Obama and the Long View - Democratic Underground

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Obama and the Long View

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100208/abramsky3

Obama and the Long View
By Sasha Abramsky

January 21, 2010

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Read Obama's writings and you are clearly reading the words of a man who loves grappling with social theories but who also realizes the fragility both of ideas and of the social systems that rest upon them. Like most keen students of history, he understands the need for leaders to exhibit flexibility to meet changed circumstances. In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, he wrote that "It may be the vision of the Founders that inspires us, but it was their realism, their practicality and flexibility and curiosity, that ensured the Union's survival." Great men make history, but they are also made by it. They dream, but they also know how to get down to brass tacks.

America, for Obama, is a wondrous experiment, something to be marveled at rather than taken for granted. "At the core of the American experience are a set of ideals that continue to stir our collective conscience; a common set of values that bind us together despite our differences; a running thread of hope that makes our improbable experiment in democracy work," he wrote in The Audacity of Hope. And yet at the same time, Obama is all too aware of the times when the country has strayed from its ideals. "Self-reliance; and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history, we've seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we've seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others."

Few politicians would dare to put such a critical analysis in print for public consumption. Yet the criticism is always tempered by a sense of possibility. Writing to his daughters in an open letter published in PARADE magazine, Obama said of his grandmother Toot, "She helped me understand that America is great not because it is perfect but because it can always be made better--and that the unfinished work of perfecting our union falls to each of us."

On the night of his election victory, Obama addressed a vast crowd of enthused supporters in Chicago's Grant Park. The nation, he declared, needed to be remade; and the task would be carried out not just by a new administration but by a motivated populace, "the only way it's been done in America for 221 years--block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand."

On inauguration day, Obama again took up the themes of sacrifice and duty. "Let us mark this day with remembrance," he told a worldwide audience, "of who we are and how far we have traveled." And then he segued into an homage to American laborers. "For us," he declared, past generations "toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth."

It was a carefully choreographed reminder to the global audience that historically America has been a country made great by underdogs. Its story can only be told and understood by digging beneath the surface, by searching for the lost stories of countless millions of "ordinary" people. If the Bush years had been characterized by a certain historical amnesia, the inauguration's timbre made clear, the Obama years were to be framed by a powerful and inclusive sense of history.