Of all the sins of all the pols who have derided Barack Obama as a vapid rhetorician -- as an inexperienced newcomer of "talk versus action," "speeches not solutions" and "an eloquent but empty call for change" -- none has been more lethal than their misreading of the present, based on an utter lack of comprehending inexorable historical currents.
For the election year of 2008 is likely to rank as another 1932 or 1960, when bottom-up calls for change -- something, anything but what preceded -- of transcendent, almost spiritual dimensions were uppermost in the electoral mind. Uppermost and demanded for sure, yet Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy -- two others derided in their times as speechifying phonies -- were almost singularly tuned in among the political class.
On occasion they had what some may regard as unlikely help. In 1960 Henry Kissinger, for example -- who was born, it seems, a hardened veteran of realpolitik, both foreign and domestic -- took Kennedy-adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. aside and urged this timely wisdom:
We need someone who will take a big jump -- not just improve on existing trends but produce a new frame of mind, a new national atmosphere. If Kennedy debates with Nixon on who can best manage the status quo, he is lost. The issue is not one technical program or another. The issue is a new epoch. If we get a new epoch and a new spirit, the technical programs will take care of themselves.
It is today's overshadowing yearning for a "new national atmosphere" that Hillary Clinton, above all others in the Democratic fold, missed. Armed with reams of wonkish policy proposals, she lulled audiences into a state of stupefaction, conflating the detailed introduction of "technical programs" with spirited leadership.
But the nation was one step ahead, sensing, as did Kissinger, that the technicalities of change would "take care of themselves." What is needed, rather, is a unifying voice of inspiration to get us from here to there -- to first change the uninspiring "mindset," as Obama once put it, that got us here to begin with.
By itself a call for change is fine and dandy -- that's what elections are all about -- but if the nation senses that you're dragging the uninspirational past into the present, then you're doomed.
And that, Hillary could not shake. Nor did she seem to try very hard. Instead she took the easier but ultimately suicidal route of merely deriding Obama's "rhetoric," which, it so happened, was precisely what the nation needed, and knew it needed.
Obama understood this. He is, as well, a quick study. He's capable of exploiting necessary change in himself. As a recent Washington Post article noted, friends told him after his 2000 congressional-race loss that it was largely the result of his rhetoric being "too wonkish and Ivy League." So he adjusted. Four years later, in his U.S. Senate bid, "Instead of ... dwelling on the details of welfare or health-care policy, he tied them to themes of 'hope and change and the future.'"
Yet another four years later, he was exploitative enough, which is to say smart enough, to get "informal advice from Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen." Meanwhile, Hillary was dwelling on microtrends and "technical programs." Ouch. She completely missed the national macrotrend that was swirling about her.
And, I'm happy to report, it seems that John McCain & Co. is well on its way to making the same, suicidal mistake.
For it further seems that the GOP indeed understands the vast appeal of Obama's siren song, but hasn't a clue as to how to combat it. Except, of course, by deploying the same, tired, wearisome tactics of the past.
If, say, Cincinnati talk-radio host and audience warm-up jackass Bill Cunningham is any indication of what's to come -- the mindless repetition of Barack Hussein Obama as a "hack," a "fraud from Chicago" who wishes to schmooze with "world leaders who want to kill us" -- then Obama is sitting pretty. Eight months is a self-excruciatingly long time to campaign against a man's middle name and a Kennedyesque rhetorical "fraudulence" for which the nation hungers.
It's true, as one of Obama's law-school classmates recently observed, that some "people are commenting increasingly on the disjunction between the elevated and exceptionally fine rhetoric and the rather pedestrian policy proposals that form the Obama platform." (The classmate is also a "former Bush counsel," by the way.)
But that -- a charge leveled against FDR and JFK, too -- just doesn't matter. Because a lot more people are in the mood for something else. And the GOPers, constrained by their own ideology of the rejected past, can't offer it. Even Henry Kissinger could tell them that.
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NOTE: I am delighted and honored to announce that beginning Monday, March 3, my column will appear exclusively on BuzzFlash.org. You will also be able to access it through BuzzFlash.com, front page, if that's your regular reading habit. So, see you there!
--P.M.