The Cynic and Senator Obama

The cynic wants to believe. But far too much has happened, and inspiration is no longer enough. The cynic will need to be convinced.

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The cynic knows he'll never make Oshkosh. He took the wrong exit and went too far north, and now he has to double back. He gives up, finally, and turns down County Road S in central Wisconsin, looking for a place where he can park and listen to the speech on the radio. It has warmed up well into the double digits, and the snow is sliding slowly off the roofs of the barns along the way.

The speech is not going to be anything the cynic hasn't heard over the past week, in four or five different places all over the state, on the last really good week Barack Obama will have in his campaign to be president of the United States. He's running up the score in Wisconsin, the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton having virtually abandoned its efforts when the polls went sour.

The country is not yet familiar with the words of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Tony Rezko isn't on trial in Chicago yet. Obama has not yet collided with the bitter small-town gunmen of Pennsylvania. There's a brief, silly dustup about whether Obama has lifted one of his applause lines -- "Don't tell me words don't matter!" -- from the campaign of Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, who happens to be one of his best friends and most enthusiastic supporters. But it dies aborning, and he rolls through Wisconsin on golden wheels, talking about hope and an America free from rancor and bitterness and partisan strife. The cynic drives deeper into the farm-quilted countryside and thinks to himself, Yeah, sure, absolutely. In a place like this, the cynic knows, you can see trouble coming from miles off.

The cynic likes the stump speech, even the fourth time around, and even though it's oddly impervious to the immediate events of the day. The previous day, a gunman had shot up the campus of Northern Illinois University, not far from the Wisconsin border. At the very least, he thought, this was a divisive act that would be of great rhetorical utility, given the theme of the Obama campaign. Flog your cause with the dead, the cynic thought. But it was barely mentioned in the candidate's speeches that day, and the day after that, and the cynic was disappointed.


He finally comes to the outskirts of a town. A white church rises from a snow-covered hill, and there is a Civil War cannon there with ice on its barrel. He turns left at a bowling alley and pulls into the parking lot of a school, which is just emptying out after the day's classes. He works the knobs and finds the speech on some local public-radio station. The sound quality is erratic, as though the engineer were putting down the volume at the end of every line. The applause sounds like water rushing through rusty pipes. The rudimentary transmission makes the stump speech sound both fresh and timeless. All of the same laugh lines and punch lines and applause lines are there, but they sound to the cynic like something different, as though he were listening for the first time to something out of the Library of Congress, a recording recently exhumed from an obscure archive. The cynic decides that politics is better on the radio, the same way baseball is, where you have to construct the scene in your own head. Radio is for dreamers. Television is for hucksters, and it has leached from American politics all of its creative imagination.

There in the parking lot, the cynic imagines him bounding up on the stage, a dark blade of a man, loose-limbed and jangly, with small ears and an imperious tilt to his chin, as though something is wrong in a distant part of the world that only he can sense. His smile is wide but brief. It doesn't matter if the crowd is large or small, the smile radiates around him, but it encompasses nobody in particular. He stalks the stage with a hand microphone, his long fingers brought to a point, for emphasis, and then widened to make sure that the point made it to the back of the hall. The jokes come at the top, and they are almost always the same jokes.

There is a remove to his movements and a distance to everything he does that mutes his charisma and dampens what might be a frenzy in his crowds into a patient, well-behaved enthusiasm. As much as he might like to say he is, Obama is not leading a movement -- not in any real sense, anyway. He is too oddly remote a figure to do that. If he resembles any Kennedy, it's Jack, but Obama's distance is cool and cerebral, not cool and ironic. He's as far from Bobby Kennedy as he is from Chester A. Arthur. It is impossible to imagine Obama, forty years after it happened, wading into the Indianapolis ghetto, unannounced and unprepared, to tell a crowd that Martin Luther King had been shot, and to drop Aeschylus on them into the bargain. There is nothing about Obama that bleeds, not publicly. Everything about him that bleeds he left back between the covers of his autobiography. Look for it there, not in this campaign. But mainly, he's not leading a movement because he's telling people that, through him, and through their belief in him, they can reclaim the country's lost greatness, as though the country he's talking to didn't hock all that stuff in the first place so it could afford guns and burglar alarms. He's asking it to value what it's already peddled on the cheap.

He's an impermeable man now. He is smooth and clean, and there's nothing jagged or dangling or out of place. He seems to have emerged into this campaign, and into this moment in history, fully formed. One of the chief -- and most deadly accurate -- criticisms of Hillary Clinton was that her entire campaign was based on the inevitability of her nomination. The cynic has watched Barack Obama on fifteen different stages in fifteen different places in three states, and even here, even through the static on the radio, the cynic realizes that nobody ever thought Hillary Clinton was as inevitable a president of the United States as Barack Obama believes himself to be.

"I look forward as president to going before the world community and saying, 'America is back. We're ready to lead,' " Obama says on the radio, the static crackling and popping and the transmission fading, and it takes a moment for the cynic to wonder whether or not the world wants America to lead. Maybe the world wants America to sit down and shut up for a while. Obama goes on.

"We will lead in the observance of human rights, and the rule of law, and civil rights and due process, which is why I will close Guantánamo and I will restore habeas corpus and say no to torture. Because if you elect me, you will have elected a president who has taught the Constitution, who believes in the Constitution, and who will restore and obey the Constitution of the United States of America."

There is a wash of applause that the engineer fades out, and the cynic pulls out of the parking lot. As he turns back onto County Road S, he looks up and sees a water tower looming up over the road. There's one in every small town in America. They carry the name of the town and occasionally a tribute to the local high school's championship football team. They're better than maps if you find yourself lost and wondering where you've gotten yourself this time.

"Freedom," the water tower reads.

There was a time when the cynic would have read into this the hand of what the powdered-wig set in Philadelphia called "Divine Providence." It would have been more than a landmark. It would have meant something else entirely. But politics has lost its imagination and it is dead to metaphor, and the cynic sees the water tower that says "Freedom," and it's only a measure of how utterly lost he is.

Convince me, he says to himself.

Convince me that I'm wrong. Convince me that there's enough left that's worth saving. Convince me that there are enough people left who care enough to save it.

Convince me. Convince me. Convince me.

And the cynic turns away from the center of town and back out onto the cold, narrow road that leads out of Freedom.

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More than anything else, the presidential election ongoing is -- or, as a right, ought to be -- about ending an era of complicity. There is no point anymore in blaming George Bush or the men he hired or the party he represented or the conservative movement that energized that party for what has happened to this country in the past seven years. They were all merely the vehicles through whom the fear and the lassitude and the neglect and the dry rot that had been afflicting the democratic structures for decades came to a dramatic and disastrous crescendo. The Bill of Rights had been rendered a nullity by degrees long before a passel of apparatchik hired lawyers found in its text enough gray space to allow a fecklessly incompetent president to command that torture be carried out in the country's name. The war powers of the Congress had been deeded wholesale to the executive long before Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and a passel of think-tank cowboys found within them the right of a fecklessly incompetent president to make war unilaterally on anyone, anywhere, forever. The war in Iraq is the powerful bastard child of the Iran-Contra scandal, which went unpunished.

The ownership of the people over their politics -- and, therefore, over their government -- had been placed in quitclaim long before the towers fell, and the president told the people to be just afraid enough to let him take them to war and just afraid enough to reelect him, but not to be so afraid that they stayed out of the malls.

It had been happening, bit by bit, over nearly forty years. Ronald Reagan sold the idea that "government" was something alien. The notion of a political commonwealth fell into a desuetude so profound that even Bill Clinton said, "The era of Big Government is over" and was cheered across the political spectrum, so that when an American city drowned and the president didn't care enough to leave a birthday party, and the disgraced former luxury-horse executive who'd been placed in charge of disaster relief behaved pretty much the way a disgraced former luxury-horse executive could be expected to behave in that situation, it could not have come as any kind of surprise to anyone honest enough to have watched the country steadily abandon self-government over the previous four decades. The catastrophe that is the administration of George W. Bush is not unprecedented. It was merely inevitable. The people of the United States have been accessorial in the murder of their country.


Most of the damage was in plain sight in 2004, when Barack Obama became a political star by giving a speech in which he told America what a great country it was, and what great people were in it, and then the country went out and reelected George W. Bush anyway. Then came even further revelations -- of warrantless spying, of a Justice Department turned into little more than a political chop shop, of torture and black prisons, of the length and breadth and sheer audacity of the lies that led to a seemingly endless war. The Democrats even took over the Congress in 2006. And nothing, it seemed, changed. Nobody was held responsible. White House aides simply ignored congressional subpoenas. Documents vanished. E-mails were accidentally deleted. The sound of the shredders working in a hundred different offices in the executive branch of the government must today sound like the starting line at Daytona five seconds before they drop the flag.


That is the election that the cynic thought we'd have in 2008, an epochal choice of wisdom over stupidity, energy over apathy, grimly serious business over shiny trivialities. He was no less a sucker than any of his countrymen for appeals to the better angels of his nature. But this time around, he wanted those angels to be carrying flaming swords. He thought he'd measured the wreckage, walked through the ruins, and counted the cost. He didn't think he was smarter than his countrymen or shrewder about his politics or wiser in the ways of the world. The cynic simply thought he was adequate to the times, and he didn't want to be "moving on" just yet. He didn't want an election that offered absolution without confession, without penance.

Instead, he got an incredible collection of clowns on the Republican side; he was at one debate in which three of them, 30 percent of the Republican field, declined to state publicly that they believed in evolution. (Looking at the bunch of them on stage, the cynic began to have his own doubts.) Mitt Romney of Massachusetts spent an entire campaign revealing himself to be the Piltdown man of American politics. Mike Huckabee, a likable preacher who played bass guitar, was an appealing fellow with dangerously loopy ideas. In the end, the Republicans settled on John McCain, who'd traded his shiny armor from 2000 for a tattered choir robe, and who was promising to run on being better at everything at which George W. Bush had been bad. The cynic had spent time with McCain almost a decade earlier, and he had liked him tremendously, and now the cynic didn't recognize him at all.

On the other side, an equally sizable field thinned itself down pretty quickly. Hillary Rodham Clinton was bright and enthusiastic, and her campaign seemed to be doing everything correctly, but she was engaged without being particularly engaging, her campaign something out of 1972. Barack Obama, as the tennis coaches say, wrong-footed her almost from the start.

The cynic had been in the hall for Obama's big speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. It was beautifully written, impeccably delivered, and its rhetoric was thrilling. Obama took the crowd through the incredible ethnographic stewpot of his upbringing -- Kenyan father, white Kansan mother, a brief stint living in Indonesia, high school in Hawaii, and then Columbia and Harvard Law -- and when he got to the peroration, the cynic knew that Obama had won the country as surely as he had lost the cynic himself.

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"Yet, even as we speak," Obama said, "there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spinmasters and the negative-ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there's the United States of America."

(A month later, at the Republican convention, the cynic saw fat little delegates and their fat little wives wearing Purple Heart Band-Aids to mock John Kerry's war wounds. He saw the Swift Boat ads. The country bought it. The country moved on.)

"There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America, there's the United States of America."

(Three months later, the cynic watched black voters be systematically disenfranchised in key precincts all over the country. There was no anger. There were no demonstrations. There was no great rising in defense of a fundamental right. There was, instead, nothing. The country bought it. The country moved on.)

"The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans and blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. We are all of us one people, all of us defending the United States of America."

(Over the next several months, the cynic watched as the Republicans masterfully used the threat of gay people getting married to gin up turnout where they needed it the most. It was a creepy, shabby election that wasn't about anything that was really happening in the country. The country bought it. The country moved on.)

So when Obama caught fire in Iowa this year and then moved along through the process, bedeviling the Clintons and selling out the halls, the cynic wondered when he was finally going to measure the wreckage, walk through the ruins, or count the cost. Obama was critical enough of what had happened over the previous seven years; his early opposition to the war in Iraq gave him an unbeatable trump card against Edwards and Clinton and tremendous cachet with younger and more liberal voters. But as Obama's campaign gathered strength, the cynic kept hearing that 2004 speech again, in bits and pieces, in every stump speech Obama gave, and he saw that what Obama was offering was exactly what the country did not need. He was offering absolution without confession, without penance. In 2007, when asked about the possibility -- just the possibility -- of impeaching George W. Bush and/or Dick Cheney, Obama scoffed at the idea, not entirely because it was constitutionally unsound but also because it was impolite and a nuisance and might make many people angry at one another, and he was, after all, running to help save us from ourselves.

"We would, once again, rather than attending to the people's business, be engaged in a tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, nonstop circus."

He was offering a guilty country a nolo plea. Himself. Absolution without confession.

The cynic declined the deal. There were not enough people in handcuffs yet.


We have not been a great country for a very long time, the cynic believes, and it does us no good to claim otherwise. We are not an honest and decent people in our politics, in the way we deal with one another as a political commonwealth. We will trade away our most precious rights in exchange for a bag of magic charms, and even when we find out that these include the black prison, the waterboard, and the secret microphone, we'll think we got the better of the deal. We'll swap our obligation to intelligent self-government for any huckster's trick that makes us laugh or keeps us entertained in our cars for the evening drive-time shift. We hold this truth to be self-evident -- that all men are out to get what's ours.

Obama will find this out, the cynic thought. He will discover exactly how much he overrates the country as a democracy and its people as citizens. It will happen. He may not even understand it until it happens to him, but it will happen. The cynic just happened to be there when it began.

Snow danced in cyclonic bursts all up and down the alleys by the river in Milwaukee. The Pabst Theater, a great old palace that's been renovated to within an inch of its former glory, was hosting a rally at which Michelle Obama was the keynote speaker. She's a formidable story herself, the daughter of a city worker in Chicago, she went through Princeton and Harvard Law. The crowd was hers from the minute she hit the stage. Then she said, "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."

In the hall, it was an altogether unremarkable moment. But the cynic wrote it in his notebook and circled it in red. He saw in it the kind of cheap political junk food that the American people, the ones who have gay friends in the red states and the ones who worship that awesome God in the blue states, will wolf down with gluttonous abandon.

Sure enough, Michelle Obama's unremarkable remark got hung on a string with the fact that her husband doesn't wear a flag on his lapel and that he once failed to put his hand over his heart while the national anthem played. Not long after that, a loon on the National Review's Web site speculated that Obama's mother married his father because they were secret communists, because back then only communist white women married communist black men. Someone else made note of the fact that when Obama was in high school in Hawaii, he knew a man named Frank Marshall Davis, who'd been named as a communist by some House committee or another in 1951, and that, as a state senator, Obama once had dinner with a former member of the Weathermen. Tony Rezko went on trial in Chicago. A brave woman named Samantha Power, who'd spent more than a decade looking the worst of which humanity was capable squarely in the eye in places like Rwanda and Bosnia, was forced to resign from the campaign because she called Hillary Clinton a "monster."

Then, of course, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright hit the big time. It turned out that Obama's pastor had said some things from the pulpit that you pretty much have to be a white preacher in this country to get away with, and there were YouTube clips of them, and they dominated nearly the entire month before the Pennsylvania primary. Obama responded by giving the most serious speech on American race relations since Lyndon Johnson drew his big self up in front of the Congress and said, "We shall overcome."

And all more than a few people took away from it was the fact that Obama had said some things about his grandmother that these people thought were ungracious.

Of course, it was all bullshit. Those people didn't care a damn about Obama's grandmother, or about the Reverend Wright, or about intolerance from the pulpit, for all of that. (For example, the good Catholic boys Chris Matthews and Tim Russert -- and John and Robert Kennedy, for all that -- regularly sat in the church of their youth through a Good Friday service that was so thorough an exercise in formalized Jew-bashing that even the Vatican caught on, albeit twenty centuries late.) It was all about how we do politics, and therefore, about how we govern ourselves, or, more to the point, how we choose to do neither one. This is what you get, the cynic thought, when you don't insist on measuring the wreckage, walking through the ruins, or counting the cost.

Obama's campaign had been a masterpiece of imagination, creating a future out of an ambivalent present, telling the country and its people that they should find hope in one another -- "Change happens from the bottom up" -- and it was being partly undone by the trivial and the immediate. Now he was in that place in which Albert Murray said all the heroes of the blues end up, even ones who worship an awesome God in the blue states:

"Even as flexibility or the ability to swing (or to perform with grace under pressure) is the key to that unique competence which generates the self-reliance and thus the charisma of the may skill in the art of improvisation be that which will enable contemporary man to be at home with his sometimes tolerable but never quite certain condition of not being at home in the world."

The cynic found Obama more fascinating than ever. He was still the front-runner for the nomination, but any notion that the campaign would take place on a higher plane was lost somewhere between Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The cynic wondered if Obama's campaign had not found itself in a blind alley of its own devising. By offering his complicit, fearful nation and its complicit, brutish people absolution without confession, without penance, Obama guaranteed that the sins would stay, and they would be committed over and over again, and against him this time. Poor bastard, thought the cynic. When the cynic heard Obama talk about Dr. King's "fierce urgency of now," he wondered first and always why Obama spent so much time talking about great men -- Abraham, Martin, John, and Bobby -- who'd all been shot in the head.

Why this saintly aversion to politics? Why the imperious rejection of the fight? Was the man incapable of it? Because if that was the case, the Republicans would feast on his bones come fall. In any case, the cynic had had his fill of the new painless politics and had grown wary of the self-declared phenomenon who was its chief purveyor. The cynic wondered if Obama was tough enough, so he went to the far South Side of Chicago, where Obama did his community organizing. Snow was mixing with rain, and a woman stood on the sidewalk, screaming at the raw and empty air, trash blowing all around her shoes until she screamed at the trash and then ran down an alley. He stopped by the Lilydale First Baptist Church a few blocks away, where Pastor Alvin Love was finishing up Sunday service, and Pastor Love talked about the young Barack Obama, who'd come to him to do community organizing through the various churches in the area. "Barack kind of broke down those barriers for us, because it was easy for us to get into our own agenda," Love recalled. "And it was all the neighborhoods on the South Side, and all the pastors were saying the same thing, so finding out that we had more in common than we thought was an eye-opening experience." Obama also worked in the Altgeld Gardens, a housing development built in 1945 atop an ecological hellspout where two thousand families lived on an old landfill and hard by fifty-three different sites that had been designated as "toxic" by one study of the area. He left an impression as a stubborn, stiff-necked grinder with a gift for changing tactics on the fly. His very first meeting at Altgeld Gardens did not go well, Pastor Love recalled. An arrogant city bureaucrat got everybody's back up. Half the people wanted to walk out, and the other half wanted to deck the guy.

"Barack wouldn't quit," Love said. "He pulled us off to the side and he said, Well, we messed that up. We didn't see that coming. We need to strategize right now about how to deal with stuff like this and hold people accountable so this kind of thing doesn't happen again."

Altgeld Gardens, the cynic believed, was tough enough. The far South Side was tough enough.

The cynic wondered if Obama was smart enough, so he went to Harvard Law School, where Obama went and shone more brightly than he ever had before, thriving in a lush rain forest of towering egos in which every second person already has the Supreme Court in his eyes. Students bustled between classes, heads bowed, ambition fairly crackling from every pore. He stopped by the office of Professor Laurence Tribe, Obama's mentor at the place and someone who is on the short list every time a Democratic president gets a chance to appoint someone to the Supreme Court. In 1989, Tribe took Obama on as a research assistant, putting him to work on a paper entitled, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics," which sounds like something Learned Hand wrote from Mars. "To deal with it, one had to get a reasonable command of the general theory of relativity and Heisenbergian physics," Tribe explained. "So I got to know him in a context that really tested the qualities of his mind. It wasn't a grinding kind of a job. It required a very wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and imagination." Heisenbergian physics, the cynic believed, was smart enough. Harvard Law was smart enough.

He wondered if Obama was shrewd enough, so he went and he talked to Congressman Mike Capuano, a former mayor of the blue-collar town of Somerville in Massachusetts, who went to Congress in 1998 because he was a better street pol than the prettier, wealthier candidates he ran against in a massive brawl to succeed young Joe Kennedy to his uncle Jack's old congressional seat. Capuano is no dreamer. He's a hard-eyed, calculating man who endorsed Obama only because Obama convinced him that there was a chance he could win.

"I'm not on some sort of a mission," Capuano said. "I'm looking to combine what I think is a good person, a good politician, with somebody who can win. And I try to figure it out. I try to figure out if the rest of America is capable of really getting over it and voting for a black man. And I realize there's a shot that the answer might be yes."

Convincing Mike Capuano, the cynic believed, was shrewd enough. Somerville is shrewd enough.

So the cynic did due diligence, and at the end of it, he watched the campaign go on from Wisconsin and he realized that tough enough and smart enough and shrewd enough weren't anywhere near enough. Not in the country in which the campaign was now taking place. Not in the country that made the intemperate eruptions of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright from a pulpit in Chicago more relevant to its choice of the next president than the speechifying of Moqtada al-Sadr from a balcony in Baghdad. Not in a country that didn't care if there was an actual heart left in its politics as long as the candidate put his hand over where that heart should have been or wore a pin above it on his lapel. The cynic believed that journalism wasn't enough. He felt like that woman he'd seen in Chicago, screaming into the sleet while the trash piled up around her shoes.

Patriotism, the cynic read. There were "questions" about Obama's "patriotism." (Reading the elite political press had long ago forced the cynic to think with quotation marks.) The cynic knew where the "questions" about Obama's "patriotism" were coming from. They were coming from the "conservative America" that Obama had told the Democratic convention four years earlier didn't really exist, from the fat little delegates and their fat little wives who thought the Purple Heart Band-Aids were oh so very clever. They were coming from the people who did their best to disqualify black people from voting and gay people from marrying, in those red states that Barack Obama had told the Democratic convention were only an imaginary construct meant to divide us, as though the country didn't open its eyes wide and walk into the divide, skipping and whistling like the children of Hamelin.

"Patriotism?" the cynic thought. "Patriotism" to what? To the forms of democracy and not the tattered remnants of its substance? To the words of the Constitution but not its neutered spirit? Blind, stupid, deaf, and dumb loyalty to shapes and colors and band music and bright shiny flag lapel pins, but nothing left for the bedraggled ideals dragged through the mud at Guantánamo and Bagram and a hundred other places?


The cynic read the words and he heard the quotation marks in his head, clanging at either end of the word like cell doors closing.

"My country, 'tis of thee/Sweet land of dumbassery/Of thee, I fucking sing," thought the cynic.

In Time magazine, right on cue, Joe Klein spectacularly opined that Obama hadn't been "explicit" or "corny" enough in his expressions of patriotism to win over the good white burghers of western Pennsylvania, which seemed to indicate that Joe Klein firmly believes that western Pennsylvania is populated by lizard-brained morons. And right on cue, Obama went to North Dakota and told a crowd, "I love this country, not because it's perfect, but because we've always been able to move it closer to perfection."

When was the last time that happened, the cynic wondered. What country exactly is Barack Obama talking about here? This country has rolled back its constitutional order to a point where you'd think Thomas Jefferson had died as a child. It's rolled back its jurisprudence to a point about a month before the Magna Carta. It has done so willingly, even eagerly.

Cynicism was noble, the cynic believed. It was to be directed only at targets worthy of it and not at a candidate's failure to provide what the elite political press could sell to a complicit nation as the proper proletarian dumb show. It was to be directed at how seriously Barack Obama has misjudged the country he so obviously wants to lead, which is not the country he talks about but the spavined America that actually exists, because that's the country in which the American people, in a hundred different acts of omission and commission, have freely determined that they want to live. A country of stunted anger and, yes, bitter denial of all that it's done to itself. That's the country in which Barack Obama is running now. If he sees it from the stage when he tilts his head and looks off into the far distance, he gives no sign of it.

He talks forever about "change." Change from what? the cynic wondered. Obama never really says. He criticizes Bush, and his people, and his policies. He runs through the litany: Iraq. Katrina. The collapse of the subprime mortgage industry. The overall economy, now barely clouding the mirror under its nose. He's tough when he does it, and smart, and shrewd. But it ends there. Obama never addresses the era of complicity, the fact of the country's accessorial conduct in its own murder. He just tells the country that it's really better than all that. And the cynic's questions are never really answered. And he talks forever about "hope." The cynic hears it and remembers the legend of Pandora. Hope was the jewel left in the box after she'd opened it, but Pandora never noticed Hope until she'd loosed all the demons onto the world.

Why would anyone have faith in America, which is not tough but fearful, not smart but stupid, and not shrewd but willing to fall for almost anything as long it comes wrapped in a flag? Why would anyone have faith in Americans? Barack Obama says that he has that faith because of his own life, because he was able to rise to the point where he can be thought of as president of the United States. He is the country's walking absolution. That's his reason, the cynic thinks, but it's not mine. There has to be confession. There has to be penance. Being Barack Obama is not enough. Not damn close to enough.

Congresswoman Gwen Moore is revving up the crowd in Milwaukee, pitting Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton as though she were setting up the main event in the parking lot at Caesar's. She starts with Clinton.

"In this corner," Moore begins, "wearing the helmet of fear, the breastplate of pride, wielding the shield of special-interest dollars and carrying the sword of bitter partisanship!" The crowd boos lustily. There's no room for metaphor in the cynic's politics anymore. His head is beginning to throb. Congresswoman Moore is just getting warmed up.

"And in this corner," she begins.

(Oh, dear Lord, no.)

"The candidate of the people. Skinny young man. Big ears. Funny name. Armed with the experience of humble beginnings. Educated in Ivy League suites. Trained in legislative seats. Toughened in inner-city streets."

(Okay, this is more like it.)

"Wearing the helmet of good judgment."


"The breastplate of hope. Wielding the shield of unity. Carrying the sword of truth. And feet marching to the beat of change!"

Obama takes the stage and the hall explodes, the way all the halls have exploded in this, the last really good week he will have. All the rest of the upcoming weeks and months will be about becoming aware that the country he imagines is not the America that is, and that it hasn't been for a very long time. And the cynic realizes at last that he is more naive than anyone else here, particularly more than the slim, smooth candidate himself, stalking the stage in his edgeless way and looking out over the crowd at something in his private distance. The cynic believes in an old, abandoned country that's no less illusory than the redeemed one Obama is promising to this crowd. Isn't that something? the cynic thinks. Maybe that's enough, that single revelation, just a flicker of the lost imagination. For the last time, in the roar of the crowd, it comes back to him again. Convince me America is not an illusion. Convince me that it never was. Convince me that you're not a pious mirage. Convince me that we're not. Now that you brought it up, convince me.

Convince me.

Convince me.

Convince me.

Published in the June 2008 issue.

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