Eyes and beholders

In January, after experiencing one of Barack Obama's speeches, Ezra Klein wrote:

He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

I'm not quite sure what this means--there are echoes of Ronald Reagan's "Shining City On A Hill"--but it sure sounds good, and it quickly became the standard media explanation for Obama's rise. Millions of people were voting for him, not because of his policy prescriptions (they're on his website, goddammit!) but because--as Michelle Obama put it in an unfortunate moment of candor--he finally made them feel proud of their country and of themselves.

But there are other ways of seeing Barack Obama. The incorrigible Paul Krugman got sent to bed without supper for suggesting that Obama-ism might be a cult of personality, and many of us persisted in not believing the hype. We weren't inspired by his empty rhetoric. We didn't like the slash-and-burn racial politics he employed when his back was against the wall in South Carolina. We were disgusted by the sexism practiced by his most fervent disciples. Perhaps most shocking of all--we actually preferred the candidacy of Hillary Clinton!

The media would have none of it. Obama math became sacrosanct. Any Democrat who expressed reservations about the party's "inevitable" nominee had to be a closet racist, an angry old battle-axe or a low-information cretin. Then, for a few hours one night in April, ABC News decided not to play along. Obama Nation was not amused.

When I first saw the finger video, I knew it would be very difficult for me ever to vote for its star. He exhibits a level of narcissistic arrogance I find disturbing. Even his cheering supporters seem startled at the ease with which he disrespects and then brushes off a woman of Hillary Clinton's stature. He's laying it on the line to his base: This campaign is about me and about your loyalty to me. Unbelievers in our midst get the finger. I won't speak for them or even to them. (The passage of time has not mellowed my view. If anything, Obama comes off worse in this clip today than he did in April. His pious pledge to get beyond the "say anything, do anything" style of politics Clinton supposedly learned while battling Ken Starr looks ridiculous in the wake of his own recent promise to bring a gun to a knife fight.)

Barack Obama hasn't held down a political job long enough for anybody to see what really makes him tick, so we're stuck evaluating his oratorical persona. But the Ezra Klein interpretation is not the only valid one.