The American Future

by Simon Schama

  Given the elated solemnity of the moment, the chairperson could probably have found better words to kick off the proceedings than “Let’s cha-cha-cha.” But it didn’t matter. At 7:15, the people rose from their seats, moved from where they were standing as best as they could, in the chaotic crush, toward their “preference.” For a moment the whole thing felt like summer camp: adolescent glee; lots of “OVER HERE!” shouts; self-conscious giggles. But there were also professors with urgent eyebrows, like Team Leaders, carving a route through the throng. After the immediate rush and crush, a certain ceremoniousness descended. The voters of Precinct 53 were, after all, literally taking positions; standing for something and someone. It had been like that in the local comitia of the Roman Republic too, so Cicero tells us in Pro Flacco, when proposals to vote sitting down had been defeated as an attempt to introduce Greek decadence into the proceedings. Citizens truly standing for something or someone stood unblushingly and visibly before their neighbors and took the social consequences. And for a moment, the Chucks and Katies seemed dissolved into the long marvelous history of civic liberty.

  The “preference groups” gathered in knots around the room surveyed each other; quick head counts were taken. And then it became obvious that something startling was still going on. The left-hand corner of the room, Obama’s, had not yet settled into a solid knot of supporters. It was still being fed by a moving coil of people: multi-pedal like a dragon at Chinese New Year or a slow conga line, steadily shuffling and shoving its way toward the corner, which was having to expand along the length of the left-hand wall to absorb the numbers of oncomers. Much later in the long campaign, close to the Pennsylvania primary, the Clinton team would suggest that she had done less well in the caucuses because the Obama organization had packed them with aggressive stalwarts who intimidated people into joining their camp. But that wasn’t how it happened on this first night in the caucus for Precinct 53. This was the physical expression of choice. The face of the Clinton precinct captain, whom I’d seen earlier in the afternoon, as she took this in, looked bleakly exhausted. Her camp was mostly seated; there was plenty of room to spare.

  It was not yet over. Supporters of minor contenders now deemed officially “unviable” were free to redistribute themselves along with the Undecideds in the middle of the room. There were no more than perhaps a dozen of them facing outward to listen to rival advocates. But a lot of cross-room appeals were being made—and looking at the ongoing carnival that was the Obama corner, there were temptations to defect to what was, in every sense, the more fun party. A blonde in her twenties, sharply dressed, curvy, a reporter with one of the news networks, had managed, by imploring, to sneak into the caucus a minute or two after the Closing of the Doors. She was barely in when a high school senior, ginger-haired and ardent, had made his move, excitedly chatting her up with merry talk of comparative healthcare systems. In round one he stood with her in the Clinton corner. Now, still talking, he was moving away from the group as though he’d discovered it was the carrier of some sort of social contagion. Every so often he would peel his gaze away from the object of his infatuation and transfer it, with even greater ardor, toward the Obama corner. Finally it was too much. He broke off and started to move their way. “Stay with US,” the blonde shouted. “You said you would.” “Yeah, sorry but gotta do this. See you later?” “Oh SURE,” she snapped back.

  The final tally was done by counting off, military style; each supporter calling out the next number until the group was done. This was an economical way to count the groups, but it also made the notion of a vote—a shouted voice—powerfully literal. Thus the vox populi of Des Moines sounded: elderly aunts; high school tenors; gravelly taxi drivers; sonorous lawyers: “TWENTY-THREE,” “TWENTY-FOUR”…By the time we got to Obama’s 186 (to Edwards’s 116 and Clinton’s 74), the magnitude of what had just happened was inescapable. But perhaps it was just somehow the quirk of Precinct 53, where maybe Obama had campaigned more intensively than elsewhere. I went down the hall to Precinct 54, meeting in the assembly hall. They had just finished their tally and the distribution of votes was almost identical with the one I’d just seen. Perhaps this was going to happen right across the city, right across the state: Jack Judges in their hundreds of thousands willing something different in American politics; a democratic restoration.

  Around the corner, the Republicans had gathered; a smaller, less hectic affair with seated caucus-goers enduring reading of statements from all the candidates—and there were a lot of them. Some, like John McCain, had mostly given Iowa a miss, gambling, shrewdly as it would turn out, on New Hampshire, where since the campaign of 2000 there had been longtime respect and affection for the senator’s idiosyncratic style and beliefs. The real choice had been between Romney, the standard-bearer of the conservative notables in the party, and the unorthodox pastor Mike Huckabee. Though the numbers voting were barely a third of the Democrats, Huckabee had beaten Romney by almost the same nearly 3:1 margin that Obama had scored over Clinton.

  It didn’t take a genius, much less a media analyst, to figure out what was going on in Iowa: a populist rejection of political business-as-usual, of the dominant orthodoxies. The New York Times had endorsed Hillary Clinton. Iowa voted Obama. The conservative talk-show pundits had anointed Romney as the flag-bearer of their causes—gung-ho for the war; committed to overturning legalization of abortion; permanent deep tax cuts written in letters of blood—and had warned against the undependable affability of Huckabee. Iowa Republicans by the flockful gave him their vote. And the runner-up, also by a clear margin, was the other maverick in the pack, Ron Paul, who had also been treated by the mainstream Republican suits in the television debates like a creature from another planet who had no business, what with his outrageous attacks on President Bush (whom he wanted impeached), sharing their podium. But for the Republican faithful, who had seen their party disappear into the pockets of self-appointed oligarchs and managers, the likes of Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee were ideological catnip. I liked to think of the bearded apostle of the streets roaring happily at the television that night.

  At the downtown media center: television pundits, adjusting their ties before the banks of lights as these results came in from all over the state confirming something like a little earthquake had indeed happened, stuck to their spiked guns. What was this: the joke, Ron Paul, taking more votes than Mitt? There was much on-camera shaking of heads and wiseacre warnings along the lines of “Senator Obama still has a very long way to go”—which was undeniable but not really the news of the night. The media corps was taking it personally, as if stung by the voters’ refusal to fall in line with the truisms they had been rehearsing for months: the formidable invincibility of the Clinton campaign; the solid ranks of party notables who had declared for her; the bulging bank account; the astute campaign warriors; also—the managerial smarts of Mitt Romney; the presidential manner he exuded on the air and on the rally platform; the cross-party appeal to Independents and to the patriot corner of the 9/11 mayor, Rudy Giuliani. But all of this had, apparently, meant little or nothing. Could it be that it was precisely the parade of conventional wisdoms, the construction of inevitabilities, that was the object of Iowa voters’ repudiation?

  As the big screen at the media center rolled onward with its counts, it became dramatically apparent that whatever was going on was happening in numbers that had never been seen before. Rural or urban districts, it made no difference; counts, even in a politically active state like Iowa, were now up by two or three times. In other state primaries to come, voting figures would be even more staggering. In Nevada in 2004, some 10,000 had voted in the primaries; in 2008, that figure was nearly 110,000. This was the real surge, the one that mattered, of a popular democracy acting as though it could actually effect an alteration of power. And it had happened in a way that surely Tocqueville would have recognized as authentically American: a breakout from the entrapment of management; from the platitudes about the dominance of money, of tel
evision advertising; from the pet theories of the press and radio; from the cool manipulation of the campaign pros. This had happened through the recovery of directness, the transparency of neighborhood meetings, face-to-face; the shows of hands; the unapologetic sounding of voices; precisely the unapologetic demonstration of choice that was unthinkable in societies where democracy was a matter of form rather than substance, and where publicly endorsing your preference was likely to be noticed by those who might pay you back for it in currency you’d rather not have. Or it might be even worse. At the very time when the voters of Iowa were persuading each other, in Kenya voters were trying to kill each other.

  On the electronically glimmering terraces of the media center, a Spanish television reporter was trying to get the words out and let her audience know the magnitude of what was happening. But they wouldn’t come. Again and again, take after take, her tongue would trip over “Huckabee” or “Obama” until her verbal wheels started to spin and there was no hope of ever getting her out of the vocal ditch. She was not alone in her uncertainty. Everywhere else in the media hutch were journalists tapping frantically away at monitors rewriting the past shelf-life truisms while the atmosphere turned rank with sweaty disbelief.

  That the Obama people hadn’t themselves reckoned on the turn of events was clear from the complete lack of any kind of security at the entrance to the Victory Party. No gates, no frisking, nothing barring entrance to the jamboree. All candidates schedule these events, to put heart into the dispirited (“This is just the beginning”), to let the troops have a moment of exultation—or to do the “First let me thank my wife and children…” before bowing out. But into the brutally modernist concrete convention center flowed the full river of Obama Nation: black schoolkids in hot yellow T-shirts, ready to romp; elderly whites who looked as though they’d just come back from the Ponce de León Fountain of Youth Weekend; college students waving their arms; and a whole lot of people in between. Up the escalator came the falsetto ululations that are—peculiarly—the American cry of victory, the whoops preceding the faces and bodies. There was nothing to eat or drink at this party, not a can of Coke or a bag of mini pretzels. But the jubilant multitudes were feeding off a concentrated diet of delight.

  Inside, the place was heaving and swaying, dancing and clapping. Gospel singing had turned it into the instant church of true believers, and the congregation—for Iowa is not a conspicuously black state—was just about most of America: all sizes, races, generations. When Obama showed up he seemed slighter and more sinewy than on the news, the hair coolly close-cropped as usual, dapper to show off the line of his skull as if he had the confidence that America might be ready for its contents. This bit of America certainly was.

  When the riot of noise and his multiple thank-yous died away, Obama’s first words immediately demonstrated the cunning of his rhetoric: “They said this day would never come,” voice dipping at the end, in mock disbelief. “They” comprised everyone who indeed thought it an absurd stretch that a forty-six-year-old first-term African American senator had the remotest shot at the nomination, much less the presidency; that America had enough trouble thinking about a woman in the White House, much less a black. But “they” was also evidently reserved for all those who had assumed that whatever flowering of idealism might be at hand—the appeals to lift politics above the rancid stream of partisan demonization to propose an engagement with the actual ills that were afflicting the country—it would, sure as eggs is eggs, end up as just another naively deluded jejune footnote to the harder truths; the inexorable machine-tooled grinding of the levers of power. Obama continued to repeat “they,” the people who believed “this country was too disillusioned to ever come together round a common purpose” so that, for that moment, it was the wiseacres who looked foolishly un-American. The crowd rode the moment of reaffirmation—of what? Of American democracy whose vital signs, at least on this night, were strong. But also of the living force of history.

  Moving toward his peroration, Obama made sure to bring together in this big tent of hopping elation, the past with the present, memory stalking the impatiently advancing future. Into the party marched the honored ghosts: the generation of the revolution, “a band of colonists rising up against an empire”; the generation that had fought World War II, and the civil-rights generation that fueled on hope, had had the self-belief “to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause.” And at that point—for a moment—I tuned out, turned the sound right down in the arena and was somewhere else: Selma-time, 1965. I had good reason to remember its cruel havoc as if it had taken place right before my eyes, since just the previous year I’d been in Virginia stumbling into the edges of the civil-rights struggle and then I’d seen President Johnson nominated in the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City against a backdrop of agonized fury as a black Mississippi delegation tried, unsuccessfully, to unseat the white yellow-dog Democrats. Johnson’s rage at the temerity and his maneuvring to make sure it would never happen was a low point. He needed the white Democrats of the South, racist or not, to cast their votes in the electoral college his way. A year later, in 1965, Johnson did something different: going on television and speaking as he said in his first sentence “for the dignity of man.” But as Obama invoked the past, what I remembered most about that speech was Lyndon Johnson doing likewise, summoning those moments when “fate” and history came together—“so it was at Lexington…so it was at Appomattox Court House…so it was at Selma.”

  Everything contemporary seemed impregnated with history. When Obama spoke of wanting to replace the partisan division of “Red States” and “Blue States” with a recovered United States, it was impossible not to remember Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural, after the bitter election of 1800 that (after thirty-six ballots of the House of Representatives) finally brought him to power, declaring that “every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle” and that “we are all republicans, we are all federalists.” How surprising is it that the nation that began by wanting everything, including politics and nationhood, to be minted afresh should nonetheless need the mirror of time in which to see itself; to reach out and back to history for a sense of its own future purpose? If Gore Vidal’s lament for the “United States of Amnesia” might still be right for numbers of the American public who are regularly put on the spot by interviewers asking them, mike in face, in which century, give or take a few, they think the Civil War was fought, it’s equally true that for those who still think of themselves as citizens, as active participants, the habit of peering into the mirror of time to see the character of their present and future selves, dies hard.

  PART ONE

  I: AMERICAN WAR

  1.Veterans Day: 11 November 2007

  “America has never been a warrior culture.”

  Just because it was Dick Cheney saying this didn’t automatically make it untrue, even on Veterans Day in Arlington National Cemetery, a year before the election. Patriotic chest-thumping from an impenitent vice president was not what anyone, least of all the veterans themselves, wanted to hear. Bodies of young American men and women were showing up regularly at Section 60, at the foot of the grassy hill. Mustard-colored backhoes stood parked in a row, steel claws raised, ready to dig. Every so often, on the hour, a soft clop of horses’ hooves could be heard coming over the dips and rises of the cemetery park before a reversed gun carriage rolled into view. Most weekdays, every hour or so, those small, sad parades do the funerary honors as tourist buses are diverted to alternative routes, heading for the Unknown Soldier or JFK. But if you walk the green vales of Arlington, you can catch young soldiers of the 3rd Infantry getting ready for their next duty, operating the forklifts that hoist coffins onto the carriages. Others grab a quiet smoke beneath the plane trees before dressing the horses and getting on their ceremonials. Out in Samarra and Helmand and Mosul and Kandahar a great many more mutilated and eviscerated bodies, not American, are being tended
to as best as possible without benefit of flag or drums. Only the keening sounds the same.

  But at Arlington, on Veterans Day 2007, in Memorial Amphitheater there was no howling, except from small children squirming against the captivity of their mothers’ laps. Cheney would utter the consolatory pieties with studied quietness, his voice falling at the end of the sentence, as if the avoidance of vocal histrionics were itself a symptom of truth-telling. Perhaps he has Theodore Roosevelt’s injunction to “speak softly and carry a big stick” framed over the vice presidential desk. When, every so often, an infant would let rip with an aaaighw, the note bouncing off the columns, Cheney would look up from the teleprompter, sight line briefly changed and then move impassively to the next homily, like a tank rolling over a cat.

  It was warm on 11 November, and the temper in the amphitheater was jocund. Sunlight falling on cherry-red caps and coats turned veteran marines into a gathering of jolly elves. The oompah from the big orchestra was classical lite, and the procession of colors into the amphitheater could have been any high-school parade but for the many years of the standard-bearers. Studded biker jackets decorated with Vietnam insignia—“Hells’ Harriers,” “Dragon Breath”—draped the gutswagged bodies of old grunts, but behind the bandannas of yore they had lost their heavy-metal menace, their righteously roaring grievance. Now they were just living exhibits in the museum of stoned-age warfare, the walking wounded of the Sha-Na Na-tion. More speeches droned; more Andrew Lloyd Webber chirped; and the volunteer “service” being eulogized was rapidly turning into social granola: “veterans helping out in communities” more akin to the coast guard or the scouts; nothing to do with bombs and bullets. If Iraq and Afghanistan had turned out not to be a picnic, Veterans Day at Arlington certainly felt like one.