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Rock the Barack

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If You Can Keep It

Here it is, the biggest piece of news you’ll see all day: there are a lot of unpopular people in politics.

(See. Told you it was big.)

And that, Dear Reader, is not all.

Ahem.

Here it is, the biggest piece of news you’ll see after seeing the biggest piece of news you’ll see all day: Barack Obama is not one of those people.

(Yep. I am on fire.)

Indeed, the junior senator from the Land of Lincoln is nothing short of a rock star — something he’s been called by more than just yours truly.

Seems like I’m just the only one who doesn’t quite get it.

Now. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t like the “skinny kid with a funny name” who vaulted into the public consciousness after delivering the speech wherein he styled himself as such at the 2004 Democratic National Convention; it’s just that, truth be told, he’s not really my kind of rock star.

Take the speech in question.

“[T]here’s not,” Obama said then, “a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America … We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

That much we agree on.

It’s what he said next — the track that propelled him to stardom, as it were, and one containing the theme that would become his once and future trademark — that has just never made me want to cut a rug: “In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope? … Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty — the audacity of hope. In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.”

Here again — don’t get me wrong. Hope is a good thing. Really. But what exactly does Obama mean by it? How does he translate hope into action?

It is precisely that which has endeared the Illinois senator and presidential candidate to so many that, in a very real way, leaves me feeling uneasy. The translation, after all, is the tricky part, where even hope is not above getting lost now and again. And there doesn’t seem to be much more to the author of The Audacity of Hope than, well, you know.

Obama is, put simply, a man with a Vision (with, yes, a capital “V”), and this — combined with his ability to employ skilled rhetoric in the description of what he says it will take for us to realize that Vision — is what makes him inspirational. This is also, I argue, what should give us pause when considering the prospect of an Obama presidency.

“To seek for utopia,” the American conservative thinker Russell Kirk once wrote, “is to end in disaster ... Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious.”

And there’s the rub.

Obama’s message, the same today as it was when he first arrived on the national scene three years ago, is tempting; hope — so stunning in its simplicity — is something America has been sorely lacking as of late, answers still largely unforthcoming in both the question of Iraq as well as in the many public and political dilemmas facing us here at home. But hope, while it would most certainly be a welcome addition in the quest for answers, does not itself prove an adequate answer, and this is where our protagonist falls short.

He is, to be sure, not alone. There is no shortage of presidential candidates on either side of the aisle willing to offer up their own version of hope — their own easy fix — to solve our country’s problems and inspire its people. This, after all, is not a hard thing to do; enunciating a Vision is the easy part. It’s in actualizing it where things usually get a little messy.

About Iraq, for instance, Obama has long called for a withdrawal — or “redeployment,” to invoke the preferred political parlance du jour — of American forces. For us to keep our soldiers there any longer, he says, is simply indefensible: “There have been too many speeches. There have been too many excuses. There have been too many flag-draped coffins, and there have been too many heartbroken families.”

But the hope he is — however goodheartedly — attempting to instill in Americans so desperately seeking it is here, as it is in various vignettes throughout his greater Vision, a false hope.

“Let’s get something straight,” one of Obama’s Democratic opponents for the top job beseeched his rivals in a July debate. “It’s time to start to tell the truth. The truth of the matter is if we started today, it would take one year — one year — to get 160,000 troops physically out of Iraq, logistically. That’s number one. Number two, you cannot pull out of Iraq ... unless you have a political solution.”

That opponent was Senator Joe Biden (D-DE), a man whose campaign has gotten about as much coverage from the media as it has to this point in my commentary.

I would suggest that Democrats, for the country’s sake as well as their own, start paying him and his message more attention, both where Iraq is concerned and beyond.

“The great enemy of the truth,” John F. Kennedy told us, “is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

Kind of like any good rock star.

Mark Coombs is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mcoombs@cornellsun.edu. If You Can Keep It appears alternate Wednesdays this semester.

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