October 30, 2008
King Obama
"Why?" a moderate-to-right-of-center relative asks the other day, "are [enumerate three people, all of whom are intelligent, reasonable, and have voted for Republicans before] so captivated by Obama?"
On some level, many Americans -- heavily weighted toward "moderates" -- internally elect a king every four years. This person will be our face to the world, will represent us, and will affect our daily lives far more than envisioned in Federalist #10.
If you're after a king, Senator Obama is a good pick. He's likeable, confident, strong and intelligent. If your disposition is slanted more toward the Executive modeled in #10, you might still choose Senator O, but I think your predilection will run more toward Senator McCain.
I toil in the fever swamps of ThreeSources and meet precious few moderates. But Fouad Ajami reinforces my riff, if indirectly, in "Obama and the Politics of Crowds." Ajami sees the phenomena of large-crowd political rallies as being outside the traditional American political culture:
My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination.