No One Ever Died from a Paper Cut
After telling us that the media have been too soft on Barack Obama, the pundits now want us to believe that two words — “bitter” and “cling”–are major gaffes that may sink his campaign. Is this really credible? Presidential campaigns follow a familiar arc. After a long winter’s nap, public interest wakes up for the first primaries of the season. Once a candidate has been picked, everyone takes the summer off, and attention isn’t paid again until a month or so before the November elections.
By nature, politicians would love for everyone to listen to them every day of the year, but in fact there’s a law of diminishing returns. We are in the tune-out phase of the campaign. The Clintons are trying to inflict death by paper cuts to Obama in the face of mounting apathy. “Bitter” and “cling” aren’t news. Obama doesn’t hide his education and intelligence, even if they are dubbed elitist. While the Clintons try to pretend that their own $100 million income makes them working class heroes, the polls move incrementally up and down. The bald fact is that Obama’s integrity has registered with almost everyone he might attract, and the Democratic party has silently given up on Hillary.
When political interest reawakens in the fall, two major narratives will fight it out. Obama’s narrative is “Let’s go back to being the America of our highest ideals.” In other words, he stands for the politics of altruism. Sen. McCain’s narrative is “No surrender.” He stands for national pride and a refusal to back down. On the surface it would seem that the Obama’s stance is more powerful than McCain’s, but
in fact the race is likely to be tight. America’s national identity is such that losing any war feels abhorrent — the Republicans are still trying to turn Vietnam into a conspiracy of liberals and hippies who “prevented us from winning.” On the other hand, our national identity sees itself as ever- renewable, capable of recapturing our idealism whenever we will it. In reality there are many forms of bias, prejudice, hidebound self-interest, and inertia that fight against renewal.
We are going to have to sit around for a while in the political doldrums, watching the candidates inflict paper cuts on each other. Nobody will die from it, and then once September rolls around, something dramatic will occur. The fight over national identity will be one of the turning points of the twenty-first century as reactionary nationalism makes a desperate call for the troops to rally.
