Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  ONLY WORDS | February 23, 2008

  “I gotta use words when I talk to you.”

  —T.S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes

  The marathon battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination is already one of the great political dramas of our time.

  More than any other element, more than money, organization or endorsements, what has carried Mr. Obama from relative obscurity and being a hundred-to-one shot at surviving even a month in the primaries to celebrity and frontrunner status is his ability to speak on a platform. He is the front-runner over … Hillary Clinton!

  He has overtaken a household-name candidate who began with every advantage: heaps of money; a set of professionals second to none; a husband regarded as the best natural politician of his generation; and the expectation of most seasoned observers in the press and elsewhere that the nomination was hers.

  This was a lot to displace on the strength of one’s vocal cords.

  The phrase we hear most often describing Mr. Obama’s performance is that he connects. And he does. He has reduced the frenetic Chris Matthews of MSNBC, a veteran of the rough game of politics, to exclaim, live on air during an Obama speech, “My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”

  I note, only incidentally, how glad we are that he doesn’t.

  Facing what seem to be Mr. Obama’s near-invincible platform skills, Hillary and her camp have adopted a peculiar line of attack. Mr. Obama, she says, is just using words really well, or he’s just making really eloquent speeches, or he has great rhetorical gifts. This is extremely strange, for what is a political campaign except an exercise in verbal persuasion? How is it a vice to be good at the essential task?

  In a bathetic pronouncement on this theme, she offered this anecdote: People come up to her and say, “You’re so specific … Why don’t you just come and, you know, really just give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and then, you know, get everybody all whooped up?” This is so tone-deaf it should be in its own one-quotation anthology.

  She implies, of course, that she could be a cross between Elmer Gantry and Winston Churchill any time she chooses, and that only her virtuous addiction to “being specific” holds her back from getting everyone “whooped up.”

  She observes that Mr. Obama offers “only words,” while she offers “real solutions.” This is perplexing. How does she, or any politician, retail solutions, real or otherwise, to an audience except through the medium of those despised words? Her criticism of Mr. Obama, a politician, for his acknowledged skill as a speaker is akin to criticizing Wayne Gretzky for his skill in scoring goals. Good hockey players score goals; politicians, the good ones, talk and make speeches very well.

  The other bizarre aspect of Ms. Clinton’s protestation is the attempt to imply that her (relative) inarticulateness is actually a screen concealing greater competence. It’s offered, in fact, almost as proof. This is parallel to some hapless goalie trying to persuade a coach that letting all those pucks pass through the net is, actually, an emblem of greater hockey skill than his opposite number who, you know, actually stops them.

  Finally, and this point is very true for the United States in particular, to suggest that skill and finesse with language, some sympathy with the evocative and poetical nature of public utterance, is a flaw, is hostile to the legendary example of some of America’s greatest political heroes, is to ignore or deflate what Abraham Lincoln achieved through words, bypass dozens of others from Patrick Henry to William Jennings Bryan to Roosevelt with his fireside chats and Ronald Reagan’s inspired ease with anecdote and humour.

  Ms. Clinton, whether she knows it or not, is repudiating the very medium of her trade. A care in the choice of words signals a corresponding respect for the ideas those words embody. A politician that cannot handle language is intrinsically handicapped in his or her capacity. It is George Bush’s one undeniable, and central, weakness as president.

  Hillary Clinton is now, of course, Barack Obama’s secretary of state. The woman who mocked Mr. Obama’s judgment and “unpreparedness” for office with the devastating “3 a.m. phone call” ads during the primary season is now his principal legatee in dealing with the very type of crises which might precipitate just such calls. The world will rest the better knowing that if Obama is wakened at 3 a.m., Hillary will be called five minutes later.

  CANADA COULD LEARN FROM OBAMA | February 19, 2008

  Remember the great mess of Florida in 2000? Al Gore wins popular vote, Bush wins electoral college, and then the recounts and lawsuits, the dimpled ballots and hanging chads, the furiously bespectacled scrutineers peering though Sherlock Holmes-like magnifying glasses at mutilated ballots, trying to determine the “intent” of the ghostly voter.

  Some people said American politics would never get over it.

  And here we are today, with a new star ascendant in the American primaries, a wave of young and new voters trooping off to their state contests, all for a black man, a novice senator, whose middle name is “Hussein” and then, for good measure, whose last name is a perfect rhyme for America’s arch-terrorist arch-enemy.

  Everything was against the Obama explosion. He was virtually unknown a year ago, and was staring down the long, steel barrel of the most formidable munition in U.S. politics: the great howitzer known as the Clinton machine. He wasn’t so much a candidate as an ornamental distraction. And here we are today, with the first serious black candidate for president ringing up victory after victory, and the Clintons, Hillary and her Exocet husband, are now outfitting their only Alamo for a very last stand in Texas and Ohio.

  The American electorate is “turned on” to politics in a way that even the most dewy-eyed optimist in Florida 2000 would not have dared to dream.

  Why? In one sense, the answer’s simple. Obama, or the Obama candidacy, is out of the mould. He’s not tiredly or nakedly partisan. He’s not looking over at his opponents, whether Democrats or even Republicans, as if they’re running a branch office of Satan or are “enemies of the state.” He suggests that politics is not a game played between teams who “own” the game.

  All that tedious, empty and inane Bush-hatred, which followed years of visceral contempt for “slick” Willie; the mutual, almost clinical, rages members of one party have for the members of the other—that’s what most of U.S. politics has been: a psychodrama of the hyperpartisans.

  Obama, so far, I say again, suggests that something less corrosive, something larger than animosity for the other guy, and something other than the incestuous righteousness of pure partisanship, is the vehicle of politics. His “hope” is just another word for taking politics away from the viciousness of raw ambition and egotistical scrambling as its fundamental drives.

  We could learn a bit in Canadian politics from his campaign.

  Our politicians should look south, look at the phenomenon of Obama, and, if they are determined to inflict another essentially repetitive election on us this spring, throw away their rote scripts, talking points, wedge issues and prefabricated attacks, all the tired tactics and tired practices of the tired old game, and try something new. Speak their minds, abandon the trumped-up warfare, and—heresy of heresies—think a little less of winning, and a little more of making their politics as large as the country they profess to serve.

  It is surely the case that Canadian politics picked up nothing of the charm of the early Obama example. We didn’t have a spring election; our torment was deferred till the fall, followed by one of the most hyperpartisan explosions even seen. Prime Minister Harper’s attempt to cut political funding was followed by the great coalition showdown that attempted to sit Stéphane Dion in the prime minister’s chair. It was a spectacle of rage, cunning and confusion rarely, if ever, seen before. Canadian politics every day erodes what tiny pockets of esteem still exist for its conduct. The Obama example, emphatically, didn’t “catch.”

  SHE CAME TO PRAISE HIM | March 8, 2008

/>   There is an echo of Shakespearean archetypes in the American contest, with Barack Obama as an apprentice Prospero uncertainly testing his mesmerizing powers against the sleepless ambition of Hillary Clinton, a twenty-first-century—kinder, gentler, but still remorseless—Lady Macbeth. I can hear Hillary, fully in character, declaiming to her troops, “But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail.” The Clinton machine showed Tuesday night why it holds such esteem in the cold and calculating hearts of those who follow politics as a profession. Here was Obama coming off a sweep of eleven states in a row, finally brought to ground with a real thumping from Hillary in Ohio and Rhode Island, and beaten as well in the wide, wild state of Texas.

  Bill Clinton, uproarious, spotlight-craving, ungovernable Bill, had been tucked away into lesser corners of her campaign. Bill, it was early discovered, had to be administered to the voters of the Democratic primaries in measured doses. His early appearances raised the unsettling spectre of a dual presidency and reawakened images, best forgotten, of the man’s own term in the White House.

  Containing Bill, as the tactic was so delightfully called, was the first step toward Hillary’s re-emergence. The second was to reach for whatever was not nailed down and throw it at Obama. This was formally announced as the “kitchen sink” strategy, a homely metaphor to convey an all-out assault, maximum bombardment on every issue and flaw of Obama or his campaign, from his punchlines to his past or present associations.

  I don’t know if Mrs. Clinton has a cat these days. There used to be one called Socks. If there is a Socks II, it most likely will be found lying flat, bruised and lifeless on Obama’s doorstep, its last moments on Earth spent as a projectile at the Hillary counterattack. In desperate times, ammo is ammo, even when it purrs.

  Next, the Oprah-canonized candidate of charismatic uplift was hauled down from his hitherto-untroubled flight in the sunny altitudes of Hope and Change by a press shamed by Hillary herself into properly questioning him. In Obama’s words, after Ohio and Texas, she “played the ref.” He said he didn’t think the press would fall for it. Poor, naive Obama.

  Most telling for Canadian spectators, Clinton hit him on his NAFTA statements, accusing him of retailing a hard line to Ohio voters and then having some minion run to Canadian diplomats to signal us that it was just noise from a stump speech.

  Could such things be? Could the freshest, most inspiring presence in U.S. politics since John F. Kennedy be warbling of the New Jerusalem while on the campaign platform and practising the Old Washington shuffle—politics as it always has been—while off? Eek! I say, and I mean it.

  Her campaign ratcheted up the rhetoric. Bob Shrum, Democratic consultant par excellence, wailed: “You’ve got a right-wing government in Canada that is trying to help the Republicans and is out there actively interfering in this campaign.” It was as good as a play, as we say back home. The NAFTA story, whatever its dubious provenance, was rocket fuel for Hillary in Ohio and, moreover, was the pebble that hit the windshield of Obama’s “untouchability.” After NAFTAgate, as inevitably and drearily it was named, the American press went after the Illinois senator on his Chicago connections, and the late-night talk shows—the real agents of opinion in American journalism—started dealing with Hillary with something resembling kindness.

  It’s all lining up for a grand collision within the Democratic Party. Both camps have supporters that by now have invested their full being into the causes of their candidates. This is not a typical campaign. With the first woman and the first black candidate as champions they see in their respective campaigns the chance to “make history.” One has to lose.

  If the Clinton campaign, with all its guile and toughness, does indeed halt the rise of Obama, then surely it cannot escape a penalty for forestalling the arrival of America’s first black president. Nor, given the intensity with which some of Hillary’s supporters look at the prospect of the first woman in the White House, can I see how Barack Obama will escape a like response for impeding her ascension. Identity or cultural politics have very brittle edges. And the Democratic campaign, whether by design or not, has become a contest between the immensely charged and emotive themes of race and gender.

  Half of the hopes of this most vivid campaign are bound to be disappointed.

  Neither Prospero’s magic nor Lady Macbeth’s steel resolve can avert a painful fracture.

  A DREAM DIVIDED | August 30, 2008

  Abraham Lincoln knew the power of biblical quotation. He was a public figure during a time when recourse to scriptural reference by political leaders was neither as contentious nor as rare as it is today. One of Lincoln’s most famous orations, for example, is known by a phrase he borrowed from the gospel of Matthew: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

  As I watched Barack Obama on Thursday night, on stage in front of a set designed to suggest the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, a variant of that compelling maxim insistently came to mind: A speech divided against itself cannot persuade.

  Mr. Obama’s speech was at war with its setting. His campaign had picked the site (a massive outdoor arena) and set the stage for one type of speech, and their candidate (almost entirely) gave another. There was a second tension or contradiction within this speech as well, possibly even larger and more consequential than the first. The speech was to be given by the first black candidate for president on the forty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s incomparably eloquent “I have a dream” speech. Yet, when Mr. Obama—whose achievement may reasonably be seen as a living realization of Dr. King’s prophetic words—took to the stage, he left all direct linkage to the anniversary, all allusion to Dr. King and his words, to a coda, to a few paragraphs at the end of an otherwise fairly stock political speech. Until those few concluding paragraphs, Obama’s presentation could have been delivered—and this is a cruel measure of the opportunities missed or declined—by Joe Biden, the campaign’s designated hit man.

  Dr. King’s speech, we remember, was given to a massive audience in front of the Lincoln Memorial and carried on television as well. King was wise enough to realize that addressing a huge audience in the shadow of the statue to the Great Emancipator called for a style of address, a nobility of statement, that “belonged” to the occasion and its setting. Mr. Obama, for all his wonderful rhetorical instincts, in his first speech as the Democrats’ officially nominated presidential candidate, missed or declined the parallel connections available to him.

  In other words, his speech lacked decorum. It was at odds with—in fact, beneath—its occasion (the King anniversary) and its grand setting. I found this very strange.

  Mr. Obama’s candidacy is about nothing if not about his capacity to represent a plateau moment, not just in American politics but in the tormented history of America itself. There is no greater fact in the Obama candidacy than that, should he succeed, a country that began in the terrible self-contradiction of slavery for blacks—while proclaiming the equality of all men—will have awarded its ultimate office to an African American.

  The Obama candidacy, in this sense, is immensely symbolic, and that is the major source of its great power. The symbolism does not have to be trumpeted by Mr. Obama himself, nor should it be. Symbols do their own communicating. Why does anyone think that nearly 80,000 people show up at night to hear a speech from a “politician” except that they have an intuition that some special moment in their country’s history is unfolding, and that the Obama candidacy is its vehicle?

  He did not cause this moment. But he is its realization. Dr. King and Lincoln, both of whose presences were meant to be suggested by the setting and the day, were the great historic agents, each in his own way, who moved American history to the point where it may—finally—reconcile the terrible contradiction of racial inequity present at the founding of a constitutionally declared egalitarian society.

  But Mr. Obama’s speech seemed tone-deaf to the importance of its moment. Wisecracks about George Bush, sniggering witticisms playin
g off a useless sitcom of thirty years ago (Eight Is Enough), tendentious putdowns of John McCain, stale pseudo-populism (the corporations, the oil companies)—this kind of stuff almost stole the moment of its overwhelming magic. Having reached the mountaintop of which Dr. King spoke so longingly, why was Mr. Obama so determined, rhetorically, to return to the valley?

  The crowd came for history, and Mr. Obama gave them talking points. But I said “almost.” When, toward the end of an otherwise disappointing address, Mr. Obama cued his audience to the significance of giving this speech forty-five years to the day of that other speech in front of the real Lincoln Memorial, what this night meant—finally—had a chance to breathe. And the Obama candidacy shimmered back into its peculiar and commanding magic.

  Mr. Obama should be careful, however. If Americans, particularly Democrats, wanted another combat politician, Hillary Clinton would have been on the stage Thursday night. They have opted, instead, for a campaign touched with a sense of nobility. A house divided, or the dream? Which is it to be?

  Obama flirts with disappointment very frequently; it’s almost a signature of his political style. Here, his party had built a great showy set, set the speech for the anniversary of MLK’s great “I Have a Dream” oration, and he—in the main—delivered a pedestrian speech.

  On Inauguration day, with the memories of Lincoln’s imperishable addresses having been stoked by Obama—like Lincoln, travelling to Washington by train—he gave another slack speech. (See “A Clichéd Dud,” page 73.) I have no doubt President Obama retains the oratorical virtuosity people saw variously during the primaries—but it either vanishes, or he declines to exercise it, on precisely those occasions when it would be most decorous.