Candidates tell us who they are by crafting autobiographies to win our support. Yet, regardless how artfully they shape our perceptions, the monologue ineluctably becomes a dialogue, as political autobiographies are translated and transformed by the electorate. Candidates are like distant stars whose light comes to us from so far away that we can never be certain who and where they are, so we stuff the ballot box with our own resumes, superimposing ourselves and our lives on political figures. In a Utopian democracy, citizens would assess the contenders, their experiences, and positions on the issues, sift through their records and vote for the individual most likely to do the best job. But voting is self-expression; we vote who we are. Politicians want us to vote for their autobiographies but we vote our own.
I relate to Hillary Clinton. This was not always the case. When she was First Lady, I had a chance to see her make a public appearance at a local hospital, but I never made it. Over time, Hillary Clinton has shown great intelligence, courage, and perseverance. She is a diligent and ambitious individual who works toward goals and takes nothing for granted. She is sincere in her commitment to public service and causes that matter to her. She is remarkably resilient. When she fails in one initiative, she finds other ways to be effective. Although often characterized as deceptive, Mrs. Clinton is as trustworthy as you would want your attorney to be—shrewd, meticulous, discreet, and cool under fire. You want Hillary Clinton on your side, never against you.
Often depicted as arrogant and ruthless by her critics, Hillary Clinton has heroic attributes. She has risked substantial rewards for greater ones and has sacrificed simple pleasures and security for public service. Mrs. Clinton has a long record of subordinating self-interest for causes and people she believes in. She is a politician of surprising skill, who has shown quick thinking, supple wit, and sharp timing in various circumstances. She is also a warrior—brave, strong and resolute before a fusillade of attacks that would waste a more fragile individual. Despite her many admirable traits, Mrs. Clinton most of all evokes sympathy because she has incurred the anathema of most of the media. Like the furies of Greek myth, pundits swarm about her, belittling her accomplishments and gauging at her smallest mistakes.
Mrs. Clinton has compared herself to “Rocky,” the dogged underdog, an almost laughable persona for such a dignified, studied and intelligent woman. But the comparison is surprisingly apt. Like Rocky, one of the most appealing aspects of Mrs. Clinton is her capacity to overcome. Her greatest obstacle is her failure to live down to general expectations of women. One subtext to Hillary-bashing is that she is more than a woman and not woman enough. She is perceived as too smart and tough to be feminine and maternal, too calculating to be likeable; Like Rocky, she is viewed as a plodder, who compensates for a lack of natural talent by working hard and wearing down her. The list of her real and imagined defects is long--not a great orator, too detailed, too divisive--yet, Mrs. Clinton has always been more than equal to every fight she has been in. Since she is frequently underestimated, she plays the thankless public role of striver, climber, and over-achiever. Regardless how well she does, her detractors cannot bring themselves to believe it. At each phase of this primary season she has been counted out—even after she repeatedly postponed her political obituaries.
Apparently, many in the media hate the idea of Hillary Clinton becoming her party’s nominee. She is treated like a party-crasher who has overstayed her welcome, or worse, as a contemporary Lucretia Borgia. The irony is that Hillary Clinton is who our country needs now—a steely and efficient leader who will take being president as seriously as running for office. Like Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, Mrs. Clinton has the stature, strength and gender novelty to lead her nation in a new direction. Yet despite her eagerness to serve and a character that thrives in the kind of adversity we face, the media despises her for reasons more relevant to how they feel about women than to Hillary Clinton’s qualifications.
Senator Obama evokes the image of a precocious lad who studied hard and behaved well so that he could make his family proud. When I look at a picture of myself as a six year old with a wise expression on my face, I see this same quality. It is a desire to be more, to make others proud, to save myself, my family and the world. The photograph of Obama in African garb was interesting not because he looked like a Muslim, but because he resembled a child on a field trip. He has retained a youthful quality, a whimsical air, and a childlike stubbornness to have the world conform to his specifications, which is different than it is. All of this may explain his appeal to young people even though he is middle-aged.
I feel I know Barack Obama from early school days. He evokes for me every class rival I had, whom a teacher preferred for intangible factors that I could not quantify, like temperament and personality―likeability. When I was in school, I smarted under this favoritism, sometimes in very real ways that would bear on my opportunities and my future, and I see an intrinsic unfairness in Senator Obama’s ascendancy. When he does well, Senator Obama seems to be appreciated more for who he is than for what he does. When he errs, he receives indemnity. When he loses—as in Texas and Ohio—he wins. When his judgment, on which he stakes his superiority, is debunked, by his twenty year friendship with a vituperative minister, he is allowed to repair it with a speech, and his advocates tell the public to forgive and forget.
Barack Obama seems more comfortable as a writer than as a politician. When he runs into trouble, his impulse is to write a speech. Since I am a writer, I like this quality, but how well would it work in a chief executive? A writer and a politician are designed differently. The politician is responsible to others; the writer to himself. The writer must reflect; the politician must act. The writer is a loner by temperament; the politician must be a 24/7 extravert. Most importantly, the politician must either hide his moral failings and dilemmas or be close to perfect; he must be unwavering in what he professes to think and believe. The writer is the eternal skeptic, turning thoughts, feelings and attitudes over and over like a barbecue, exploring, indulging, and exposing self-doubts, ambivalence, and moral crises.
When I was fifteen I exchanged the role of the student politician—a precocious “fine young man”—for the dark, ironic persona of a modern writer. Senator Obama never made that transition. He continues to play the role of good citizen required of the politician, although in his heart he may wish he were a writer. When he faces a crisis, he tries to defuse it with words rather than decisive action. How does his ambivalence play out? If President Obama faced a calamity would he retreat to his study like a literary Nero to write a speech while the nation burns?
I also see race in Barack Obama’s story, although I am told I should not do so. His autobiography is supposed to be about a man who beat enormous odds, but Senator Obama has been promoted in part by the collective social guilt of private and public institutions like colleges, universities, and media organizations. When Senator Obama made his “race” speech, the media issued a predictably favorable review. They described it as if they were teachers extolling an “A” paper—although he failed to address the assignment. While falling over themselves to praise his summary of racial conflict in America, the media ignored that Senator Obama did not explain how he—a socially aware and intelligent adult—could associate so closely and for so long with a man who expressed bigoted invective to hundreds of people every week.
Finally, I cannot separate Senator Obama from my indignation at the media’s favoritism toward him. My view of him has more to do with how he is perceived by others than with who he is. Of course, this opens a paradox: without the media and the money behind him, why would I know about him at all?
Of all the candidates with stories, John McCain gives me the most hope for my own life. This uplift has little to do with his ideology, party affiliation or stand on specific issues. John McCain’s appeal is not primarily about politics. He is trans-political in the same way that Natan Sharansky; Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa are trans-political. All are freed men, who walked out of prisons intact and contributed to their countries. McCain's stature overflows the banks of politics because he sees a world and a reality beyond polls, elections and sound-bytes. His world-view appears to be derived from the world—a reality beyond politics, which government plays only a part. Because Senator McCain has seen life and death and survived in that corner where government rarely goes, he can separate himself from politics, to speak as himself, not as a public figure, to possess an ironic distance from the scene and moment he occupies. His wryness, candor, and occasional pique--very unpolitical behavior--suggest that his political performance is superimposed on an internal soundtrack. He treats politics as something less than life and death, and can make the distinction between living and dying and winning and losing.
Although John McCain endured a circumstance that we have no right to think we can imagine, his story strikes us powerfully real. Perhaps this is because reality imposed itself on his life. John McCain was transformed and nearly destroyed by circumstances. The Republican nominee stands as an icon of redemption, not the moral redemption of a man who took campaign contributions from a dishonest businessman only to co-write a campaign finance reform law. His life was redeemed from captivity and death and extended to serve its current purpose. He is not the hero of victory, but survival. In this sense he offers hope to everyone.
The arc of John McCain’s life is tragic. An ordinary man with common flaws—the resume of a classic tragic hero—McCain had every reason to be confident—a military pedigree, an Annapolis degree, the ability and training to fly planes—until a tragic event nearly took it all away. John McCain’s pedigree and privilege could not save him from the harsh vagaries of war—being shot down, wounded, captured and held in a POW prison. He might have died and never been heard of again. Instead, he survived five years of incarceration and torture and returned to the United States to enter public life. He stands before the American people as a guileless survivor, stripped of artifice, who sees beyond politics because his most powerful experiences were outside of it. What draws me to Senator McCain is his status as the prisoner who escaped. It gives me hope that in my own life I can escape the prison that holds me, even if it has bars that others do not see.
John McCain offers himself as proof that one should never surrender, regardless how hopeless a situation. His candidacy demonstrates why courage and perseverance matter. Pundits talk about a political life, about political death, about politics as a blood sport, but McCain’s presence on the political stage belies those claims. McCain reduces politics to its appropriate, often trivial proportions. McCain casts an ironic shadow over the process because his experience belongs to a reality that exposes politics as an artful simulation of life produced by light and shadow. He has been able to weather political tempests like the Keating scandal that would have smashed less resilient figure precisely because he has seen worse.
Distance is a rare quality in a politician that would seem indispensable for high office. But like any quality it is a question mark. It can take the form of needed perspective or self-righteous detachment. With John McCain this is the risk the voter takes. However, he has proven a capacity and willingness to cooperate with politicians who differ in ideology, to work for reform, and to assume positions unpopular with his party, so there is reward with the risk. Ultimately, what makes McCain an intriguing candidate is that he does not take politics too seriously or as an end in itself, but as a means to get to something beyond it. His prior experience has taught him the brutality and randomness of life, left scars and given him a sense of what is real. In the virtual world of sound-byes and spin, his authenticity seems more important than ever.
I vote myself. But once I have projected my story on the candidates, I turn on the lights and look in the mirror. How can I vote myself until I can see myself? When I look at my situation I no longer see Clinton, Obama, or McCain. I see a man in a world no candidate can see, imagine, or positively change, a world as many light-years from these luminaries as they are to me. I live in a world where government seems to be ubiquitous when you step out of line or look at your paycheck. But government is invisible when you drive on the shoddy roads, need to ask a question, or solicit help of any kind. Each day, I struggle for basic needs, while I am aware that many people face more difficult circumstances. I have no illusion that presidential candidates cannot deliver to me anything I need.
Once elected, over whom and what does the president preside?
Is the United States the new Rome or the new Holy Roman Empire? Can one political figure, with duties adumbrated in our constitution, bring coherence to our palimpsest of governments, regions, communities, markets, industries, interest groups, ethnicities? How did they live, work, and procreate without coherent political and social structures and institutions? Now I understand that long epoch because despite all of our technical advances, we are now in a dark age of omnipresent danger, of warring elements at every level of existence. I do not feel I belong to a coherent and cohesive order. I pay taxes to several layers of government. But if a problem arises in my life for which I need help from higher temporal powers, I am routed to web-sites, 1-800 numbers; I leave messages and am left to my own devices—and prayers. Computers and the internet have given us the illusion of a community, by bringing us so close to information, opinions, products and services, but they are rendering obsolete the human contact on which actual community and social order are based. Perhaps all periods in human history have been characterized by a fluctuating balance of order and disorder, control and chaos. I was always mystified and amazed that people survived the dark ages. We are now in a period of controlled chaos.
Will the political sphere and my world ever intersect? Or are they meant to remain parallel, one reflecting the other, like the mythic world of the constellations the ancients gazed upon for nocturnal entertainment? Maybe if we act as it is a democratic society it will be one. Maybe if we act as if our votes matter, they will assume the power we wish they had. Perhaps the government will do more than collect taxes and wage war.
Ultimately, politics is the alpha and omega of reality shows. Like any competitive spectacle I choose my favorite, hope he or she wins, am mildly satisfied if they do, am temporarily irritated if they lose, and push my life forward regardless of the outcome. This may sound cynical and passive, but I can do no better from my remote vantage point. I am unable to see the true candidates from behind their handlers and the media and so I am mistrustful of the entire process. This criticism may sound like the unreasonable critique of an amateur astronomer who complains that he cannot see the stars for the street lights. If we only become familiar with the candidates through the dark, distorted lens of the media, how can we complain? Without the media, we would know them less.
Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself,” Michel Montaigne wrote in “Of Husbanding the Will.” This is the psychology of the average voter. We vote for others, but ultimately we vote ourselves—our needs, hopes, and aspirations. We view our politicians as instruments or impediments to our will, but at the end of the day, they are like the constellations the ancient star-gazers saw in the night sky—avatars of the imagination who provide entertainment and help us dream.
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