Obamanation

This week, The New Yorker's George Packer joins the chorus of concern over the nature of the public's engagement with the Obama campaign. Packer represents a faction of the liberal community (of which I'd consider myself also a member) that you might call cautious or pragmatic progressivism. Or you might just call them rationalists. Like others, including Paul Krugman and Stanley Fish of the New York Times, Packer is attracted to and impressed by the energy of the Obama campaign, and fairly bowled over by its ability to rope in usually jaded segments of the electorate like youth and independents. But he's disturbed by the occasional slipperiness of the campaign's rhetoric, by the often uncritical and undemanding attachment of voters to that rhetoric (witness the overuse of content-free words like "change"), and by the heavy investment not in a specific set of ideas or policy goals but in a single man. Packer calls it near-messianic, and he's right; Obama supporters can have a drank-the-kool-aid, frothing-at-the-mouth intensity that suggests brownshirts marching through the streets of Milan with tire irons in hand. They can wax particularly vitriolic toward Hillary Clinton and her supporters — nearly as much so, as Stanley Fish discovered, as the wack-job Republicans that have dogged the Clintons for sixteen years now. What's weird about this, of course, is that there's little daylight between Obama's and Clinton's actual policy positions or voting records; the venom is all personality based, or, rather, perceived personality based. (It's not as if they know Clinton, after all — what it really seems to come down to is that she doesn't move them to tears when she speaks on TV.)

As Obama's numbers have improved, the hordes of his supporters have seemed to grow more intransigent, which is to say less and less tolerant of an alternative. Packer notes one Obama fan who claims he might well defect to a third party ("maybe a Bloomberg-Hegel ticket" — because, hey, that's totally rational as a substitute for Obama; and man would it ever punish Washington!) if Obama can't secure the nomination. It's only one man, but these grumblings have been spreading since Tsunami Tuesday, or whatever they're calling it; Michelle Obama herself suggested she might not vote for Clinton should the latter become the nominee.

Now there's commitment to an agenda for you. There's common purpose. There's bringing people together.

This strikes me as exactly the kind of my-way-or-the-highway politics voters drawn to Obama claim they want to "change." It's personal, it's irrational, and it's uncompromising — all curious, given the politics-of-unity rhetoric of their candidate. If Obama Democrats can't make common cause with Clinton Democrats, whose governance aims they would appear to share almost exactly, how are they to make common cause with Republicans who share almost none of those aims?

There's no concrete answer to this so far, not from the candidate and not from Obama nation.