as his own background. I've read in these pages that his campaign often tells their volunteers to steer clear of discussing policy proposals with voters, and to stick to the symbolic. His popularity, it has been said, is owed to the charisma of his confidence in himself; as he himself said, "not whether he could win, but should win."
I'm genuinely fascinated by our relationship with Barack and what it signals about our relationship with our own history. There is an interesting paradox at work in his campaign: he may be the embodiment of hope, but at the same time he is also the embodiment of our disaffection for politics, our desire to turn away from history, to forget, to transcend, to wipe the slate clean, all of which are signs of our profound state of civic-spiritual despair. He is a "black candidate" who in some way symbolizes the black struggle in America, and yet by birth he is not "black" in the American sense of that term - white mother and Kenyan father- or in any way connected to the history of slavery or black struggle in America; and he presents himself as "post-racial." He identifies more with Ronald Reagan than Martin Luther King AND/OR symbolizes a strange, and inexplicable fusion of the two - again, thereby a vessel through which we can somehow transcend or apotheosize our history.
He is a marquee cipher in his movie star glow - remarked upon by almost everyone - often photographed with a halo of spotlight behind him. Yet, we know less about him than we do about our movie stars.
By electing Barack, we turn the page on history, clearly meant to be the history of the Clintons as much as Bush - and perhaps everything that came before as well. Yet, its extraordinary the degree to which the history of the Clintons - as well as everything that came before - has been erased, whitewashed, forgotten, "Disney-fied." The fact is, as a nation, we have an aversion to the past - we don't want to look back - and in my opinion our political discourse suffers as a result. Could the MLK/LBJ non-controversy have been any more insipid or drained of fact?
We rail against the supposedly partisan wars of the 1990s and everything Hillary represents from that time - and yet its surprising to realize that in this campaign none of the old images and none of the old ideas have come back.I've had to search the internet and the library to find both video of Hillary circa '92-'94 and articles from that time that discussed her cultural and political importance. And in those that I have found - such as the video of the speech she gave in Seattle in '94, famous for its mass protests - I've been surprised to see how far she has come as both a politican and a candidate: she is clearly not the same woman today as she was then, you can see the development. You can also see how strangely irrational the protests against universal health care were! Was anyone listening to the contents of the speech back then? I doubt it. The ideas were there - the ideas were good - culture was divisive. She WAS fighting - but she was on the right side - and it was the right fight - a good fight.
We call her a "polarizing figure" BUT to what extent is she a casualty of our own ignorance and stupidy OR a casulaty of the culture's inability to move or change?
So, I am also fascinated by the cult of personality surrounding Hillary, yet from the point of view of history, the "discourse" surrounding her is so much richer and and so much more interesting than that surrounding Barack. On the one hand, we have two decades worth of feminist writing on her, and on the other, we have the mythic monster Hillary that can supposedly mobilze mass right-wing armies. But have we really gone back and examined what is real and what is myth?
Its strange to me that while the current debates touch on the Clinton past they barely touch the surface of the history, which is so complex and fraught in the most interesting ways.
When Hillary says that she has been "vetted and tested" this is her way of assuring us that with her we don't have to look back, that everything from the past is already out in the open, that we can just move forward scandal-free. In this way she, like Barack, presents herself as a candate through whom we can transcend our own history, or enter into a kind of "post-histroical" state. And in some way, the triumph of Hillary, should she win this election, would be a kind of vanquishing of the right and thus a kind of transcendence.
YET, what fascinates me is that the "discourse" surrounding Hillary from the early 1990s was far richer and more meaningful than anything we see or hear today. That was the moment at which her meaning for America, her symbolic significance, was fleshed out. I think a full, rather than superficial examination (which is what we've been getting from Hillary herself and from the media) of those earlier discussions actually give her candidacy a greater sense of gravity, a greater sense of meaning and purpose. She was a transformational figure - and continues to be.
How much of the animosity toward HIllary is part of our enduring national antagonism toward the idea of history itself?
Why do we put our "hopes" in a figure who seems so disconnected and detached from history, above or beyond history?
How much of the desire to "transcend" history is really a desire to "forget" history?
Hillary in Seattle, 1994, Part I:
Hillary in Seattle, 1994, Part II:
Also from 1994: Leslie Bennetts of "Vanity Fair" and Connie Bruck of "The New Yorker" discuss the personality of First Lady Hillary Clinton, her role in the White House, and her possible political aspirations: