The audacity of realism

WILLIAM GOULD

If the Democratic Party wanted to lose the next American presidential election they would simply have to run Barack Obama. However, it appears that they may elect Obama to represent them, and, if they had their way, the entire free world. Obama is not the wrong candidate because of his race, but because of his policies.

Obama has been campaigning on inclusiveness and bringing the country together. He has continually used the language of Abraham Lincoln to push forward his agenda. For example, during the announcement of his candidacy in Illinois, Obama said: “And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States.” If Obama thinks that the country needs to be unified and that he is the man to do then not only is he wrong, but delusional.

Few men are able to fully unify such a diverse and complicated country as the United States. Abraham Lincoln fought a civil war, and still faced a bitter fight for unity with the south calling the Civil War “The War of Northern Aggression.” Ronald Reagan faced harsh criticism for his brilliant policies that ended the Cold War and collapsed one of history’s most hideous regimes. Even Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. faced the perils of unification after his famous “I have a dream” speech. However, in the case of each of these heroic leaders, they faced far greater threats than the threats that face Obama’s America.

The unification that Obama characterizes is not a Churchillian unity seeking to save civilization in a time of war. It is some sort of warm fuzzy feeling that goes around at a campfire while singing Kumbaya. The speech that he gave at the 2004 Democratic Convention that rose him to stardom epitomizes this perspective: “But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.” But who is it that is preventing Obama’s America from getting together?

Barack Obama answers in the same speech, “Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers . . . ” — Spin doctors and negative political ads, hardly the slave-holding Confederate States of America, Stalin’s tyrannical communist regime, or the bigoted Jim Crow of the South.

I can think of few times the United States has been as united as it is currently. Both Republicans and Democrats agree that mistakes have been made in Iraq, and a new way forward must proceed. If Obama feels that pastors who disagree with homosexual activists, or conservatives disagreeing with liberals, or blue states disagreeing with red states or whatever differences exist are signs of dysfunction and even perhaps hatred, he is wrong.

Unlike some areas of the world, America’s disagreements are a sign of unity; it is democracy at work. Obama on the point of unity could not be more wrong: the America of angry divisiveness he pictures is an America that does not exist. Rather than unifying the population as he seeks to do he divides it further. The Democrats have realized that their campaign in the last presidential election was a failure. If there is one thing that scares Americans more than the far right of the political spectrum, it is the far left.

The Democrats have been trying to get away from the stereotypical image of the far-left cereal-eating hippies and try to present themselves as moderate, hardworking, God-fearing Americans. Unfortunately, many moderates and conservatives see Obama as too liberal.

The Washington Times, on Dec. 19, 2006, pointed out that Obama has been consistently rated more liberal than Hillary Clinton by influential liberal-minded organizations. For Obama, the unifier, that is not a label he either needs or wants. Democrats have learnt from the last election that Republicans go after voting records. It will be difficult for Obama to suggest he is different from the stereotypical Democrat when the Republicans point out that, as the Washington Times reports in the same editorial, he has voted with his party 97 per cent of the time.

The Democrats are in a strong position for the upcoming election. They have a strong field of candidates and a lot of mistakes and misjudgments to attack. Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, international relations, domestic policy, debt, eavesdropping, the list goes on. Opportunities like these do not come along often for a political party, and the Democrats are in a prime position to take advantage of it.

However, Obama is not the man to do it; Hillary Clinton or perhaps John Edwards, but not Obama. His race will not greatly effect the presidential outcome should he be chosen to run, and rightly so, because the segregated, divided America that would have made it an issue is almost all gone. What will prevent Obama from being elected is that somewhere along the way when he was contemplating the audacity of hope, he forgot about the audacity of reality.

William Gould is a first-year science student at the University of Winnipeg.